10 Years Later

I wasn't blogging yet 10 years ago, I started this blog in May of 2004.  But I was reading blogs.  I remember that many pointed out that the ultimate winner of the war would be Iran.  I spent some time today going over some of my early posts.  One of the sources of intelligence used by the Bush/Cheney cabal was one Ahmed Chalabi.  In May of 2004 we found out that Chalabi was working for the Iranians.  Here is my post from May, 21, 2004:
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Talk about being had, it appears that Cheney and the Defense Department were being taken in and paying Iranian spies as in Chalabi and his slimy group.
Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran

WASHINGTON -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.

"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

In other words we attacked one country part of the Axis of Evil, Iraq, for another, Iran.
Will the incompetence ever end.
Josh Marshall also has some thoughts on this
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Indeed, we fought a war against Iran's arch enemy - we lost and Iran won.

Cheney promised us that the US would be seen as liberators.  It took a little over a year to see proof that this was just another lie.  This post from June 19, 2004:
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In a recent poll conducted by the US CPA in Iraq 55 percent of the Iraqi's polled said they would feel safer when the Americans left. With headlines like this you can see why:
US Strikes 'Al Qaeda Safe House' in Iraq, 22 Dead

FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. forces launched an air strike on Saturday on what they said was a safe house linked to elusive al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Iraqi city of Falluja, killing 22 people in a "precision strike."

"An American plane hit this house and three others were damaged. Only body parts are left," a witness said, as rescuers dug through the rubble of the shattered house for survivors.

"They brought us 22 corpses, children, women and youth," Ahmed Hassan, a cemetery worker, said after the blast.

I'm sorry, but even if it was an al Quida safe house this is no way to make the Iraqi citizens feel more secure or feel good about the American presence. No matter how you felt about the war it can't be hard to concede that the effort has been thourghly botched.

Update

Juan Cole has some thoughts on this. He thinks it might be considered a war crime since many of the dead were women and children.
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Iraq was a colossal mistake.  Even those who think it might have been a good idea admit that there was gross incompetence on the part of the Bush administration.

Clueless, Dangerous Idiots

The Bush/Cheney administration and the neocons are truly clueless - dangerous - idiots.
Iran Top Threat To Iraq, U.S. Says

Last week's violence in Basra and Baghdad has convinced the Bush administration that actions by Iran, and not al-Qaeda, are the primary threat inside Iraq, and has sparked a broad reassessment of policy in the region, according to senior U.S. officials.

Evidence of an increase in Iranian weapons, training and direction for the Shiite militias that battled U.S. and Iraqi security forces in those two cities has fixed new U.S. attention on what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday called Tehran's "malign" influence, the officials said.

The intensified focus on Iran coincides with diminished emphasis on al-Qaeda in Iraq as the leading justification for an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq.

Yes, they are still looking for an excuse to attack Iran. And if they do? It would appear they are oblivious to the fact that the ISCI and Da'wa party are even closer to Iran than al-Sadr. The ISCI's Badr brigade has infiltrated the Iraqi security forces and they will not stand by if the US should attack Iran. With the ISCI and the Da'wa party in charge of the government Iran is already calling most of the shots. Iran, unlike the US, realizes al-Sadr is popular and powerful so they give him token support. But they would much prefer to have the ISCI and the Da'wa party running the show in Iraq.

If the US thinks that al-Sadr is a problem just wait until the US bombs Iran. That's when all hell will break lose.

Who's the big dog?

I seem to have personally survived the duo of Pacific typhoons the battered the Pacific Northwest. I did experience a short power outage but that's all. There is a lot of news today but perhaps the biggest is the release of a year old National Intelligence Estimate.
U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

Now it's easy to see why Cheney, Bush and DNI Mike McConnell didn't want it released - if proves that once again they were lying in order to push their war agenda. This will make it extremely difficult for the psychopaths in the administration to attack Iran.

Kevin Drum asks a very good question; WHY WAS THE NIE RELEASED? is the administration did not want it released.

All I've got is speculation on the second question, but here it is: it was congressional pressure. Democratic members of the various intelligence committees saw the NIE (or a summary or a verbal report or something) and went ballistic. Footnotes and dissents are one thing, but withholding a report whose primary conclusion is 180 degrees contrary to years of administration innuendo produced a rebellion. Somebody who got briefed must have threatened something pretty serious if the NIE didn't see the light of day.

Like I said, just a guess. But who else has the clout to force Bush, Cheney, and McConnell to change course?

I have to wonder if the lawmakers may have had some help from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Pentagon.

This should also all but take Iran off the table for the 2008 presidential elections meaning the Republicans will have to stick to immigration to prove how manly they are.

Update
Spencer Ackerman doesn't think it was the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee that forced the release of the NIE but that it may have been a case where the Intelligence Community wanted to set the record straight. I don't think so. While the rank and file members may have wanted to release it they couldn't without Mike McConnell's approval and I would doubt that he would have any interest is "setting the record straight". My money is still on the the Pentagon and Robert Gates perhaps working with Rice and her people at State. Perhaps that's why Wolfie is coming back - to keep a leash on Condi.

Fighting the Lord of Darkness

Dick Cheney is still intent on bringing on Armageddon before he leaves office or his cyborg body gives up the ghost. The road to Armageddon leads through Iran and this has resulted in a power struggle between the Vice President's office and the saner heads in the Defense and State Departments and some of the Intelligence community.
Spooks refuse to toe Cheney's line on Iran

WASHINGTON - The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear program. The aim is to make the document more supportive of Vice President Dick Cheney's militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts provided by participants in the NIE process to two former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers.

But this pressure on intelligence analysts, obviously instigated by Cheney himself, has not produced a draft estimate without those dissenting views, these sources say. The White House has now apparently decided to release the "unsatisfactory" draft NIE, but without making its key findings public.

