The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

Early in the salad days of the B-C (Bush-Cheney) administration, Cheney needed justification to invade Iraq. WMD in Baghdad would be reason A, and a conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein would be reason B. Proof of WMD, alas, was not to be. It turned out that the aluminum tubes were not for centrifuges and the bill of lading for yellow-cake uranium from Niger was a crude forgery. To prove conspiracy between Iraq Al Qaeda he planned to get confessions from detainees. He had CIA interrogators and trusted contractors torture the prisoners creatively. It was only by fear of pain, drowning, or death that anyone would say that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots. Everyone, even Cheney, knew that Saddam was secular and Osama was a fundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim. Nor was there any love to lose between them personally. But, fear got the confessions. The trouble was the detainees started confessing to everything, even mythological
events. It was akin to the librarians’ reaction to the Patriot Act when they forgot to keep records of which clients used their computers.

Cheney was smart enough to know war for oil would never fly outside of Texas. So, he also offered fear to the American public. We heard “terrorism” repeated umpteen times in every speech by Cheney’s deputies: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, David Addington, Condoleeza Rice, and the rest of the B-C loyalists. Cheney, himself, stayed in a secure, undisclosed location.

All the documents that told of torture, and how it was ordered from on high, were marked classified and kept in the black hole called the Office of the Vice President (OVP). Even President Bush’s own staff had no access there. Everything except the word “terrorism” was secret.

Now that Cheney is out of office, he refuses to retire gracefully. He started giving interviews whenever anyone came near him with a microphone. After ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked the wrong questions, he pretty much stuck with Fox News and their powder puff questions. Still, his malevolent smile has been on the tube every week. What is Mr. Secrecy up to? What kind of grandfather prefers to hang around Washington, DC instead of spending time with his grandchildren?

Maybe he is trying to make sure that history records that he and George Bush kept the country safe for eight years. Maybe, too, he is presenting a preemptive brief to head off any prosecution for authorizing torture. After all, how could anyone prosecute him when he protected the nation after [though not before] 9-11-01. Or maybe he is angling for an appointment as a White House senior counselor. Barack Obama does that sort of thing with potential troublemakers. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State has to carry out White House policies and not criticize them. Poor Dick Cheney must find it hard to be away from the levers of power.

Another maybe — Cheney ia a complex individual even if he is a one-note fear monger — is that he wants to keep the public debate focussed on torture. That way he can distract the 9-11 Truth movement which has accumulated an enormous amount of research, many interviews, and a detailed review of the Law of Gravity and Newtonian Laws of Motion. Concentrating on torture and the Guantanamo prison would keep Americans busy discussing Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles, and centuries of Anglo American law: the Magna Carta of 1215, the Lieber Code of 1863, the War Crimes Act of 1996, and John Yoo’s legal memos and definition of torture.

Anyone who questioned why WTC Building 7 collapsed in 6.5 free-fall seconds in a cloud of dust after not being struck by a plane could be brushed off as a conspiracy theorist. Anyone who heard the Ground Zero firemen tell of explosions just before the Twin Towers collapsed was also called a conspiracy theorist. Anyone who questioned how a Boeing 757 could get through a small hole in the wall of the Pentagon, between 20 and 40 feet wide, was a conspiracy theorist, too. It didn’t matter that the specs of the 757 documented: the 124’10” wing span, the fuel tanks 90’ feet apart in the wings, and the 20 ton engines that were mounted 50’ apart below the wings. It was conspiracy theory for the 100 other unlikelihoods and impossibilities if we believe the official story of widespread inattention, incompetence, and pure chance that allowed the events of 9-11 to take place. Conspiracy theory, however, is not mythology. In fact, it is pretty common. Many of the RICO cases brought by the Justice Department against organized crime have charged conspiracy.

Can Dick Cheney be trying to divert attention from his role in the 9-11 attacks by talking about Arab terrorists whom we have to torture to elicit information. You will recall that on 9-11 morning George Bush was in a Florida elementary school reading a story with the children when his chief of staff whispered to him that the second Tower had been hit. But don’t say anything, just finish the reading lesson. While George was following instructions (from whom?), Dick Cheney was in the Operations Room deep in the sub-basement of the White House where he had control of all the communications equipment so he could be in touch with Air Force One, the Pentagon, the FAA, NORAD, the NSA, and Lynne Cheney. Whom did he call that fateful day and what instructions did he give? It wasn’t the pizza parlor to order lunch.