dick cheney

Former Vice President Dick Cheney will have to give his account -- under oath, in a legal deposition -- of what happened at a Colorado ski resort in June 2006 when a man stepped up to protest the Iraq war and was arrested, a federal district judge ruled Monday.

The protester, Steven Howards, sued five Secret Service agents in Mr. Cheney's security detail after the encounter at the Beaver Creek resort. Mr. Howards's lawyers have argued that Mr. Cheney's version of events is crucial to getting at the truth.

Mr. Cheney's lawyers had responded -- successfully until Monday's ruling by Judge Christine M. Arguello in Denver -- that a deposition was unnecessary. A federal magistrate agreed with Mr. Cheney last April; Judge Arguello's ruling reversed that decision.

Mr. Howards has admitted to approaching Mr. Cheney and saying the administration's policies in Iraq were disgusting, or words to that effect. He walked away unhindered by Secret Service agents, but he was arrested by them about 10 minutes later for what they said was the "assault" on the vice president.

Mr. Howards was detained by the Secret Service and local law enforcement officials, then released. Misdemeanor harassment charges were filed, then dropped by the local district attorney. Several of the agents, in their depositions, have accused one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in handling the matter.

It's a sad day when you can't tell the vice president to his face what you really think of his administration.

IN 1993, Rush Limbaugh was invited to address CPAC, but had to take a pass. "I wasn't able to broom my schedule and get down there," he told the audience of his short-lived television show on February 22nd, 1993. Mr Limbaugh did, however, send a reporter to ask attendees a question.

Rush Limbaugh has challenged the Democratic National Committee a million dollars that [President Bill] Clinton's economic plan will not work if it's implemented. Do you think that's a good bet?

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Mr Clinton presided over eight years of economic growth.

Funny thing, my entire family (mom's side, but my dad was joining them) were all talking this weekend about how bad Obama is handling the economy and how he was going to screw everything up. Oddly, no one could tell me how things got this bad.

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, "if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?" "I think as a general proposition, I'd say yes," replied Cheney.

Cheney went on to defend the administration's actions over the past eight years:

CHENEY: There are bound to be debates and arguments from time to time and wrestling back and forth about what kinds of authority is appropriate in any specific circumstances, but I think that what we've done has been totally consistent with what the Constitution provides for.

We no longer have a civilian-led government. It is hard for a lifelong Republican and son of a retired Air Force colonel to say this, but the most unnerving legacy of the Bush administration is the encroachment of the Department of Defense into a striking number of aspects of civilian government. Our Constitution is at risk.

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But these initial military takeovers of civilian functions all took place a long distance from home. "We are in a war, after all," Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, told me by way of explaining the military's huge role in that country -- just before the Pentagon seemingly had him removed in 2007 because of his admirable efforts to balance military and civilian needs. (I heard angry accounts of the Pentagon's role in Neumann's "retirement" at the time from knowledgeable diplomats, one of them very senior.) But our military forces, in a bureaucratic sense, soon marched on Washington itself.

As military officers sought to take over the role played by civilian development experts abroad, Pentagon bureaucrats quietly populated the National Security Council and the State Department with their own personnel (some civilians, some consultants, some retired officers, some officers on "detail" from the Pentagon) to ensure that the Defense Department could keep an eye on its rival agencies. Vice President Cheney, himself a former secretary of defense, and his good friend Rumsfeld ensured the success of this seeding effort by some fairly forceful means. At least twice, I saw Cheney staffers show up unannounced at State Department meetings, and I heard other State Department officials grumble about this habit. The Rumsfeld officials could play hardball, sometimes even leaking to the press the results of classified meetings that did not go their way in order to get the decisions reversed. After I got wind of the Pentagon's dislike for the approved interagency anti-drug strategy for Afghanistan, details of the plan quickly wound up in the hands of foreign countries sympathetic to the Pentagon view. I've heard other, similarly troubling stories about leaks of classified information to the press.

Dick Cheney's lawyers are asserting that the vice president alone has the authority to determine which records, if any, from his tenure will be handed over to the National Archives when he leaves office in January.

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"The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law," according to a court filing by Cheney's office with the U.S. District Court on Dec. 8.

Cheney is being sued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group that is trying to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.

Another case of this moron thinking that those in government should operate unchecked.

The outgoing US vice-president, Dick Cheney, last night gave an unapologetic assessment of his eight years in office, defending the invasion of Iraq, the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, secret wiretapping and the extreme interrogation method known as waterboarding.

In his first television interview since the presidential election in November, Cheney displayed no regrets and gave no ground to his many critics within America and around the world. He summed up his record by saying: "I think, given the circumstances we've had to deal with, we've done pretty well."

He told ABC News he stood by the most controversial policies of the Bush administration, and urged president-elect Barack Obama to think hard before undoing them. Asked about the use of torture on terror suspects, he replied: "We don't do torture. We never have. It's not something this administration subscribes to."

Later in the same interview, Cheney was asked whether the use of waterboarding in the interrogation of the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, had been appropriate. He replied: "I do."

Jack Goldsmith is a friend from law school. We clerked together at the Supreme Court. We have remained friends since. When he went to the Justice Department to head the Office of Legal Counsel (read: the coolest possible job in the world of public lawyers), many of us were anxious. The kind of legal storm that was/is the Bush Administration is not a place one wishes on friends.

The Terror Presidency is the story of Jack's time at OLC. It is a book that makes me very proud -- of the ideals of my profession, and of my friend. You've no doubt heard the sexy bits -- orchestrating the reversal of OLC on the torture memos, the scene at the hospital with Ashcroft, etc. Those alone make the book worth the read. Indeed, the new attorney general said he "couldn't put it down."

On December 30th Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) announced the fifth death in custody of a Guantanamo captive.

The JTF-GTMO asserted that 68 year-old Abdul Razzak was a confirmed jihadist and military leader.

It is interesting to compare the JTF-GTMO claims with his testimony.

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Is it possible that Razzak was lying? Sure. It is possible. But what is clear is that even though Razzak was in US custody for six years -- no member of the US counter-terrorism establishment bothered to take the trouble to contact Ismail Khan, to see if Razzak had been telling the truth.

Many other captives were told that the USA couldn't find the witnesses they requested, even though those witnesses were members of Karzai's cabinet, or they were senior members of Karzai's administration.

Unfortunately, the American counter-terror establishment did not take any steps to check out the alibis of any of its captives.

Another aspect of Razzak's case is that his death casts doubt on the meme that the Guantanamo captives are getting excellent health care. Razzak died of colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer is a very slow-growing kind of cancer, that takes decades to get to the fatal stage. It is also very easily detected, decades before it becomes dangerous, when one is receiving competent, modern medical care. After fifty everyone should get a butt periscope. A tube with a camera, and tiny pincers, is inserted up the butt. A doctor monitors the camera, and if he or she sees a pre-cancerous polyp, the pincers are used to snip it off.

If Razzak had been getting the excellent health care the Bush Presidency claims, his cancer would have been detected back in 2002.

George Bush and Dick Cheney were always talking about how great it was there. Cheney even said "they've got everything they could possibly want."

Interesting comment:

This is not to justify the lack of medical care in Gitmo, but there may be more factors. Do the US Army MDs know their stuff? Will the patients accept screening (due to religious beliefs of personal fears)? Can they even do colonoscopy in Gitmo? I wonder if there are any gastroenterologists there. If not, the detainee would have to be transported to another location (in the US) and then could make a claim for habeus or other legal motions.