A NIE coordinates the judgments of the US's 16 intelligence agencies on a specific country or issue.

A former CIA intelligence officer who has asked not to be identified told Inter Press Service (IPS) that an official involved in the NIE process says the Iran estimate was ready to be published a year ago but has been delayed because the director of national intelligence wanted a draft reflecting a consensus on key conclusions - particularly on Iran's nuclear program.

There is a split in the intelligence community on how much of a threat the Iranian nuclear program poses, according to the intelligence official's account. Some analysts who are less independent are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the alarmist view coming from Cheney's office, but others have rejected that view.

The draft NIE, first completed a year ago, which had included the dissenting views, was not acceptable to the White House, according to the former intelligence officer. "They refused to come out with a version that had dissenting views in it," he says.

As recently as early October, the official involved in the process was said to be unclear about whether a NIE would be circulated and, if so, what it would say.

[.....]

"The White House wants a document that it can use as evidence for its Iran policy," says Giraldi. Despite pressures on them to change their dissenting conclusions, however, Giraldi says some analysts have refused to go along with conclusions that they believe are not supported by the evidence.

In October 2006, Giraldi wrote in The American Conservative that the NIE on Iran had already been completed, but that Cheney's office had objected to its findings on both the Iranian nuclear program and Iran's role in Iraq. The draft NIE did not conclude that there was confirming evidence that Iran was arming Shi'ite insurgents in Iraq, according to Giraldi.

Giraldi said the White House had decided to postpone any decision on the internal release of the NIE until after the November 2006 congressional elections.

Porter tells us the John Negroponte would not go along with the Cheney tribe on Iran and that's why he was replaced by Mike McConnell to be director of national intelligence. McConnell was willing to go along with the insanity of the Cheney Tribe. But the consensus is still not there and the NEI still contains dissenting views. So what will the Bush/Cheney cabal do? What they always do - declassify the parts of the NIE that support them and leave the dissenting views classified.

The decision to withhold key judgments on Iran from the public was apparently part of a White House strategy for reducing the potential damage of publishing the estimate with the inclusion of dissenting views.

As of early October, officials involved in the NIE were "throwing their hands up in frustration" over the refusal of the administration to allow the estimate to be released, according to the former intelligence officer. But the Iran NIE is now expected to be circulated within the administration in late November, says Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and founder of the anti-war group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

The release of the Iran NIE will certainly intensify the bureaucratic political struggle over Iran policy. If the NIE includes both dissenting views on key issues, a campaign of selective leaking to news media of language from the NIE that supports Cheney's line on Iran will soon follow, as well as leaks of the dissenting views by his opponents.

Both sides may be anticipating another effort by Cheney to win Bush's approval of a significant escalation of military pressure on Iran in early 2008.

Nothing will stand in the way of Cheney's Armageddon - certainly not the worthless House and Senate.

KGB Envy

The US and the west spent over half of my life, I'm 61, fighting the cold war to prevent the totalitarian Soviet Union from taking away our Democracy only to have the Bush/Cheney administration do exactly that over the last six years. Digby has an interesting, if disturbing, post up on this.

I agree with Greg Djerejian who responded:

It's really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)--openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union--our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn't it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC.

It's almost as if the reason they hated" the totalitarians was because they could get away with doing what these guys could only fantasize about. It wasn't hatred at all, actually. It was envy.

But this is no longer an academic exercise, is it? Aside from the torture and black sites and detention without habeas (as if that's not enough) they've also been busily laying the legal groundwork for an authoritarian regime at home. It only awaits the next "crisis" for them to fully implement.

And judging by the hysterical reaction of the media and political elites the last time, I can only assume that they will succeed in persuading the country that all these things are necessary.(Recall that Sally Quinn spent the first few years after 9/11 giving terror-porn speeches all over Washington about how to prepare for the next attack, including whether your Shih Tzu can wear a gas mask.) The Nazis, (another former enemy no doubt richly admired for their efficient ways of dealing with internal dissent) never did an illegal thing according the German law. They just changed the laws. That's how the smart folks do things. Precedents, judges, new laws -- it all adds up to a new police state just waiting for the moment it's required.

Meanwhile, Cheney and the rest of his lunatic cohorts are sending clear, unambiguous signals that they are planning to attack Iran. Indeed, as Kevin Hayden pointed out yesterday, there is a coordinated product roll-out happening right before our eyes. First of all we have that Dick Cheney speech in which, as Greg Djerejian also points out, he repeatedly uses a phrase he and Bush used in the run-up to the Iraq war: "serious consequences.

The best way for would be tyrants to become the real thing is to scare the hell out of the population with the threat of an "external" enemy. Cheney and his psychopathic cohorts started laying the ground even before 911 - it just made things easier. They were going to make Saddam into a mortal threat without it. After 911 we saw the serious shredding of the Constitution begin. The press and the congress were cheerleaders - that includes many Democrats as well as most of the Republicans. The Bush/Cheney misadventure in Iraq and the War on terror are no longer enough, their credibility is now zero. They need a new threat - a new war. They will attack Iran. They don't even care if it is another cluster fuck as most predict. They will still use it as an excuse to take more power and discard the constitution.

Lawless

I discussed Harry Reid's attempt to halt the Bush Administration's political "recess appointments below. It seemed like a good idea but Dr. Steven Taylor and others point out that the Constitution is not clear on this and that Bush may just decide he can do ti anyway.

Reid may be basing his ten-day cycle on a 1921 Attorney General opinion that a ten day gap was likely too short a recess, but a 1993 DoJ briefing argued for a gap of as small as 3 days. I noted these opinions here. James notes a number of recess appointments made during brief recesses (as short as 11 days).

My guess is that President Bush would be willing, based on his track record, to make a recess appointment for a recess of 24 hours, and then seek to fight it out with the Senate. As such, James is right: this won’t work.

