• Promoting torture
• Funding Al-Qaeda
Did all of these aspects of Mr. Cheney's background converge in the Iraq debacle? Well, a top official at the State Department stated there was a secret "cabal" involving Cheney, and that Cheney and a handful of others had hijacked the country's foreign policy.
This last question is not merely academic: vice President Cheney was apparently in charge of ALL 5 of the war games which occurred on 9/11 and coordinated the government's "response" to the attacks. See this CNN article; and this essay.
And Cheney is the one who monitored flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon and -- when a military man asked "do the orders still stand?" -- Cheney responded affirmatively:
"The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"Watch the video for yourself (and see this essay).
Mr. Cheney's motive concerning 9/11 was strong. As a well-known writer said:
"For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him . . ."
Postscript: For the sake of brevity, I have left out numerous additional acts committed by Mr. Cheney. For example, you may have heard that the Energy Task Force chaired by Cheney prior to 9/11 collected maps of Iraqi oil fields and potential suitors for that oil. But did you know that a secret document written by the National Security Council on February 3, 2001 directed the N.S.C. staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the “melding” of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states,” such as Iraq, and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields”? In other words, it is difficult to brush off Cheney's Energy Task Force's examination of Iraqi oil maps as a harmless comparison of American energy policy with known oil reserves because the N.S.C. explicitly linked the Task Force, oil, and regime change. Indeed, a former senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the N.S.C. said “if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans” (see also this essay).
And Cheney was largely responsible for generating fake intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the war.
And Cheney was probably responsible for outing CIA agent Valerie Plame.
And, according to former British Defense Secretary, Cheney has called the shots in the failed Iraq war.
Of course, Cheney has not acted alone in his actions. But he's been an important player in many different arenas and is, perhaps, the most widely-known figure who has had a hand in all of the above-described events. Cheney might not be the ultimate Mr. Big in these crimes, but he appears to have gotten his hands dirtier -- and to be closer to the true seat of power -- even than Mr. Bush.
In addition, while Cheney was not solely responsible for the above-listed actions, he hired many of the people who caused the mischief, such as the chief architect of the Iraq war - Paul Wolfowitz.
See also this round-up of Cheney's actions.
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