Dick Cheney

At the start of the Bush-Cheney Administration, former Vice President Dan Quayle visited Dick Chaney and tried to explain what it was like being Veep. He said: “Dick, you know, you're going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you're going to be doing all this political fundraising . . . you'll be going to the funerals. " Cheney "got that little smile," Quayle said, and replied: "I have a different understanding with the President."

The power wielded by Dick Cheney, and his malevolent influence on the policies of the Bush White House, can be traced to the insecurities and incompetence of George W. Bush. Although the Constitution decrees no particular authority for the Vice President, Bush ceded wide power to Cheney at the outset, and Cheney has expanded on that power ever since.

Cheney is one of the chief government officials responsible for the Iraqi War. He manipulated the intelligence process to invent a threat by Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Cheney’s chief of staff, I Lewis Libby, repeatedly pressured CIA analysts to report that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda.

Among a host of false pre-war statements, Cheney claimed that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attack, stating that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials. Cheney also claimed that Saddam was “in fact reconstituting his nuclear program” and that if the U.S. invaded Iraq, American troops would be “greeted as liberators.”

When Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson contradicted the President’s assertion that Saddam Hussein has purchased nuclear materials in Africa, Cheney, in order to discredit Wilson, coordinated the revelation in the press that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover C.I.A. agent. Cheney then allowed his lieutenant, Libby, to take the blame for the disclosure.

Cheney overruled advice from White House political staffers and lawyers, and withheld crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

After 9/11 Cheney influenced the President to begin illegal interceptions of communications to and from the United States. Such interceptions without warrants had been forbidden by federal law since 1978. Cheney insisted that they were justified under his greatly expanded theory of the President’s war powers.

Cheney was behind the creation of military commissions to try captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters without the benefits of due process. The commissions were later struck-down by the Supreme Court. It is estimated that as many as one-third of the detainees at Guantanamo prison had no affiliation with al Qaeda or the Taliban and were innocent of any actions against the United States. These innocent captives would have had no chance of vindication under the Cheney commissions.

Cheney was directly responsible for the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Graib. Convinced that the “war on terror” required “robust interrogations” of captured suspects, Cheney pressed the Bush Administration to carve-out exceptions to the Geneva Conventions. It was Cheney who chaired the meetings in the White House where various methods of “enhanced interrogation,” including water-boarding, were approved.

Cheney made himself the dominant voice on taxes and spending. He is one of the main architects of the Bush tax cuts. Although some in the Administration wanted the tax cuts to benefit the general public, Cheney was successful in having the cuts benefit primarily the wealthiest Americans.

Cheney saw it as his role to reverse years of environmental protection and rules which hamper industry. He has constantly stepped-in to prevent enforcement of laws which protect the environment and endangered species. As a result of his rough tactics, the first Administrator of the EPA under Bush, Christine Todd Whitman, resigned.

Chaney has always been opposed to governmental action to prevent global warming, and even now is one of the few remaining people who oppose governmental action to lower the emission of greenhouse gases.

American democracy is a messy business, with three branches of government checking and balancing one another, and a constitution which guarantees our citizens a host of rights. There are some Americans who oppose all of the best symbols of our advancing civilization, such as constitutional rights, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, International Law, and the World Court. They believe that such things make a people soft. Such a person is Dick Cheney. Such thinking is barbarism.