The New York Times has an editorial this morning, Why This Scandal Matters, talking about the US Attorney Purge and the Justice Department.

Justice Department headquarters has become deeply partisan. Young operatives like Ms. Goodling were apparently allowed to hire and promote based on party membership. Political appointees cleared the way for laws designed to disenfranchise minority voters, and brought litigation to remove Democratic-leaning voters from the rolls.

The department’s integrity lies in tatters. As a result of the purge, Tim Griffin, a Republican operative and Karl Rove protégé, was installed as the top federal prosecutor in eastern Arkansas. Rachel Paulose, a 33-year-old Republican activist with thin prosecutorial experience, was assigned to Minnesota. If either indicted a prominent Democrat tomorrow, everyone would believe it was a political hit.

Congress has to save the Justice Department, something President Bush shows no interest in doing. It should pass a resolution of “no confidence” in Mr. Gonzales, and push for his removal. But it also needs to insist on new leadership that will restore the department’s traditions of professionalism and impartiality, and re-establish that in the United States, the legal system does not work to advance the interests of a political party.

That sounds really good but the reality is Bush will simply ignore the congress if they attempt to make DOJ the justice department for all Americans not just the Republican Party.

I have not been a supporter of the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney but it is becoming obvious that the only way to end the lawlessness in the White House is to remove them from office in the only way the constitution allows. And I'm not just talking about Alberto Gonzales.

A quick message to the Democrats who control both the House and the Senate: the only thing you can do that George W. Bush will pay any attention to is impeachment. Anything else you try to do is a waste of time so don't bother.

The Only Way To End The Occupation....

....Is To End The Rule Of The Bush/Cheney Cabal.
David Ignatius has an Op Ed in the Washington Post today on Dick (Lord of Darkness) Cheney's trip to the Middle East - specifically to Saudi Arabia.

The Cheney visit is aimed partly at mutual reassurance. Both sides want to reaffirm the alliance, despite disagreements over Iraq policy and the Palestinian issue. The Saudis also want to establish an additional channel for communication so they can avoid misunderstandings that have sometimes arisen when the primary intermediary is Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the freewheeling former Saudi ambassador to Washington who is now national security adviser.

Abdullah had seemed to be distancing himself from Washington in some recent comments. In February, he broke with U.S. efforts to isolate the radical Palestinian group Hamas by sponsoring the Mecca Agreement that created a Palestinian "unity government" fusing Hamas with the more moderate Fatah. In March, he surprised U.S. officials by calling the military occupation of Iraq "illegitimate" in a speech to an Arab League summit in Riyadh. He also nixed plans for a White House dinner in April.

Abdullah's criticism of the "illegitimate" American presence in Iraq reflects the Saudi leader's deep misgivings about U.S. strategy there. Saudi sources say the king has given up on the ability of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to overcome sectarian divisions and unite the country. The Saudi leadership is also said to believe that the U.S. troop surge is likely to fail, deepening the danger of all-out civil war in Iraq.

And then there is this:

The ferment in the region is driven partly by the perception that U.S. troops are on the way out, no matter what the Bush administration says. To dampen such speculation, Bush is said to have told the Saudis that America will not withdraw from Iraq during his presidency. "That gives us 18 months to plan," said one Saudi source.

So there is a time line but it's not September, 2007 but January, 2009. That would seem to fit with recent comments by Condolezza Rice and this;
Commanders in Iraq See 'Surge' Into '08

Pentagon to Deploy 35,000 Replacement Troops
The Pentagon announced yesterday that 35,000 soldiers in 10 Army combat brigades will begin deploying to Iraq in August as replacements, making it possible to sustain the increase of U.S. troops there until at least the end of this year.

U.S. commanders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that heightened troop levels, announced by President Bush in January, will need to last into the spring of 2008. The military has said it would assess in September how well its counterinsurgency strategy, intended to pacify Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, is working.

"The surge needs to go through the beginning of next year for sure," said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the day-to-day commander for U.S. military operations in Iraq. The new requirement of up to 15-month tours for active-duty soldiers will allow the troop increase to last until spring, said Odierno, who favors keeping experienced forces in place for now.

Bottom line - we will have 100,000 plus troops in Iraq as long as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are in office. If you want to end the US occupation of Iraq you must prematurely end the regime of Bush and Cheney.

Update
Our friend Cernig has a well deserved I Hate To Say I Told You So... over at NewsHoggers

The enemy within?

People like Juan Cole noted years ago that Bush/Cheney Mideast policy has primarily benefited Iran. Well Nicholas D. Kristof at the New York Times has noticed ans wonders if Iran has a man in the Bush administration.
Iran’s Operative in the White House

If an 18-year-old American soldier were caught slipping obscure military paperwork to Iranian spies, he would be arrested, pilloried in the news media and tossed into prison for years.

But in fact there’s an American who has provided services of incalculably greater value to Iran in recent years. So you have to wonder: Is Dick Cheney an Iranian mole?

Consider that the Bush administration’s first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, Iran’s bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran’s even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

You really think that’s just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?

Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down. The U.S. dismantled Iraq’s army, broke the Baath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran’s ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn’t have done better — so maybe they did write the script ...

We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that’s just another coincidence?

Or think about broader Bush administration policies in the Middle East. For six years, the White House vigorously backed Israeli hard-liners and refused to engage seriously in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus nurturing anti-Americanism and religious fundamentalism. Then last summer, the White House backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which turned Iran’s proxies in Hezbollah into street heroes in much of the Arab world.

Consider also the way the administration has systematically antagonized our former allies in Europe and Asia, undermining chances of a united front to block Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Mr. Cheney may nominally push for sanctions against Iran, but by alienating our allies he makes strong sanctions harder to achieve.

