(excerpts from http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/01/cheney.speech/index.html)
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he does not believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning or execution of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney says Saddam Hussein "provided sanctuary ... and resources to terrorists."
He strongly defended the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq, however, arguing that Hussein's previous support for known terrorists was a serious danger after 9/11.
Cheney, in an appearance at the National Press Club, also said he is intent on speaking out in defense of the Bush administration's national security record because "a clear understanding of policies that worked [in protecting the United States] is essential."
"I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true," Cheney conceded.
Well gee, Dick, thanks for that astonishing information. What the rest of us have known for the last, oh, 4 years or so is only now dawning on the guy behind the whole thing. He went on...
But Hussein was "somebody who provided sanctuary and safe harbor and resources to terrorists. ... [It] is, without question, a fact."
Cheney restated his claim that "there was a relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq that stretched back 10 years. It's not something I made up. ... We know for a fact that Saddam Hussein was a sponsor -- a state sponsor -- of terror. It's not my judgment. That was the judgment of our [intelligence community] and State Department."
Cheney identified former CIA Director George Tenet as the "prime source of information" on the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Tenet "testified, if you go back and check the record, in the fall of [2002] before the Senate Intelligence Committee -- in open session -- that there was a relationship," Cheney said.
As I've state innumerable times on the internet to the morons who at least have the decency to hide the ugly, snarling faces while they spout bile: just because you say something is a "fact" doesn't magically make it so. The Baathist regime was horrible, yes... but it was also ideologically and religiously utterly at odds with a Sunni group like Al Qaeda. This little tidbit went un-noticed by... well, everyone at first - but it still appears to be slightly beyond the capacity of our former VP, The Undying One. The Baathist regime of Hussein, as we found out by hitting the hornet's nest in 2003, was really the only thing keeping the various factions - including the extremist ones - under control. Far from providing shelter to terrorist organizations, Hussein's reign kept them out of the area. I say this not in defense of Saddam and his despicable reign, but rather as a condemnation of these utter falsities of a man so worried about how people will view his Vice-Presidency/Reign of Terror that he's willing to fall back to the stand-by Bushian defense of saying a lie often enough and loudly enough that people begin to believe it might be true.
Still, he went on...
Among other things Monday, Cheney also called the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center a "good facility ... if you are going to be engaged in a world conflict, such as we are, in terms of global war on terrorism. You know, if you don't have a place where you can hold these people, the only other option is to kill them. And we don't operate that way."
But that's a false choice, Dick. Utterly false. It's not Guantamo or summary executions, nor is it Gitmo or releasing terrorists into the US. The choice is between keeping open a facility which is seen by our enemies as the pinnacle of what they're fighting against, a center which stands against every philosophy and creed we as Americans believe in and hold dear, a camp which is a slap in the face to any notion that we're fighting "the good fight."
or
Closing down said abomination and instead housing the detainees (which the Supreme Court has ruled have no right to Habeus Corpus protection) in the Supermaximum Security prisons we have already built to house the world's most dangerous people. You know, the prisons no one's ever broken out of, and letting them rot instead of torturing them in Cuba.
Most though, Cheney is pissing me off right now because he's engaging in the most insidious, despicable, nigh treasonable PR campaign I've ever heard of... ever. That is to actively predict that under an opposition Administration America will be subject to the unthinkable: yet another terrorist attack; ad not just predict it, but to all-but hope for it -- all so he will look not as much of the inhuman monstrous shell of an autocrat he is, and more like some patriotic hero for engaging in the most systematic undermining of America and its values since South Carolina seceded from the Union and started the Civil War.
Turning America itself - along with the lives of hundred, thousands, or possibly millions - into a political trump card. Nice one, Dick. Way to go for the gusto... or was the the throat?
(CS)WC Out.
Why don't you ask the kids at Tiananmen Square/ Was fashion the reason they were there?
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