Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put one in a fruit salad.

Source Unknown

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

We did a little cleaning...went to breakfast , took a drive down the East side of the Pend Oreille River, ... very pretty drive, Christian called pretending he was sick, then Monica did the same thing... too tuckered and preoccupied to get excited about it...

Mike went to Colville, it's 2300, he's not back yet.

March

This is the guy who pulled the trigger of the gun that fired the round that hit his friend that ruined the hunt and shed some light on the world that Dick built...

Four days after blasting 78-year-old hunting partner Harry Whittington in the face, neck and chest with birdshot, vice president Dick Cheney emerged from his fortified bunker to make a snarling, unapologetic taped announcement to Fox News' Brit Hume that basically amounted to what he did on his own time was his own business. Dick said shooting Harry the previous Saturday was one of the worst days of his life -- which is quite an admission considering the fate of those who have been in Dick's crosshairs over the years.

Harry, no longer Dick's friend but a mere "acquaintance," emerged from the hospital two days later to apologize to the media for the delay he had caused by having an operation, a heart attack and a shotgun pellet in his heart. Harry begged Dick and his family to forgive him for the trouble he and his family had caused them. "We all assume certain risks in whatever we do, whatever activities we pursue," Harry said. "And regardless of how experienced, careful and dedicated we are, accidents do and will happen -- and that's what happened last Friday..."

Members of the press corps might wonder why Dick chose to return to the house and fix himself a cocktail rather than accompany his victim to the hospital. They might also be interested in comments made by Dick's Secret Service agents who say Dick was "clearly inebriated" when he bagged Harry. Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson reports, "According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up."

Thompson says the agents reported that members of the hunting party, including Dick, consumed alcohol "before and during the hunting expedition," and their report also noted that "Cheney exhibited 'visible signs' of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions."

But reporters don't ask such questions in Dick's world. Those who are not house-broken are, at a minimum, paper-trained. They don't ask questions in the house or even close to the house for fear of tracking the resulting mess in on the rug. Their yapping and barking on-camera at White House press secretary Scott McClellan concerned just one issue -- they should have been told first. "We have cell phones," they wailed. "We have Blackberries! We're the press corps -- we should have been given the story before a local newspaper!"

There's a big difference between being "given" a script to copy and hitting the investigative trail to dig up what really happened. Apparently, no one in the mainstream media dared question Dick's final taped account. Not one questioned the 14-hour delay in the Kenedy County Sheriff's Department getting access to Dick nor wondered why the Sheriff would send a deputy to dutifully jot down Dick's account and take depositions from other parties without asking pertinent questions about alcohol consumption, or why Dick can't get it straight whether he "turned right," as he said several times, or "counter-clockwise" as he is saying now.

While reporters were frenziedly chasing their tails, Internet reporter Joseph Ehrlich wrote an excellent piece wherein he addressed both questions and answers in this tangled affair. Ehrlich meticulously laid out the timeline, the elaborate behind-the-scenes machinations, and Dick and Katharine's ridiculous efforts to cover up what actually occurred, to include having the Secret Service bump the time of the shooting to 5:50 PM to put the sun in Dick's eyes when he pulled the trigger. Ehrlich even quotes Harry's daughter who, in a strange revelation, said that after her father was shot, he lay there for such a long time "he was unsure whether he was being taken to the hospital or the morgue."

Such a ghoulish remark is more than passing strange, yet the media failed to pick up on it. Little attention has been given to poor Harry other than he is a 78-year-old Austin attorney, and the victim of yet another Dick Cheney "accident."

In truth, Harry, like those with whom he cavorts, is a multi-millionaire, and a major Republican player and donor. Bush appointed Harry to chair the Texas regulatory Funeral Service Commission in 1999, just in time to force the commission to settle a whistleblower lawsuit shortly before the 2000 election. Harry managed to keep Bush out of the courts and out of jail in the burgeoning Funeralgate scandal that theatened to engulf not only Bush but Robert Waltrip, owner of Service Corporation International (SCI), the largest funeral corporation in Texas; Joe Albaugh, Bush crony, campaign manager and former FEMA director; Texas Attorney General (now Senator) John Cornyn; and, of course, Bush counsel (now U.S. Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales.

Dick's world is an incestuous world whose core is Texas power and money -- lots of it. As Sydney Blumenthal writes in Salon, both Dick and Karl Rove literally owe their present positions to Katharine and her family. "Anne Armstrong, Katharine's mother, was on the board of Halliburton that made Dick Cheney its chief executive officer," Blumenthal said. "Tobin Armstrong, Katharine's father, financed Karl Rove & Co., Rove's political consulting firm." Blumenthal says Katharine is a lobbyist for Houston law firm Baker Botts, founded in the 19th Century by the family of James A. Baker, former secretary of state, Poppy Bush's buddy and the architect of the 2000 presidential coup d`etat that gave the presidency to Bush and Dick.