And by condoning torture and extralegal detentions in Guantánamo, the White House antagonized Muslims around the world and made us look like hypocrites when we criticize Arab or Iranian human rights abuses. Take Mr. Cheney’s endorsement of the torture known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning: “It’s a no-brainer for me,” he said. The torturers in Iran’s Evin prison must have cheered. They got a pass as well.

Even at home, Iran’s leaders have been bolstered by President Bush and Mr. Cheney. Iran’s hard-liners are hugely unpopular and the regime is wobbly, but Bush administration policies have inflamed Iranian nationalism and given cover to the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Kristof rightly concludes that Cheney is to blame as he is the apparent author of all the above insanity but is he an Iranian plant?

Mr. Cheney isn’t an Iranian mole. Nor is he a North Korean mole, though his we-don’t-negotiate-with-evil policy toward North Korea has resulted in that country’s quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. It’s also unlikely that he is an Al Qaeda mole, even though Al Qaeda now has an important new base of support in Iraq.

Like Kennedy and Johnson wading into Vietnam, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney harmed American interests not out of malice but out of ineptitude. I concede that they honestly wanted the best for America, but we still ended up getting the worst.

While I agree that the Bush/Cheney cabal is inept I don't agree that Cheney wanted what was best for America. All he was ever interested in was power and oil. Kristof points out that there is a lesson to be learned from all of this.

Our national interests are as vulnerable to incompetence as to malicious damage. So we must identify and abandon the policies that backfired so catastrophically. The common threads of those damaging policies are clear: a refusal to negotiate with “evil”; an aggressive willingness to use military force to solve problems; contempt for our allies; and the bending of legal and moral principles to allow indefinite detention and even torture, particularly for anyone with olive skin and a Muslim name.

Whenever we’ve suspected a mole in our midst, we’ve gone to extreme lengths to find the traitor. This time, betrayed not by a mole but by failed policies, let’s be just as resolute. It’s time to uproot policies that in the last half-dozen years have damaged American interests incomparably more than any mole or foreign spy ever has in the last 200 years.

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The new KGB as bad as the old one!

It is to such depths that George Bush and Dick Cheney have lowered America.

The above is the concluding sentence of Paul Craig Roberts' commentary on the farcical confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
The Confession Backfired

The first confession released by the Bush regime’s Military Tribunals – that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – has discredited the entire process. Writing in Jurist, Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato likens Mohammed’s confession to those that emerged in Stalin’s show trials of Bolshevik leaders in the 1930s.

That was my own immediate thought. I remember speaking years ago with Soviet dissident Valdimir Bukovsky about the behavior of Soviet dissidents under torture. He replied that people pressed for names under torture would try to remember the names of war dead and people who had passed away. Those who retained enough of their wits under torture would confess to an unbelievable array of crimes in an effort to alert the public to the falsity of the entire process.

That is what Mohammed did. We know he was tortured, because his response to the obligatory question about his treatment during his years of detention is redacted. We also know that he was tortured, because otherwise there is no point for the US Justice (sic) Dept. memos giving the green light to torture or for the Military Commissions Act, which permits torture and death sentence based on confession extracted by torture.

I discussed the farcical nature of the confession two days ago and Roberts says the rest of the world saw it the same way.

Mohammed’s confession of crimes and plots is so vast that Katherine Shrader of the Associated Press reports that the Americans who extracted Mohammed’s confession do not believe it either. It is exaggerated, say Mohammed’s tormentors, and must be taken with a grain of salt.

In other words, the US torture crew, reveling in their success, played into Mohammed’s hands. Pride goes before a fall, as the saying goes.

Mohammed’s confession admits to 31 planned and actual attacks all over the world, including blowing up the Panama Canal and assassinating presidents Carter and Clinton and the Pope. Having taken responsibility for the whole ball of wax along with everything else that he could imagine, he was the entire show. No other terrorists needed.

Reading responses of BBC listeners to Mohammed’s confession reveals that the rest of the world is either laughing at the US government for being so stupid as to think that anyone anywhere would believe the confession or damning the Bush regime for being like the Gestapo and KGB.

Humorists are having a field day with the confession: "’I’m a very dangerous mastermind,’ said Mohammed, who confessed to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Brink’s robbery, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the Lincoln and McKinley assassinations. Mohammed also accepted responsibility for spreading hay fever and cold sores around the world and for rained out picnics."

If there was anything remaining of the Bush regime not already discredited, Mohammed’s confession removed any reputation left.

This would indeed represent a farce if not for the hundreds if not thousands of lives ruined by the Bush/Cheney cabal's activities.

The most important part of the Mohammed story is yet to make the headlines. Despite having held and tortured hundreds of detainees for years in Gitmo, and we don’t know how many more in secret prisons around the world, the US government has come up with only 14 "high value detainees."

In other words, the government has nothing on 99 percent of the detainees who allegedly are so dangerous and wicked that they must be kept in detention without charges, access to attorneys and contact with families.

And little wonder. The vast majority of detainees, alleged "enemy combatants," are not terrorists captured by the CIA and brave US troops. They are hapless persons who happened to be outside their tribal or home territories and were kidnapped by criminal gangs or war lords who profited greatly at the expense of the naive Americans who offered bounties for "terrorists."

The US government does not care that innocent people have been ensnared, because the US government desperately needs both to prove that there are vast numbers of terrorists and to demonstrate its proficiency in protecting Americans by capturing terrorists. Moreover, the US government needs "dangerous suspects" that it can use to keep Americans in a state of supine fearfulness and as a front behind which to undermine constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights.

The Bush-Cheney Regime succeeded in its evil plot, only to throw it all away by releasing the ridiculous confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

This has not only been a crime against those innocents who have been incarcerated but a crime against the American people and their way of life. Incompetent and evil - the two words that sum up the Bush administration. I will close this with the same words I used to open it.

