Cheney's Self-serving Disinformation

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Rice, Ashcroft Approved Torture in July 2002

More details have been revealed on high-level Bush administration involvement in authorizing torture. According to a timeline in the newly declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top White House officials approved torture methods, including waterboarding, as early as 2002. Attorney General Eric Holder has described waterboarding as illegal, while President Obama now says he won’t rule out prosecuting top Bush officials who approved illegal acts. Rice’s backing came in July 2002, when she gave a green light for the interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. One year later, the list of officials voicing approval grew to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger.

The Old Bastard Squawks on, Cooking his Own Goose (part 6)

The Annotated Interview Vice President Richard Cheney by Jon Ward and John Solomon, The Washington Times

Office of the Vice President
December 22, 2008
Vice President's West Wing Office

Q You would disagree that policy on detainee treatment was made opaque enough that these abuses at Abu Ghraib were–
(WTF am I trying to say without saying it?)
-- obviously not directed from the top,
(No. Obviously not from the top… cuz then that would mean that you and the ‘Dee-cider’ made the wrong dee-cisions. Better to lay the blame on a handful of moronic, under-educated yokels who don’t know any better than to follow orders.)
but under pressure for more intelligence
(More pressure but NOT from the top, aheh-heh…, like we said. Gotta get more intelligence, better intelligence. )
-- were allowed -- not allowed, but basically
(Oh, cripes, I’m in deep doo-doo and you got the shovel. Eeep…)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Abu Ghraib, like I say, I don't think had anything to do with policy, as I understand it.
( I say, ‘I don’t think’ but actually you know, it’s more like ‘I think but don’t say’. And as I understand it, I can say whatever the fuck I want because you two dweebs ain’t gonna press me on anything. Otherwise I would never have set up this phoney-baloney Q&A session with your bosses.)
And the people that they were –
(We’ll call them ‘people’ for the sake of their mothers.)
the people that were subjected to abusive practices there
(Not torture or cruel and inhuman punishment – ‘abusive practices’.)
I don't think had any special intelligence understandings, or if you will, special intelligence information that we needed.
(But since we couldn’t torture the ‘special intelligence understandings’ out of them, who’s to say?)
I mean, this was not --
(Maybe I’d better not bring that up…)
as I say, I don't think it was related to policy.
(And as I say, I think my opinion is Law around here so if it were policy – or related to policy – than that policy is Law and therefore I can do whatever the fuck I want to do and not worry about trifles like ‘legality’.)
I think it was, in fact, a case of individual personnel
(Not even members of a group; just individuals in a military hive.)
who were perhaps not properly supervised.
(I’m banking on you being so stupid as to ignore what patent nonsense this is: improperly supervised, individualistic, military security personnel who were acting outside of the chain of command even though they were constantly monitored by the CIA and their own superior officers in direct contact with the Pentagon on an almost daily basis. To put it another way – everybody knew about it from top to bottom but it’s nobody’s fault. Nevertheless, we’ll blame the enlisted bastards. )
And I think the military deserves a lot of credit for the way they handled it because they're the ones that cleaned it up.
(Like they had any choice in the matter.)


Q Foreign perception of the United States as we've had to fight these dual wars,
(Forced upon us as they were by unfortunate unforeseen circumstances, our own righteous honor and sense of duty as the appointed guardians and saviors of the Free world compelled us to use military force. If only those ‘Foreigners’ would come to realize how much America sacrifices for the common good the weight that we’ve been ordained to bear would feel lighter. Sigh…)
can you talk -- what you think has happened?
(Oops, I dropped my syntax again and it’s shattered to smithereens.)
Why has America – the perception of America changed so much in the last eight years?
(After all, in your administration, we’ve invaded two separate sovereign nations under the flimsiest of pretenses which were supported by bold-faced lies, overthrown the respective governments, slaughtered tens of thousands, forced the displacement, starvation and destitution of hundreds of thousands, destroyed the lives of millions more. Why would they change their perception of us? )
And what do you think will happen over the next few years?
(Oh, Great and Knowledgeable OZ! [Stoop here to lick boot])