The people who inhabit Dick's world possess such power they can silence an entire White House press corps in mid-yelp -- such arrogance they can turn away law enforcement officers and delay an investigation until a more convenient time, even though a man has been shot in the face. Bill Moyers, formerly of PBS, now President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, very succinctly sums them up...

"It is a Dick Cheney world out there," Moyers writes, "--a world where politicians and lobbyists hunt together, dine together, drink together, play together, pray together and prey together, all the while carving up the world according to their own interests."

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net

Published on Thursday, February 23, 2006 by Salon

Cheney's Coup
A 3-Year-Old Executive Order That Vastly Expanded His Powers Illuminates How the Vice President and His Minions Led Us Into War.

After shooting Austin lawyer Harry Whittington, Dick Cheney's immediate impulse was to control the intelligence. Rather than call the president directly, he ordered an aide to inform White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card that there had been an accident but not that Cheney was its cause. Then a host of surrogates attacked the victim for not steering clear of Cheney when he was firing. Cheney attempted to defuse the subsequent furor by giving an interview to friendly Fox News. His most revealing answer came in response to a question about something other than the hunting accident.

Cheney was asked about court papers filed by his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the leaking of the identity of an undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame. (She is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq.) In those papers, Libby laid out a line of defense that he had leaked classified material at the behest of "his superiors" (to wit, Cheney). Libby detailed that he was authorized to disclose to members of the press classified sections of the prewar National Intelligence Estimate on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. (The NIE was exposed as wrongly asserting that Saddam possessed WMD and was constructing nuclear weapons.) Indeed, Cheney explained, he has the power to declassify intelligence. "There is an executive order to that effect," he said. Had he ever done that "unilaterally"? "I don't want to get into that."

On March 25, 2003, President Bush signed Executive Order 13292, a hitherto little known document that grants the greatest expansion of the power of the vice president in American history. The order gives the vice president the same ability to classify intelligence as the president. By controlling classification, the vice president can in effect control intelligence and, through that, foreign policy.

Bush operates on the radical notion of the "unitary executive," that the president has inherent and limitless powers in his role as commander in chief, above the system of checks and balances. By his extraordinary order, he elevated Cheney to his level, an acknowledgment that the vice president was already the de facto executive in national security. Never before has any president diminished and divided his power in this manner. Now the unitary executive inherently includes the unitary vice president.

The unprecedented executive order bears the earmarks of Cheney's former counsel and current chief of staff, David Addington. Addington has been the closest assistant to Cheney through three decades, since Cheney served in the House of Representatives in the 1980s. Inside the executive branch, far and wide, Addington acts as Cheney's vicar, bullying and sarcastic, inspiring fear and obedience. Few documents of concern to the vice president, even executive orders, reach the eyes of the president without passing first through Addington's agile hands.

To advance their scenario for the Iraq war, Cheney & Co. either pressured or dismissed the intelligence community when it presented contrary analysis. Paul Pillar, the former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, writes in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made."

On domestic spying conducted without legal approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Addington and his minions isolated and crushed internal dissent from James Comey, then deputy attorney general, and Jack Goldsmith, then head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

On torture policy, as reported by the New Yorker this week, Alberto Mora, recently retired as general counsel to the U.S. Navy, opposed the Bush administration's abrogation of the Geneva Conventions -- by holding thousands of detainees in secret camps without due process and using abusive interrogation techniques -- based on legal doctrines Mora called "unlawful" and "dangerous." Addington et al. told him the policies were being ended while continuing to pursue them on a separate track. "To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values," Mora said.

The first vice president, John Adams, called his position "the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt's first vice president, said it was not worth "a warm bucket of spit." When Dick Cheney was secretary of defense under the first President Bush, he reprimanded Vice President Dan Quayle for asserting power he did not possess by calling a meeting of the National Security Council when the elder Bush was abroad. Cheney well knew the vice president had no authority in the chain of command.

Since the coup d'état of Executive Order 13292, however, the vice presidency has been transformed. Perhaps, for a blinding moment, Cheney imagined he might classify his shooting party top secret.