It is to such depths that George Bush and Dick Cheney have lowered America.

Update
While Time may be throwing softballs compared to Roberts' hardballs they do at least seem to recognize the farcical nature of it all.
Why KSM's Confession Rings False

It's hard to tell what the Pentagon's objective really is in releasing the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession. It certainly suggests the Administration is trying to blame KSM for al-Qaeda terrorism, leading us to believe we've caught the master terrorist and that al-Qaeda, and especially the ever-elusive bin Laden, is no longer a threat to the U.S.

But there is a major flaw in that marketing strategy. On the face of it, KSM, as he is known inside the government, comes across as boasting, at times mentally unstable. It's also clear he is making things up. I'm told by people involved in the investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl's execution but was in fact not the person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM's role. And if KSM did indeed exaggerate his role in the Pearl murder, it raises the question of just what else he has exaggerated, or outright fabricated.

Robert Gates and Dick Cheney

When Donald Rumsfeld was fired after the November Election there was a lot of speculation that this was a sign of Dick Cheney's waning influence. There was more speculation this week including Michael Duffy's Cheney's Fall From Grace in Time. In the National Journal Shane Harris gives us some more evidence that the speculation may be accurate in
Rolling Back Pentagon Spies

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is considering a plan to curtail the Pentagon's clandestine spying activities, which were expanded by his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, after the 9/11 attacks. The undercover work allowed military personnel to collect intelligence about terrorists and to recruit spies in foreign countries independently of the CIA and without much congressional oversight.

Former military and intelligence officials, including those involved in an ongoing and largely informal debate about the military's forays into espionage, said that Gates, a former CIA director, is likely to "roll back" several of Rumsfeld's controversial initiatives. This could include changing the mission of the Pentagon's Strategic Support Branch, an intelligence-gathering unit comprising Special Forces, military linguists, and interrogators that Rumsfeld set up to report directly to him. The unit's teams work in many of the same countries where CIA case officers are trying to recruit spies, and the military and civilian sides have clashed as a result. CIA officers serving abroad have been roiled by what they see as the Pentagon's encroachment on their dominance in the world of human intelligence-gathering.

A former senior intelligence official who knows Gates said that the secretary wants to "dismantle" many of the intelligence programs launched by Rumsfeld and his top lieutenants, Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary for intelligence, and Douglas Feith, who was Rumsfeld's policy chief. The former official added that the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has also expanded its human spying efforts, could be returned to a more analytical role.

The official noted that Gates doesn't intend to eliminate the Strategic Support Branch but said that its mandate will change. The unit arose from a written order by Rumsfeld to end the "near total dependence on CIA" for intelligence-gathering, and agency officials viewed it as a competitor.

The Strategic Support Branch was Dick Cheney's very own rouge intelligence unit which was responsible for much of the bad intelligence and misinformation that led us to war in Iraq. It produced "designer intelligence" designed to fit Cheney's policy and ideology.

As Steve Clemmons says:

Many are still trying to assess what kind of impact Bob Gates will have on America's wrong-headed military course -- and whether he will be able to bring some maturity and realism to a White House decision-making that has been dominated by Vice President Cheney and his followers.

I think that this is a subtle but important first step in changing the "structural dimensions" of Cheney's influence.

What happened?

Sidney Blumenthal writing in Salon points out that something happened, something changed during the Scotter Libby trial.

The opening statement of Libby's attorney seemed to augur a presentation of the "fall guy" scenario. "They're trying to set me up. They want me to be the sacrificial lamb," Theodore Wells said, recalling Libby's words to Cheney. "I will not be sacrificed so Karl Rove can be protected." Rove, after all, had disclosed the identity of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, to two reporters, conservative columnist Robert Novak, who first put her name into print, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. Rove told MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews that Plame was "fair game." And he offered as his motive for attacking Wilson to another reporter: "He's a Democrat."

In a note entered as a trial exhibit, Cheney expressed his concern that his chief of staff was being thrown to the wolves while Rove was being protected. "Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder," the note read. Despite the dramatic opening, Libby's defense made no reference to the note during the trial. In yet another mysterious lapse, although Libby's lawyers repeatedly gave every indication to Judge Reggie Walton that both Libby and Cheney would testify, neither did. In a perjury trial, if the defendant does not look the jury in the eye and say he did not lie or that he made an honest error, it's difficult to win. But Libby never appeared as a witness on his own behalf; Cheney was not called; and the defense rested on the thin reed of Libby's weak memory and the supposed impeached credibility of journalists. The feeble defense amounted to a verdict foretold.

But why was Libby virtually passive? If Libby knew he was going to offer the barest defense, why didn't he do as Rove did, amending his grand jury testimony to reflect the truth? Why didn't Libby do as former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer did, turning state's evidence and being granted immunity in exchange for his testimony? What stopped Libby from risking indictment? What prevented him from making more than a minimal defense that invited conviction?

So why did Libby decide to fall on the sword? The administration did not want a pathological liar like Cheney testifying under oath. Yes, he would lie opening an entirely new can of worms. A Libby conviction was not without advantages for the White House. The appeals could last for years making it impossible for Libby to testify in front of congressional committees. So why did Libby take the fall. I see a couple of possibilities.

1. He was promised a pardon and that he would be taken care of.
2. Libby truly believes in the cause and the party so was willing to play the part of the loyal Samurai.

In all probability it was a combination of both.

What the Libby conviction means

Sidney Blumenthal does the best job yet of summing up the implications of the Scooter Libby trial and conviction. It shines a light on the unchecked executive power that is the Bush/Cheney cabal.

The conviction of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, on criminal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury brings only a partial conclusion to the sordid political tragedy that is the Bush presidency. Yet the judgment on this matter goes to the heart of the administration. The means and the ends of Bush's White House have received a verdict from the bar of justice.