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, has the perception of America changed?
(Didn’t think I’d turn the question back on itself, now, did you? Oh… you expected that, eh? Right…)
I suppose it has in some quarters.
(The hind-most, heh-heh.)
I think that some of the things we had to do after 9/11
(We were forced by panic, fear and greed. We had no choice.)
to respond to it and to protect the nation against a further attack
(Since we hadn’t see 9/11 coming, we were flying blind in a shitstorm.)
clearly generated controversy in some quarters.
(Limp-dicked, bleeding-heart liberals. Always whining about civil rights and due process. Makes me sick.)
But what a lot of our friends overseas never really understood,
(Because so many of them cling hopelessly to a shared outmoded concept of international law.)
at least not initially,
(Not until we agreed to spread the profits around.)
was that 9/11 fundamentally changed the way we looked at this question of terror attacks.
(Since this is one of the lynch-pins of our over-arching rationalization of the horrific and unlawful things we’ve done, let me recite it chapter and verse. Ahem…)
Prior out-of-date 9/11,
(Say what?)
we looked upon terrorist incidents as a law enforcement problem.
(Got that?: international terrorists; Black September, Bader-Meinhoft, Hamas, the PLO, Hezbollah, the IRA, al Qaeda, etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist_organization ; the Cole, the embassy bombings, the first WTC, the whole violent enchilada was left to the cops – not the Marines, or the Army or the Air Force, the Navy or the CIA . Can you swallow that?)
You go out and find the bad guy, try him and put him in jail.
(Simple as a Tom Mix movie.)
That's the way we dealt with the World Trade Center bombing in '93.
(Never mind all of the other governmental organizations (State Department, CIA, etc) that went into the tracking, arming and infiltration that went before and after the act and the apprehension of the perpetrators. This was strictly ‘Barney Miller/Joe Friday stuff. Try to keep in mind these two gross distortions of facts that we’ll distill into this little catch phrase, ‘cops & robbers’. Otherwise the next set of bull-shit will leave you in the dust and I hate to repeat myself. )
After 9/11, we made a decision, and I think it was exactly the right decision,
(Of course it was exactly the right decision because I made it. Ergo: it was the Right one.)
and that when you -- when these actions result in the deaths of 3,000 people here on the homeland,
(Again, who’s counting ? The real emotional hook is that it happened on our homeland! The one we stole from the red savages and the Mexicans.)
more than we'd ever before lost in this kind of incident, more than Pearl Harbor,
(Actually, 2,402 were killed and 1,282 were wounded in that ‘Day of Infamy’. So, the 9/11 attacks yielded a roughly similar level of death and mayhem. No need to quibble, though. Both were disastrous. We just don’t want to cloudy the murk with verifiable information when falsely aligning two completely dissimilar events.
The apples-to-oranges elephant that you’ll have to ignore in the room, is the fact that Japan, a sovereign, imperialistic nation, attacked colonial military installations and targets with its own imperial military forces under its national battle flag whereas, al Qaeda, which is not a sovereign country or governmental or diplomatic entity, hijacked 4 commercial airliners with a force of 19 civilians armed with box-cutters.
Are you keeping the ‘cops & robbers’ concept in mind? Now, we’ve juxtaposed the Pearl Harbor ‘meme’ with all its strong emotive qualities with the false comparison of that event to attacks on 9/11 to shut down logical thought completely. A skillful blend of ‘Does not compute’ and cynically manipulated cinematic patriotism. Here comes the kicker - )
then this was a strategic threat to the United States.
(There’s no need to justify, quantify or in any way substantiate or support this preposterous statement with fact or argument. If I say, it was a strategic threat, that’s just what it was. Even though, tragic as the loss of 3,000 people is, their loss and the destruction of property did not cripple the functioning of state, local or federal government, the economy, nor the preparedness of the national armed services. Americans were stunned – the whole world was shocked – but the loss of less than 3,000 people from a population of over 200,000,000 does not constitute a strategic threat. )
