CapitalistImperialistPig

From Huffpost : A recently-unearthed video from 1992 shows Vice President Dick Cheney predicting the mess that occupying Iraq would create: If you get into the business of committing U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq, to occupy the place, my guess is I'd probably still have people there today instead of having been able to bring them home...The bottom line question for me was: How many additional American lives is Saddam Hussein worth? The answer: not very damn many. So how did he get so stupid in the meantime? -- Crazy Frank

I don't recommend reading the Washington Post's Angler series on Vice President Cheney before bedtime. It certainly gave me nightmares. I can't think of another high American official who has pursued policies so deeply subversive of the Constitution and the law. Because Cheney combined enormous influence with nearly total unaccountability, he has dominated every aspect of Bush administration policy. Because he combines great secrecy with abominable judgement, those policies have catastrophically failed. Bush bears a huge burden of guilt for outsourcing so much of his Presidency to this man. Fortunately for him, he is too dumb to know it. For an alternative point of view, you might want to check out Tucker Carlson and Jonah Goldberg working themselves into a homoerotic lather over the VP's manly manliness. (Via Glenn Greenwald )

There is, of course, no shortage of moments of high idiocy in the Bush administration's conduct of the war, but Paul Bremer is probably more responsible than anyone else for the explosive growth of the insurgency. He had hardly hit the ground when he took three disastrous actions: Firing anyone (Dr, lawyer, indian chief) who was a "senior" Bathist, abolishing the Iraqi Army, and abolishing the Iraqi police force. In one stroke he put most of the most educated people, the best armed and militarily trained people, and the people who understood how the country worked into unemployment. They all instantly were provided with motive, means, and allies for an insurgency. There is a mystery here, however. Were these actions Bremer's ideas? According to Thomas E Ricks in Fiasco , when his outraged subordinates protested, he said: "I have my orders." Rumsfeld, Feith, and perhaps even Wolfowitz were reputed to be out of the loop. We know who wanted these actions...

Via Josh Marshall , Laura Rozen connects two important dots in the Cunningham -US Attorneys - Gonzales - Rove mystery: From 1991 to 1993, a young lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve was working as a program manager in a Pentagon intelligence office. His name was Mitchell John Wade. His boss, the assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence, was Duane P. Andrews. Andrews's job at the Pentagon was essentially to serve as intelligence advisor to the secretary of defense. The secretary of defense at the time was someone that Andrews knew well and respected immensely: Dick Cheney... Among the many lingering unanswered questions on this aspect of the case is who, in May 2002 -- just two months in advance of Wade getting the White House contract -- facilitated MZM getting authorized to be a federal supplier in the first place. This was done through a small branch of the Department of the Interior called the Minerals Management Service. That se...

I. Lewis Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, and fully deserves any sentence he get. It's true that he's a fall guy for Rove and Cheney, but their guilt doesn't make him anymore innocent. Besides that, he was one of the chief architects and advocates of this disastrous war. Probably only Wolfowitz is more guilty. They are both major war criminals in my book.

Andrew Sullivan takes the occasion of the opening of the new movie Amazing Grace to note the link between slavery and torture: As Scott Horton explains more fully here, when Wilberforce and Wesley aimed to persuade the British elites that the slave trade was evil, they did not cite Biblical proscriptions against slavery. Why? Because the Bible is actually very ambiguous about slavery (the Southern Baptist Convention even used scripture to defend slavery in America). So Wilberforce stressed that the slave trade required unspeakable cruelty, abuse and torture of its victims. That was his rhetorical gambit. He framed his case against the slave trade as a case against inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. He points out that torture is an essential ingredient of slavery. Of course, Andy being Andy, he can't resist trying to make it an equivalence relation. That dodo, though, won't fly. Not that Cheney or Bush is likely to have any more respect for the Bible than they have for t...

Patrick Fitzgerald has turned over a big rock, and lots of ugly Bush/Cheney creatures are scurrying to get out of the light. In particular, the testimony of White House insiders has made it clear that Bush and company were deliberately lying to the country when they denied knowlege or responsibility for the leak campaign. Did they also lie to Fitzgerald? If so, that's obstruction of justice, even if they were not under oath. Peter Yost of the Associate Press lays out some incriminating details: David Addington, chief legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, says he was taken aback when the White House started making public pronouncements about the CIA leak investigation. In the fall of 2003, President Bush's press secretary was categorically denying that either Karl Rove or I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was involved in exposing the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee married to a critic of the war in Iraq. "Why are you making these statements?" Add...