Monday, February 09, 2009
Yearnings of Richard B. Cheney
Hoping, dreaming, perhaps praying.....
For what? A terrorist attack on US soil so that he can gloat "I told you so".
He no longer holds an official position but he just cannot let go. Reading about the former veep's remarks it becomes obvious that he misses the power that he used for so long to abuse and subvert laws and advance the neocon agenda. The dark sider continues to mutter about a scenario that, according to him, only the Bush administration's efforts prevented from being reality. The ex veep believes that President Obama is making our country vulnerable by not continuing to follow the same policies.
From The Washington Post, Feb.7, 2009
On a related issue about former prime minister Tony Blair's craven and hypocritical position on torture, so dear to the heart of our former vice president, Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Guardian UK:
*****
From The Washington Post, Feb.7, 2009
Bush White House Cast Assails Obama But the strongest criticism so far has come from Cheney, the former vice president, who said in an interview with Politico this week that under Obama, there is a "high probability" of a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack by terrorists. Cheney also criticized several key Obama policies, including new interrogation rules and the decision to eventually close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an al-Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry," Cheney said, adding that counterterrorism is "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business." |
While no country, including the United States, is absolutely safe from acts of terrorism by fanatics who are ready to die for their cause, whether post-9/11 actions such as extraordinary rendition, torture, and holding people suspected of being terrorists, or aligned to them, for years without trial prevented further attacks is a claim that has been questioned by knowledgeable people, including high-level military officers.
But for the true believers -- ex vice president Cheney and his supporters -- things are in stark black and white. They have no doubts; they are infallible. If you think about what they have done in the name of war against terror you would get the impression that in some respects they are not much different than the Islamic jihadis portrayed as our enemies.
On a related issue about former prime minister Tony Blair's craven and hypocritical position on torture, so dear to the heart of our former vice president, Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Guardian UK:
- The true extent to which British officials colluded in torture is yet to be established. In terms of ethical complicity, I think we can already begin to return a verdict. As the God-fearing Tony Blair knows, there are sins of commission and there are sins of omission. "We have condoned with our silence torture committed by others," says Charles Guthrie, his favourite general.
- That was arguably the biggest moral failure of Tony Blair's premiership.