And when you view it in those terms,
(Which are in near total disregard to the facts...)
then we believed we were fully justified, and indeed obligated, to use all the resources at our command
(And many that were legally outside of our command…)
to defeat that enemy so that they couldn't do it again.
(Which on the face of it – apart from the byzantine illogical blend of sophistry, non sequitur and red herring - would seem a reasonable aim.)
And that means you're prepared to use military force,
(No need to justify this statement for the reasons cited above. But if you idiots had brain ‘One’ between you, you’d have asked yourselves: ‘Why would the 9/11 attacks mean we’d prepare to use military force to forestall subsequent attacks by an undetermined group or groups of expatriated, stateless militant radicals who have no central command, air or naval forces when obviously the attacks of 9/11 were not deterred by the mightiest, best equipped military juggernaut in human history.)
use your intelligence asset
(Military intelligence; the original oxymoron.)
to go after those who support terrorism financially,
(Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for example but never mind that or why two ill-advised and illegal invasions and two violent coup d’états were necessary to ‘go after those who support terrorism financially’.)
to go after those states that sponsor terror and provide sanctuary or safe harbor to terror. And that's what we did.
(Even though proof for such sponsorship by either Iraq or Afghanistan was tenuous at best at the times of the respective invasions.)
I think some of our friends overseas didn't agree with those policies.
(Most of the member countries of the United Nations, as a matter of fact.)
I think over time that has -- the situation has improved.
(But don’t quote me on that. I give two shits either way.)
And after people saw what happened here, but then saw what happened in London when the -- I guess the subways were bombed and buses and so forth,
(I wasn’t paying much attention to the internal security matters of our closest lap-dog... uh… ally. Of course, the bombings in July, 2005 were a direct response to Britain choice to go to war in Iraq.)
or what happened in Madrid, the train bombings,
(In 2004, also as a direct result of the Spanish joining the ‘Coalition of the willing’. After massive demonstrations against the ruling party, Spain withdrew from the coalition, so I’m really stretching the argument by referencing this.)
or more recently, what's happened in Mumbai,
(Though not on the same scale of any of the aforementioned attacks .)
that this kind of international terrorism is indeed a threat to those of us who lived in the developed world.
(Lived? Did I just let that slip? Lived?)
And tough, aggressive policy is what's required to succeed against it, and that's what we put in place.
(And if we get tough enough and aggressive enough with a large enough military force we could lock down the world and dare anybody to raise their head to protest. The fact that it hasn‘t worked so far should be proof that we aren’t tough or aggressive enough yet. Global gulags – that’s the answer; built by Halliburton.)
As I say, some of our friends weren't all that happy with it, but a lot of them were, in fact, and supported it.
(Our noble ‘Coalition of Patsies’)
And even as we went into Iraq, while some of our historic friends and allies criticized that, an awful lot –
(The pussies with their goofy ‘international law’ and stupid ‘multi-lateralism. Diplomacy is for the weak.)
for example, the NATO states, especially the new member states,
(The ones feeding at the trough of US ‘aid’ that we bought memberships for.)
sent troops to serve alongside our guys.
(Our guys. Oh, yeah, I guess there are girls there, too. Probably dykes, But that’s better than faggots, so far as I’m concerned.)
So I think it's evolved over time.
(From being a disaster in the making to a grade ‘A’ double-prime generational cluster-fuck.)
I think that it's less controversial now than it was,
(When we were still able to keep a tight lid on the whole mess.)
although there's still, obviously, controversy about things like Guantanamo and so forth.
(Silly, foreigners and their antiquated sense of morality and due process.)