Foreign policy was and is the principal way of consolidating unchecked executive power. In the run-up to the Iraq war, professional standards, even within the military and intelligence agencies, were subordinated to political goals. Only information that fit the preconceived case was permitted. Those who advanced facts or raised skeptical questions about sketchy information were seen as deliberate enemies causing damage from within. From the beginning, the White House indulged in unrestrained attacks on such professionals. Revealing the facts, especially about the politically-driven method of skewing policy, was treated as a crime against the state.

All those who questioned Bush, Cheney or the neocons were attacked as the enemy. That included Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. And it went beyond the war and foreign policy.

For exposing the absence of rational policymaking in economics as well as foreign policy, Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill was threatened with an investigation for allegedly abusing classified material. Once he was intimidated into silence, the probe was dropped.

But of course the greatest effort went into discrediting the man who posed the greatest threat.

In the aftermath of former ambassador Joseph Wilson's revelation that the most explosive reason given for war against Iraq - that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger to fuel nuclear weapons - had no apparent basis in fact, the Bush White House revved into high gear against the critic. Wilson, however, was even more dangerous than the others because he was a witness to the false rationale for the war.

And yes, the Libby conviction will supply the legacy for the Bush/Cheney administration.

Libby's conviction not only indelibly stains neoconservatism. It is a damning condemnation of the Bush White House belief that the ends justify the means and its aggrandizement of absolute power. Ultimately, this is a verdict that can never be erased from the history of the Bush presidency.

Pardon My [lack of] Outrage

Digby is outraged.

I have to say that I think the conservatives are winning the spin war on this. By the time they are done, everyone in the country is going to believe that poor little Scooter was railroaded and that it's perfectly normal for a president to immediately pardon his aides when they are found guilty in a court of law. Hell, he can hire him back!

Republican administrations always break the law and when they are caught they always pardon their own. I guess we've just become so used to it now that people don't even find it shocking anymore.

If this happens, from this day forward, Republican administrations know they have no obligation to uphold the law while in office, ever. Why should they?

I don't care about Scooter, I don't care if everyone thinks he was a fall guy, he was. And I don't care if he gets pardoned.

I have to say that I think the conservatives are winning the spin war on this.

They may be winning the spin war on Scooter but they are losing it on Cheney - that's what's important. Scooter may have been a high ranking officer but the ultimate source of the evil is the General, Cheney. When Libby told his lies he thought Ashcroft would be handling the case. Would he have lied if he knew there would be a special prosecutor? Libby knew however he was taking a chance which would indicate he was attempting to cover up something really big, probably involving Cheney himself. That's what we should be concerned with not Libby. There are plenty of reasons for outrage but Scooter is way down the list.

Update
More Above

It still has little to do with Scooter

Howard Fineman agrees:
Libby verdict really about Iraq War and Cheney
Question now arises: What - and whom - was Libby lying to protect?

WASHINGTON — The ramifications of the stunning, vehement verdict in the Scooter Libby trial - that he lied, repeatedly, big time - aren't really about Scooter Libby at all. They are about how and why we went to war in Iraq, and about how Vice President Dick Cheney got us there. Loyalty is everything to President George W. Bush, and I don’t expect him to march into Cheney’s office to demand a resignation. But the veep is a liability as never before, and even Bush has to know that.

For those on the right who say it's unfair and really doesn't matter, it does - in fact it's "stunning".

Expect the Democrats and their anti-war allies to do something that they have not quite had the specific legal justification to do until now: use the “L word”. They will conflate two things – lying about evidence for war and lying to Patrick Fitzgerald – but no matter. They will use the Libby verdict to pump up the volume.

But the biggest burden will fall on Cheney himself. His own Hobbesian view of the world – that life is nasty, brutish and short – is becoming all too personal. He had to be relieved that Prosecutor Fitzgerald described his investigation as “inactive.” That would seem to mean that Cheney is in no legal jeopardy.

But if we have the “L word” can the I word be far behind?

It has little to do with Scooter

The Scooter Libby verdict has little to do with Scooter and everything to do with Dick Cheney. Andrew Sullivan gets it right:

Something is rotten in the heart of Washington; and it lies in the vice-president's office. The salience of this case is obvious. What it is really about - what it has always been about - is whether this administration deliberately misled the American people about WMD intelligence before the war. The risks Cheney took to attack Wilson, the insane over-reaction that otherwise very smart men in this administration engaged in to rebut a relatively trivial issue: all this strongly implies the fact they were terrified that the full details of their pre-war WMD knowledge would come out. Fitzgerald could smell this. He was right to pursue it, and to prove that a brilliant, intelligent, sane man like Libby would risk jail to protect his bosses. What was he really trying to hide? We now need a Congressional investigation to find out more, to subpoena Cheney and, if he won't cooperate, consider impeaching him.

As I said earlier congress should not be wasting it's time with George W. Bush. Dick Cheney is the source of all evil. He should be questioned under oath and then impeached when he is caught in lies.

Dick Cheney and the Dirty Dozen

As I have repeated here often, we are wasting our time going after George W. Bush because it's all about Cheney. The shrill libertarian, Paul Craig Roberts, explains that the Americans Have Lost Their Country to the first neocon administration, to Dick Cheney and the rest of the "dirty dozen.

The Bush-Cheney regime is America’s first neoconservative regime. In a few short years, the regime has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, the Geneva Conventions, and the remains of America’s moral reputation along with the infrastructures of two Muslim countries and countless thousands of Islamic civilians. Plans have been prepared, and forces moved into place, for an attack on a third Islamic country, Iran, and perhaps Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well.

This extraordinary aggressiveness toward the US Constitution, international law, and the Islamic world is the work, not of a vast movement, but of a handful of ideologues – principally Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales. These are the main operatives who have controlled policy. They have been supported by their media shills at the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page and by "scholars" in assorted think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute.

