This Week You Need To Know
Cheney and His Policies Now Under Bipartisan Attack
by Edward Spannaus
Vice President Dick Cheney has made himself such an inviting target, that he is now under attack from both Democrats and Republicans. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) delivered an extremely thoughtful speech on Jan. 14, which avoided the usual Democratic "blame-it-all-on-Bush" rhetoric in favor of a precise analysis of who in the Administration actually led Bush down the path to war against Iraq. Kennedy described what he called "an extraordinary policy coup," carried out by "Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, the axis of war" (see Documentation).
Kennedy traced the war party's origins back to the office Cheney held in the first Bush Administration, when he was Secretary of Defense and Paul Wolfowitz was one of his top advisors. Kennedy quoted from the 1997 book by George H.W. Bush and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, in which they explained why they resisted pressures to eliminate Saddam in the first Gulf War: "We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed.... The United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land." Kennedy also referenced two other major developments which are feeding the clamor against Cheney: the publication of the new book based on the experiences of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in the Bush-Cheney Administration, and the devastating report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction issued on Jan. 8 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Kennedy noted that he knows Paul O'Neill from having worked with him on issues of job safety and health care, when O'Neill headed Alcoa in the 1990s. Describing O'Neill as "a person of great integrity, and intelligence and vision," Kennedy said, "it's easy to understand why he was so concerned about what he heard about Iraq in the Bush Administration"namely, that overthrowing Saddam Hussein had been on the agenda from the very beginning.
It is also clear that O'Neill viewed Cheney as the real power and the key policymaker in the Administration; he describes the President as shallow and superficial, disengaged and uninterested in the complexities of policy. In the book, The Price of Loyalty, O'Neill is cited portraying Cheney as driving the Administration's key domestic and foreign policiesalways putting his political priorities above the national interest. Author Ron Suskind describes how O'Neill implored his old friend Cheney to open up a more rigorous debate and policymaking process in the White Houseand finally realized that it is Cheney himself who is the problem.
As a columnist in the International Herald Tribune put it: "These scenes are reminiscent of a spy thriller in which the protagonist warns the head of counterintelligence that there is an enemy mole in their midst, only to discover that his confidant is actually the mole."
O'Neill is not an off-the-reservation renegade, as White House flacks are trying to portray him. Knowledgeable sources have advised EIR that O'Neill is speaking for many mainstream Republicans who are horrified at the drift of Administration policy and the role of Dick Cheney. Top White House advisor Karl Rove and other insiders are aware that polls show that many Republicans would be happy to see Cheney dumped from the ticket this yearbut they still believe, mistakenly, that to let Cheney go would constitute an admission that the President had been misled, which they are not yet ready to make.
Carnegie Also Hits Cheney
Cheney was prominently featured in the presentation of the new Carnegie report entitled "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications." The report has received extensive domestic and worldwide coverage. Throughout it, there are many quotations from statements by Cheney expressing certainty that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons; claiming that Saddam was linked to terrorists; and falsely asserting that he had provided training to al-Qaeda.
The Carnegie report zeroes in especially on the shift in official intelligence assessments which took place during 2002, and culminated in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). The report says that this shift suggests "that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002." It then notes, "In this case, the pressure appears to have been unusually intense," and it then gives as the example of this pressure, "the Vice President's repeated visits to CIA headquarters."
In presenting the report to a Washington press conference, the project director for the report, Joseph Cirincione, focussed almost exclusively on Cheney when demonstrating how the Bush Administration had misrepresented the findings in the October 2002 NIE on Iraq. Cirincione quoted statements by Cheney in August of 2002 ("We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon."), to illustrate how the Administration mischaracterized the certainty and the immediacy of the threat.
Cirincione then quoted Cheney in September 2002 ("We know with absolute certainty that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon."), and cited Cheney's attacks on the International Atomic Energy Agency in March 2002after the IAEA had reported that its inspectors had found no indication of resumed nuclear activity in Iraq, and that the documents purporting to show Iraqi attempts to import uranium, were forgeries. "They [the IAEA] have consistently underestimated or missed what Saddam Hussein was doing," Cheney asserted. "I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time."
Army War College Study
Adding fuel to the fire, the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College has released a report which is highly critical of both the Iraq War and the Administration's global war on terrorism (the "GWOT"). Called "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism," and written by Dr. Jeffrey Record, a professor at the Air Force's Air War College, the report says the global war on terrorism has been "dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious" and "strategically unfocussed"; while the Iraq War was "unnecessary and unrealistic." The result is that the Army is "near the breaking point."
The Record study is a scathing attack on the Bush Administration for bungling the war on terrorism, with grave potential strategic consequences: "The administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global, regional and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy, and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."
Record also zeroes in on one of Dick Cheney's obsessions, the claims that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda: "Of particular concern has been the conflation of al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al-Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT, but rather a detour from it."
Military Lawyers Dissent
A further indication of dissatisfaction within the military over the Administration's policies steered by Cheney, is the extraordinary legal brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 14, by uniformed military lawyers who have been assigned by the Pentagon to defend Guantanamo prisoners before military tribunals. In their amicus curiae brief, filed in the case of a number of Middle Eastern men being detained at the Guantanamo military prison, the lawyers charge that the system of military tribunals (or commissions) created by the Defense Department after Sept. 11, 2001, has created "a legal black hole" and a "monarchical regime."
The military lawyers are not challenging the President's right, as Commander-in-Chief, to wage war and to take enemy combatants into custody. But they strongly challenge the President's right to try and punish such prisoners, and they call this a usurpation of the power of the judiciary. "If there is no right to civilian review, the government is free to conduct sham trials and condemn to death those who do nothing more than pray to Allah," the brief states.
Sources have told EIR that the military tribunal scheme, in its original form, did not come out of the uniformed military, but was dreamed up by civilian lawyers in the Pentagon, and by the Counsel to the Vice President, David Addington, himself another veteran of the Office of Secretary of Defense during Cheney's tenure in the early 1990s.
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