End of part 6

From Our Favorite Dick's Own Pie-hole (part Five)

Q So much of the debate on the war on terror,
(Well, not exactly debate – blather, rather; hand-wringing.)
particularly as Democrats
(Damned Dems…)
have encapsulated in Congress,
(to encapsulate: to epitomize, to express in brief summary. So WTF?)
is focused on the legality of the tactics.
(Legality – you say po-tay-to and I say ‘spud’.)
Could you talk a little bit behind the scenes
(Where you’re most comfortable – living on the ‘Dark Side’.)
of some of the discussions that might have focused on the morality and the ethics of the tactics,
(Not that you’d have even the most tenuous gasp of the concepts…)
and whether those things weighed into the discussions that went into --
(Oh, I’m getting lost in my own fractured syntax!)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: What kind -- which tactics?
(You better re-phrase that or I’ll have you head, you friggin’ mutt!)
Q Oh, anything from rendition to waterboarding to --
(Gawd, I hope he doesn’t snarl at me. I’ve heard he snarls!)
Q Sleep deprivation.
(Gulp!)
Q -- to deprivation, tactics that were used at Gitmo. Is there any -- I'm sure –
(Fake a weak chortle here.)
were there discussions that also focused just on American values
(Hay-rides, quilting parties, lemonade at the July Fourth picnic… We’re looking for a Norman Rockwell moment.)
and whether those can be preserved in the course of trying to protect the country from terror attacks?
(There, have we left you enough wiggle room to sufficiently dodge the question?)