© 2006 Copyright Salon.com

Considerations of Decency

by John Liechty
by John Liechty

Jane Mayer’s "The Memo" (New Yorker, 2/27/06) tells the story of Alberto Mora, former general counsel of the U.S. Navy. Mora appears to have been equipped with a degree of principle far surpassing the quota required by the average practitioner of government. He held torture to be morally despicable, and during his time with the Navy fought an uphill battle to keep government policy off the slippery slope to Abu Ghraib. Mora’s efforts were subverted by William Haines, his boss at the Department of Defense, and ultimately by the Defense Secretary himself, Vice-President Cheney, and their lawyers. The torture "policy" that eventually slithered to the surface is summed up best in Donald Rumsfeld's handwritten aside on a memo: "Carte blanche, guys."

Mora concludes that in giving torture the nod, a group of "enormously hardworking, patriotic individuals" inadvertently trashed American values. They meant well, even as they were taking a truncheon to the soul of the country they loved. As the Billie Holiday song says: "Love will make you do things that you know is wrong."  Yet it seems charitable to ascribe the misdeeds of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their lawyers to misguided patriotism. Too often their love of country has resembled the self-interest Goneril and Regan tried to pass off as filial love in King Lear. The Rumsfeld-Cheneys may have trumpeted their devotion to America after September 11, but their actions have suggested a devotion primarily to power – country has played second fiddle.

And what of "hardworking"? A favorite suggestion of the Cheney-Rumsfeld school of public servantdom is that if only the cream of government were not subjected to the vinegar of rules, laws, and regulations, the governed could be blessed more regularly with its uncurdled goodness. Much of the hard work, meanwhile, goes into arranging for the governed to know less and less about what the cream is up to. One can sympathize to some extent. Government officials, like anyone else who is expected to do a good job, should be granted sufficient privacy to work as freely and creatively as possible. An urge to bend the rules or waive them altogether is understandable when it is a matter of enabling good work to be done better.

The good work the Bush Administration is so eager to be left to its own devices to do better is not readily apparent, however. Preemptive attacks? Unimaginable debt? Crass manipulation of public and press? A steady stream of inept comments, inane stunts, and insane war? Occupation? Torture? Another song lyric comes to mind, Bob Dylan’s "To live outside the law you must be honest." Some people, Jesus Christ for example, have managed it and others from Thoreau to Hunter S. Thompson have given it a good run for the money. One is not convinced, however, that the Rumsfeld-Cheney type is temperamentally suited to live outside the law, much as it may yearn to. "Honest" is not the word that springs to mind when considering the architects of Carte Blanche Guys "policy."

Whether they are or are not the well-meaning, hard-working, but misguided patriots Mora says they are, one thing is now clear – they’ve dirtied their hands and ours, not merely with the usual day-to-day grime of politics but with the abhorrent scum of torture. ("We do not torture," the President declared last November – an assurance scholars of Bush-tongue duly parsed as a resounding confirmation that we do.) How do you wash the scum off? How do you refute the charge that the moral stink of torture competes with the moral stink of September 11 itself – the very stink we declared war on? (Lately we have been advised to settle in for the Long Stink.) The perverse "vision" of a degenerate band of zealots has been foolishly magnified by the perverse "vision" of its adversaries, prompting many these days to wonder: with adversaries like these, why would a bin Laden need allies?

One of the most powerful books ever written on the question of torture is South African J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. The novel involves a provincial official known simply as The Magistrate, who turns a blind eye when Colonel Joll arrives from the capital. Joll is one of "the new men of Empire…who believes in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages." Sound familiar? And like so many of our Neo-conservative men of Empire, he can enthusiastically wrap what’s left of his heart around torture. The Magistrate comes to regret his initial complicity with Joll’s methods. "I should never have opened the gates to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency," he reflects. Ashamed, he takes a stand, and is brutally tortured himself. But in the book’s climax when the discredited Joll is driven out, The Magistrate leans into his carriage and has the last word: "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves," he tells Joll. "Not on others."

Such messages may be lost on the Gonerils and Regans, Cheneys and Rumsfelds, bin Ladens and al-Zawahiris. Their ideologies allow no possibility that they themselves might be in the wrong. They seem unaware of or indifferent to "the crime that is latent within us." They are unashamed of torture and unashamed to torture, to take it out on others. They are ashamed of nothing, and may go to their graves convinced they have nothing to be ashamed of. We should be grateful, meanwhile, for people like Alberto J. Mora. He may not have won the ear of his superiors, but he outranked them in decency, for whatever it's worth. Like Cordelia, he had a heart, and his love for his country may one day ring truer than that of his twisted sisters.  

February 27, 2006

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

From Superpower to Tinhorn Dictatorship

by Paul Craig Roberts
by Paul Craig Roberts

February 27, 2006

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

Paul Craig Roberts Archives

February 26, 2006

A Proclamation

We must stop this catastrophe now!