Roberts asks this question; "Why is the US spending one trillion dollars on wars, the reasons for which are patently false. What is going on?" Here is his answer.

There are several parts to the answer. Like their forebears among the Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the communist revolution, and the National Socialists of Hitler’s revolution, neoconservatives believe that they have a monopoly on virtue and the right to impose hegemony on the rest of the world. Neoconservative conquests began in the Middle East because oil and Israel, with which neocons are closely allied, are both in the Middle East. The American oil giant, UNOCAL, had plans for an oil and gas pipeline through Afghanistan, but the Taliban were not sufficiently cooperative. The US invasion of Afghanistan was used to install Hamid Karzai, who had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as puppet prime minister. US neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad, who also had been on UNOCAL’s payroll, was installed as US ambassador to Afghanistan.

Two years later Khalilzad was appointed US ambassador to Iraq. American oil companies have been given control over the exploitation of Iraq’s oil resources.

Yes it's all about oil and gas but there is also the Israeli connection.

The Israeli relationship is perhaps even more important. In 1996 Richard Perle and the usual collection of neocons proposed that all of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East be overthrown. "Israel’s enemies" consist of the Muslim countries not in the hands of US puppets or allies. For decades Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians such that today there is not enough of Palestine left to comprise an independent country. The US and Israeli governments blame Iran, Iraq, and Syria for aiding and abetting Palestinian resistance to Israel’s theft of Palestine.

The Bush-Cheney regime came to power with the plans drawn to attack the remaining independent countries in the Middle East and with neoconservatives in office to implement the plans. However, an excuse was required. Neoconservatives had called for "a new Pearl Harbor," and 9/11 provided the propaganda event needed in order to stampede the public and Congress into war. Neoconservative Philip Zelikow was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission Report to make certain no uncomfortable facts emerged.

Yes Dick Cheney is the leader of the dirty dozen and the source of all evil. He has always been a little insane and has always held Democracy and the American people in the utmost contempt. But it's getting worse. Joe Conason writes about Last Throes of Cheney’s Credibility. Glenn Greenwald details how Cheney has become even more combative and more secretive since the November elections.

Since the smashing repudiation his party suffered at the hands of the American voter in the 2006 midterm elections, Dick Cheney's behavior has become palpably more secretive, combative, and scornful. The embittered interview he gave to Wolf Blitzer was the most vivid, but far from the only, instance. He seems to harbor such scorn for the democratic process that he literally no longer cares whether the answers he gives to reporters' questions even make any sense.

The interview Cheney gave to pool reporters on his plane yesterday as it returned home from Afghanistan is striking in several respects. Initially, as Dan Froomkin notes, Cheney demanded that journalists not identify him by name when reporting on the interview (but instead refer to him only as a "senior administration official"), even though Cheney himself makes unmistakably clear in the transcript that it is him.

In fact, the very first words out of his mouth were: "The reason the President wanted me to come, obviously, is because of the continuing threat that exists in this part of the world." He discussed at length the comments he made recently about Nancy Pelosi wanting to "validate Al Qaeda's strategy. So even though there was not a single security reason for the anonymity, Cheney insisted upon it anyway. The official White House transcript (linked above) refers to him only as a "senior administration official," and reporters were required to identify him only as such.

Now dynamite is always explosive but when you see small drops of nitroglycerin on it you know it's unstable and even more dangerous. Now we have known for some time that Cheney is dangerously insane but does his recent behavior indicate increased instability as well. Is a dangerous man becoming even more dangerous.

Iran tries to kill Cheney in Afghanistan

OK, I'm just trying to get ahead of the spin, we all know it was Saddam's second cousin.
Cheney unhurt after deadly blast at Afghan base

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - A suicide bomber attacked the entrance to the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, killing up to 23 people and wounding 20. The Taliban claimed responsibility and said Cheney was the target.

Cheney’s spokeswoman said he was fine, and the vice president later met with President Hamid Karzai in the capital, Kabul, before leaving the country.

[....]

“At 10 a.m. I heard a loud boom,” Cheney said.

A red alert was sounded and Secret Service officials told Cheney there had been a suspected suicide attack. “They moved me for a relatively brief period of time to one of the bomb shelters nearby,” he said.

“As the situation settled down and they got a better sense in terms of what was going on, then I went back to my room until it was time to leave.”

It doesn't really matter if Cheney was the target or how far away he was from the blast. It just goes to show how the chaos in Afghanistan is increasing and that the US is helpless to stop it.

Update


Steve Soto has an excellent post and analysis on all of this and asks, how did the Taliban know the super secret Cheney was there? Pakistan perhaps?

This is really Romper Room. The Taliban are supported by Pakistan’s ISI, where Cheney visited the day before. Why is no one asking how the Taliban knew where Cheney was? Sure, the Taliban would not be here to attack him if Cheney and Rumsfeld had finished Bin Laden off five years ago at Tora Bora. Nor would the Taliban be in this position had Bush and Cheney not encouraged Musharraf to give Bin Laden and the Taliban a free pass out of North Waziristan back in September. But the fact that this trip has turned into a joke of sophomoric secrecy and an attack against the Veep is a perfect illustration of the administration’s failed foreign policy and war on terror.

Cheney - incompetent or insane

The headline reads:
Bush to Warn Pakistan to Act on Terror



And apparently he's going to leave it to the totally mad Lord of Darkness, Dick Cheney, to do it.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 — Vice President Dick Cheney made an unannounced trip to Pakistan on Monday to deliver what officials in Washington described as an unusually tough message Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces become far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney’s trip was shrouded in secrecy, and he was on the ground for only a few hours, sharing a private lunch with the Pakistani leader at his palace. Notably, Mr. Cheney traveled with the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Steve Kappes, an indication that the conversation with the Pakistani president likely included discussion of American intelligence agency contentions that Al Qaeda camps have been reconstituted along the border of Afghanistan.

