Tag: Dick Cheney

I thought it was time I outed myself. And all those like me, on left wing websites, who dare criticize President Obama. For compromising or selling out on trivial issues such as DOMA, the bank bailout, secrecy, torture, or prosecuting war crimes. We don’t really care about issues. We’re all about personality. And we all secretly wish Dick Cheney were president. Because we get the vapors for rabid weasels.

     In Federal Insurance Co. v. Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, a suit filed by several insurance companies who sought to recover over $300 billion for losses incurred by the 9/11 attacks, the following men are named as defendants.

   Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, president of SHC, who was warned in 2000 of his organization’s ties to al Qaeda;

   Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the designated successor to King Abdullah, who received warnings as early as 1994 that some Muslim charitable groups were fronts for al Qaeda;

   Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who as Saudi Minister of the Interior monitors and controls the charities operating in Saudi Arabia;

   Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who was the director of the Kingdom’s Department of General Intelligence (“DGI”) until August 2001; and

   Prince Mohamed al Faisal al Saud, who unlike the other princes named is not a government official but a bank manager alleged to have knowingly provided material sponsorship to international terrorism.

cbs2chicago.com

    When the crown prince and successor to the throne of Saudi Arabia is warned back in 1994 that charities his family supports are funneling money to terrorist organizations, and then those groups attack America, you would think that somebody in the executive branch would find that interesting.

    But not Bush/Cheney. They spent every minute between the Inauguration and 9/10/2001 trying to find a way to attack Iraq. Defending America from terrorism was not very interesting until after the attack had already occurred.

    This is not the only evidence that the royal family and absolute rulers of Saudi Arabia directly aided Al Qaeda before and up to the attacks against America on September 11th. This evidence is well documented, and yet it went ignored.

    Why was this evidence ignored? I will not speculate on that point, rather, here is more evidence. You may decide for yourself.

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

In all the recent debate over torture, many of our Beltway pundits and politicians have twisted themselves into verbal contortions to avoid using the word at all.

During his speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute last week – immediately on the heels of President Obama’s address at the National Archives – former Vice President Dick Cheney used the euphemism “enhanced interrogation” a full dozen times.

Smothering the reality of torture in euphemism, of course, has a political value, enabling its defenders to diminish the horror and possible illegality. It also gives partisans the opening they need to divert our attention by turning the future of the prison at Guantanamo Bay into a “wedge issue,” as noted on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times.

[snip]

If we want to know what torture is, and what it does to human beings, we have to look at it squarely, without flinching. That’s just what a powerful and important film, seen by far too few Americans, does.

[snip]

As the editors of The Christian Century magazine wrote this week, “Convening a truth commission on torture would be embarrassing to the US in the short term, but in the long run it would demonstrate the strength of American democracy and confirm the nation’s adherence to the rule of law…. Understandably, [the president] wants to turn the page on torture. But Americans should not turn the page until they know what is written on it.

Read the whole thing here…

Torturing Democracy originally aired on PBS January 21st, 2009

You can watch “Torturing Democracy” here in three segments, or watch the full  one hour program below.

On the way to Baghdad in 2003, in the aftermath of “prolonged, ferocious combat” in the Euphrates Valley around Najaf, General David Petraeus talked about the invasion with journalist and historian Rick Atkinson.  When the interview was over, Petraeus hooked his thumbs into his flak vest and adjusted the weight on his shoulders.  “Tell me how this ends,” he said.

The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley could have told him how it ends.  It ends in death and desolation, it ends in ruin.  No ruler, no matter how powerful, no matter how arrogant, can escape the judgment of history.  It does not redeem tyrants, it exposes them as posturing frauds . . .  

I met a traveler from an antique land,

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay,

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.  

Round the decay of that colossal wreck Dick Cheney, the boundless crimes of his torturers are being exposed and laid bare.  But with a sneer of cold command  . . .

he has told America to look upon his mighty works, and despair that Obama will not keep America “safe” like Dick Cheney did, with rape and sodomy and torture.

Old man what the hell you gonna kill next

Old timer who you gonna kill next

Hey bartender over here

Two more shots

And two more beers

Sir turn up the TV sound

The war has started on the ground

Just love those laser guided bombs

-Roger Waters (The Bravery of Being out of Range)



Today, Memorial Day we honor our war dead. Some could care less, it’s just another excuse for barbecue, beers, baseball and NASCAR. Little can they be bothered by any concept that men at one time were burned, butchered, gassed, shot, blown into so much bloody fucking hamburger so that they would be free to be mean-spirited, fat, drunk and stupid lemmings. Their silly, meaningless understanding of history is an affront to those who served with honor and paid with all so that they could be goddamned ugly, crude and indolent Americans. With the fascist police state now fully implemented and Lord Obama talking nonsense about “preventative detention” all of those war deaths, even the ones dressed up in the monstrous nonsense of the GOOD WAR have all been in vain and for nothing. The grandchildren of the men who were cut down by German artillery, mines and machine guns as they took Omaha Beach have become that which their ancestors fought against, a nation of Good Germans, willing accomplices who are no better than those who lived downwind of Auschwitz and never once questioned the smell.

I originally posted this here at the Great Orange Satan. I stated then and I will state now that my rights are not for sale. Now, Philip Gourevitch seeks to sell my right to know what is being done in my name down the river in the New York Times. I will repost here and then add a rebuttal to Mr. Gourevitch down below.

Crazed & Confused thinks that Obama was right not to release the torture photos. But he ignores the basic problems with Obama’s rationale — transparency is essential to a functioning democracy. It was the clear intent of the Founding Fathers that the government follow a policy of transparency — in fact, the Constitution requires that Congress publish a journal of its proceedings. If we do not have maximum transparency in our government, then how will we know if we are still a functioning democracy? How will we know if our elected officials are following the Constitution? This is the very sort of thing that Obama ran on. I suggest that he do what he was elected to do and provide more transparency in government by releasing these pictures.