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, let me, before I respond to that,
(Since that’s why you’re paying me the honorarium.)
let me state a proposition.
(So as to side-track you and avoid actually giving an answer.)
It's very important to discriminate between different elements of -- or issues that are often at times conflated and all joined together and balled up.
(Like the following non-answer is obviously going to be.)
People take Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib
(with a double-dose of Pepto-Bismol)
and interrogation of high-value detainees
(a delightful euphemism; ‘high-value detainees’- sounds much better than prisoners)
and sort of throw that all together
(in a big naked goose-pile…)
and say, characterize it as torture policy.
(snort! Preposterous, what the simple-minded John and Jane Q Public come up with.)
You've got to, I think,
(I know it’ll be a strain for you two knuckle-draggers)
back off and recognize that something like Abu Ghraib was not policy.
(Even though there’s ample proof that it was policy, we’d prefer it wasn’t recognized as such.)
It was, in fact, uncovered and then exposed by the military.
(With the New York Times and 60 Minutes giving them a gentle assist.)
There were people involved in that activity who were not conducting themselves in accordance with the standards that we would have expected,
(The standards we expected were much lower and more brutal. Underwear on the head? Naked goose-piles!? Come on! That’s kid stuff. We were thinking more of bamboo-under-the-fingernails and electrodes-on-the-genitals - you know. School of the Americas techniques.)
and they've paid the price for it.
(And luckily – knock wood – those of us who made the executive decisions to flout international law haven’t.)
Guantanamo I believe has been a first-rate facility.
(As a symbol of the American iniquity and neo-conic depravity.)
It's one we absolutely needed and found essential.
(By ‘we’ of course I mean those in the Bush administration; it was essential for us to cover our asses for criminal activity.)
It's been primarily a military facility.
(Even you dorks probably know that. But did you know that it’s held in violation of treaty?)
If you're going to evaluate how it's functioned,
(And I strongly advise that you do NOT.)
the policy that we adhere to at Guantanamo basically is the U.S. Army Field Manual.
(Although most of what is done there is in direct violation of the Field Manual in regard to torture or detainment.)
With respect to high-value detainees and enhanced interrogation techniques,
(The euphemistic jargon is so vital to the proper functioning of propaganda. Don’t you think?)
totally separate proposition under the jurisdiction of the Central Intelligence Agency
(They had carte blanche with the blessing of John Yoo and Gonzo.)
and applied to only a few people who were individuals like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
(a few hundred or so)
the mastermind of 9/11,
(Keep repeating that. It takes away some of the P.R. sting from the horrific things we authorized done to him.)
who we believe possessed significant intelligence about the enemy,
(Whoever we say that is on any given day.)
about al Qaeda,
(Which means ‘network’ and the title of a CIA databank used in recruiting Islamic extremists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.)
about their future plans, about how they were organized and trained and equipped, where they operated.
(Since we were- ahem - totally in the dark (wink-wink) about all of this even though, as mentioned, the CIA ran and funded the Mujahidins in the jihad against the Soviets which became the al Qaeda network – if you’ll pardon the redundancy.)
And after 9/11, we badly needed to acquire good intelligence on the enemy.
(Since we had no good intelligence in Washington DC. None that we wanted to pay any attention to, anyway.)
That's an important part of fighting a war.
(So I’m told.)
What we did with respect to al Qaeda high-value detainees, if I can put it in those terms,
(And since that’s the standard party line we’ve been using for years, don’t even think of denying me.)
I think there were a total of about 33 who were subjected to enhanced interrogation;
(A magical term, isn’t it: enhanced interrogation. A good quick round of ’20 Questions’ followed by tea and cucumber sandwiches.)
only three of those who were subjected to waterboarding -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and a third, al Nashiri. That's it, those three guys.
(It’s not like we did to thousands or millions. So, since it was only those three guys –and we all know what nasty dudes those guys were (take our word for it) - international law and the US Constitution outlawing torture can be waived under those conditions. Right? Ask John Yoo.)
Was it torture?
(Of course it was. Oh, sorry. That was meant to be rhetorical, wasn’t it.)
I don't believe it was torture.
(“And what a fool believes… no wise man has the power to reason away”.)
We spent a great deal of time and effort getting legal advice,
(To cover our asses…)
legal opinion out of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where you go for those kinds of opinions,
(Otherwise we’d have called it something different like the Office of Obfuscation or the Department of Dissemblance.)
from the Department of Justice as to where the red lines were out there in terms of this you can do, this you can't do.
(That’s how we asked them to lay it out for the Frat-boy Brush-cutter – color coded. He still couldn’t follow it. )
The CIA handled itself, I think, very appropriately.
(They were doing what they do best after all – torture and undermining democratic process.)
They came to us in the administration, talked to me, talked to others in the administration,
(Of course, they talked with me first since I’d summoned them to my office. Addington was there along with those other knuckle-heads – they always reminded me of those little toy dogs in the back windows of cars, their heads bobbing up and down, up and down… very gratifying.)
about what they felt they needed to do in order to obtain the intelligence that we believe these people were in possession of.
(Since, as I said, we had none of our own in DC.)
I signed off on it;
(Gulp!)
others did, as well, too. I wasn't the ultimate authority, obviously.
(George W Bush.)
As the Vice President, I don't run anything.
(LOL!)
But I was in the loop.
(Hell, I WAS the loop.)
I thought that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
(Which goes to show I haven’t the foggiest notion anymore about what is right or wrong.)
I thought the legal opinions that were rendered were sound.
(Because we had lawyers write down what we wanted in legalese.)
I think the techniques were reasonable in terms of what they were asking to be able to do.
(Reasonable as far as criminal activity and in terms of what we demanded that the CIA do.)
And I think it produced the desired result.
(Although we got nothing as far as actionable intelligence as a result of our non-torture torture.)
I think it's directly responsible for the fact that we've been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for seven and a half years.
(That and the fact that I’ve had interns continuously shredding newspapers in my office, lighting incense and ringing a little silver bell. Oh, and the monkey paw blessed by Alexander Haig that I wear under my shirt.)
And come to the question of morality and ethics, in my mind,
(Comes up blank…)
the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in on January 20th of 2001,
(What was it again…?)
to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
(Actually, it’s ‘protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic’ – not the neo-conic ideology.)
And that's what we've done.
More or less. Probably less than more.)
And I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11.
(In hopes that we could somehow make up for the fact that we didn’t do diddley-squat – ethical, immoral or fattening – to stop those attacks in the first place despite multiple reports, memoranda and advisories warning us of imminent attack.)
We made the judgment, the President and I and others, that that wasn't going to happen again on our watch.
(Not again. Getting caught flat-footed with our pants down once was enough. Heh-heh.)
And I feel very good about what we did.
(And so do the stock-holders of Halliburton, etc)
I think it was the right thing to do.
(Whatever that means to you. It means shit to a tree.)
If I was faced with those circumstances again, I'd do exactly the same thing.
(Because I am that freaking stupid, insane or obstinate.)
To be continued...