The decision to send Mr. Cheney secretly to Pakistan came after the White House concluded that General Musharraf is failing to live up to commitments he made to Mr. Bush during a visit here in September. General Musharraf insisted then, both in private and public, that a peace deal he struck with tribal leaders in one of the country’s most lawless border areas would not diminish the hunt for the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

This from Josh Marshall

Okay, it seems we need more updates on why Dick Cheney is too dangerously incompetent to have in any position of authority, let alone the vice presidency. You'll see for instance that this morning Cheney showed up in Islamabad warning President Musharraf that al Qaeda is "regrouping" along the Pakistani border. Musharraf must be a little confused since, didn't we sign off on the armistice his government signed with the jihadists and their protectors just a few months ago?

More to the point, last week Cheney claimed that Nancy Pelosi's position on Iraq would validate al Qaeda since al Qaeda's goal in Iraq is to show that our will can be broken. Reed Hundt chimed in and pointed out that it's far more likely that al Qaeda's goal is to bait us into ridiculous and unwinnable wars that will sap our military strength and financial power.

Sorry Josh, you've got it wrong, it's even worse. Dick Cheney is not too incompetent to be VP, he's to insane - mad - bonkers. Musharraf and the rest of the world knows it. Now Condi Rice is incompetent but Dick Cheney is bat shit crazy, a real life Dr Strangelove.

A Dick Cheney Weekend

The Lord of Darkness was the subject of much speculation this weekend. And no, I'm not referring to is airplane problems. Cheney's latest delusional inflammatory rantings have been covered already so I'll pass on that as well. Seymour Hersh thinks that the super secret activities of Dick Cheney's super secret shadow government may be too much for Iran-Contra felon John Negroponte. Jeralyn at TalkLeft discusses the possibility that Fitzgerald with go after Cheney if he gets a Libby conviction.

This brings us to some speculation from paradox at The Left Coaster. Now everyone who checks in from time to time know that I consider Cheney to be the source of most if not all evil and on top of that he is insane - bat shit crazy. Now if Cheney wasn't actually running the show he would have been gone years ago. We also know there are people within the administration who are fighting Cheney's influence and speculation they may be more powerful than in the past. With all that in mind paradox wonders if Cheney is going to be forced to resign in the next few months.

If justice, reason and truth ever meant anything in this world of course Cheney should have resigned years ago, and of course our whoring media class has completely shielded yet another Bush administration felon, and of course Darth Cheney is seen as the untouchable evil glue that holds the heinous forces of Bush reactionaries together.

Yes, but stranger things have happened. Another extremely interesting notch to add to the detrimental cascade above is Cheney’s unique and extremely debilitating status as a non-successor vice president; it ensures a very nasty primary fight for his party before they even have to think of taking on the Democratic nominee. Bush could toss him to legitimately solve the successor issue.

Humans also, regrettably, love to find scapegoats. If Libby is guilty, Cheney is about to be indicted and bring down the whole party, why, one could easily see Cheney being forced to take the fall and resign in disgrace.

Be prepared for the unexpected on the Republican side in the next ten months. The forces being applied to the party are terrific, and already John McCain is babbling incoherently. Right now the only thing the GOP can do for 2008 is serve good food on the campaign plane, that’s it, and for a party with so much resources and expectations facing so much failure something is going to give.

It can't happen too soon.

Get that padded bunker ready

The last few days I have suggested that Dick Cheney is "bat shit crazy" and a megalomaniac. On his recent tour of Australia Dick Cheney confirmed those observations and more. From The Carpetbagger Report:

He “stands by” what he said in 1991? Maybe Cheney is confused about what the phrase “stands by” means, but it suggests he still agrees with the remarks he made when he insisted that invading and occupying Iraq would be a “classic definition of a quagmire.” In the next breath, however, there’s 9/11.

It seems, in all sincerity, that Cheney was arguing that the 9/11 attacks justify the quagmire he predicted 16 years ago. Why? Just because.

If Cheney had said he was wrong in 1991, there would at least be something resembling coherence here. He thought Iraq would be a mess if we invaded, but we invaded, and lo and behold, everything is going great.

But that’s not what he said. Cheney argued that he was right before and right now, despite the fact that the two Cheney's appear to contradict each other.

I’m starting to think the Vice President isn’t well.

And Cernig points out that he contradicted everyone else in the administration.

Unheedful of his own administrations insistence that the US wants a peaceful resolution to its dispute with Iran over that nation's nuclear power program, Cheney insists that "all options are on the table" and, incidentally, comes out at odds with Bush's wish for the White House to appear neutral in the Republican presidential nominee race by endorsing John McCain and his view of foreign policy as war forevaaaah! (Maybe Cheney is why senior UK defense officials worry the rhetoric of a peaceful solution is just a cover for the coming attack.)

Unmindful of Bush's push of the recent North Korean nuke deal as a glorious victory for his administration, Cheney insists that he doesn't trust the North Koreans to keep their end of the deal. If the administration really thought that, then the whole deal would be a sham, a fake, a subterfuge to look like they were doing somehting, right? Way to undermine your (at least theoretical) boss, Dick!

Oh, and at the same time, Cheney picks on a recent Chinese anti-satellite test as a sure sign of Chinese belligerence.

Uncaring that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently described that very test thusly: "I would not directly tie that to a threat - it's a capability."

Even within the administration there must be people who realize Dick Cheney is dangerously demented and a threat. It's time to pad the walls of the secret bunker and lock the door. And as I suggested below we shouldn't be wasting our time going after George W. Bush. We shouldn't be concentrating on the puppet but on the puppeteer - the modern day Rasputin - the administration's own bull goose loony - Dick Cheney himself.