Welcome to The Newest Big Lie re: Dick Cheney UPDATED

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

We’re supposed to believe this shit?:

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

GASP!  Dick Cheney as trying to kill Al Queda leaders!   Because he was really trying to protect the United States.  He’s just like Jack Bauer!  

No.  I don’t think so.   This is crap, and it’s crap for several reasons:

A.  Anyone who has been paying attention already knew that the U.S. was already doing this years ago.

B.  There are instances of this, revealed to the public, of this already being implemented.  Like, a long time ago.

C.  The people telling us this are ex-CIA.   These sources are automatically suspect.

Here is the story, from Time Magazine in 2002, where this was publicly acknowledged to be occurring:

Yemen Strike Opens New Chapter in War on Terror

The officially unacknowledged CIA missile strike that killed a key al-Qaeda leader on Sunday is a major tactical victory in the U.S. war on terrorism – a war whose rules and terms are quite unlike any America has ever known. Indeed, the assassination by Predator drone of Ali Qaed Sinan al-Harthi in the wilds of northern Yemen encapsulates much about the new war – one of covert actions, sometimes in murky circumstances, designed to disrupt the terrorists’ efforts to regroup far from erstwhile sanctuaries in Afghanistan. And it shows the U.S. is plainly now open to assassination as a means of eliminating terror threats.

So no, this is classic “old news”.  Are people’s memories REALLY that short?

There’s simply no WAY that this is The Big Ugly Scary Secret that Dick Cheney was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes about.  

This is just another propaganda tactic designed to make us think that “you’ve gotta usurp the Constitution and the rule of law to protect Americans, and Dick Cheney was just the guy to do it”.  

Yet everybody’s falling for it, and I mean everybody.  

“I saw it on CNN!  It must be true!   I read it in the NY Times!   It must be true!   And even “I read it on Dailykos!  It must be true.”

No.  It doesn’t even BEGIN to pass the “smell test”.

Please spread this around.   I’m banned at Dailykos, so I can’t post it there, but somebody needs to, because that crap is all over the place there.  

UPDATE:

I’m starting to think this whole “Cheney was just trying to save us by killing bad guys” story is a smokescreen for what is quickly revealing itself to be one of the most heinous war crimes in history, the Afghan Massacre.

Democracy Now has a piece up on it right now, a documentary made by some very intrepid folks who travelled to the area, and videotaped the sites, littered in bones and clothing, where the people were dumped and shot, apparently by American troops.  

It’s revolting.  

The dead filled the trucks, and the stench is described as unbearable, a mix of feces, urine, blood, vomit and rotting flesh.  The living and unconscious were mixed with the dead.   At the prison the living were tossed back into the trucks with the dead, and taken out into the desert and dumped.   Those still alive were simply shot.   The bodies were left to rot.  A driver describes how he made several round trips, over a hundred victims in each trip.  

I can’t extricate the link of the video, but it’s right here:

http://www.democracynow.org/

I can’t figure out how to link to just the video, but it’s the video right there at the top of the page, and this doc starts a little over halfway through.

This makes Mai Lai look like a pinata party.