| -Caveat Lector-
It's beginning to appear that Dick Cheney
has been the single most destructive figure in the Bush administration. So
much for Mr. Responsibility and Mr. Gravitas.
By the way, is Cheney Skull &
Bones? To the best of my knowledge, no. He, and not George W. Bush,
appears to be running the country. Bush lacks the mental capacity to run a
McDonald's franchise.
Is Cheney presently in his right
mind? His recent disturbing interview with Tim Russert on Meet
the Press suggests not. That interview sent shockwaves of disbelief
rippling through political elites around the world.
Inter Press
Service
POLITICS-U.S.:
Cheney as Extremist
Analysis - By Jim
Lobe
In
the 2000 elections he was the thoughtful, grey-haired Washington veteran who
reassured nervous voters that candidate George W. Bush would indeed have adult
supervision if he became president of the United States.
WASHINGTON,
Sep 29 (IPS) - Calm, if intensely purposeful and focused, always
substantive, and with virtually unmatched experience, Dick Cheney, who at age
34 had served as White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford and
later as defence secretary under Bush's father during the Gulf War, embodied
competence and gravitas.
In addition to his government service, he had
worked for several years as the CEO of one of the country's biggest and most
profitable corporations.
You could trust him to round out Bush's own
inexperience and curb his boyish enthusiasms, especially perhaps for Texas
wildcatters, tax cuts, Christian fundamentalism, or baseball. His was the
steady hand that communicated good old mainstream conservative Republicanism.
Now three years later, the image of Vice President Dick Cheney is
changing.
Already tarnished by questions surrounding the huge no-bid
reconstruction contracts won by his former company, Halliburton, in which he
retains a financial interest, as well as his refusal to disclose to Congress
what meetings he held during his creation of Bush's energy policy, Cheney is
increasingly seen as a serious right-wing extremist and ideologue, and by far
the most powerful number two in U.S. history.
As much as Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisers have become the
lightning rods for criticism over the Iraq war and the administration's
hubris, Cheney appears to have acted as their principal patron and advocate
with Bush, and, more than any other official, except perhaps Deputy Defence
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the driving force within the administration for war
with Iraq.
Although long in the making, the secretive vice president's
image as zealot appears to have impressed itself in the media just in the last
two weeks.
In particular, his Sep. 14 appearance on the Sunday
television news programme 'Meet the Press', when he not only defended the
administration's pre-war optimism about Iraq, but also revived two stories
long dismissed by the intelligence community -- that one of the 9/11 hijackers
had met an Iraqi spy at a Prague cafe just five months before the attacks on
New York and the Pentagon and that Iraq sponsored the 1993 bombing of the
World Trade Centre -- has attracted unprecedented attention.
The
Prague story, which reportedly rests on a report to Czech intelligence by a
single ''Arab student'' witness five months after the alleged meeting, had
been pushed primarily by Cheney and several neo-conservatives outside the
administration, notably Richard Perle and James Woolsey, since it first
surfaced in November, 2001.
After an exhaustive investigation, U.S.
intelligence agencies concluded a year before the March invasion of Iraq that
the hijacker, Mohammed Atta, was in the United States at the time of the
alleged meeting. Moreover, the Iraqi spy, who has been in U.S. custody in Iraq
since July, has apparently failed to back up the story despite, no doubt,
repeated suggestions that he do so.
According to a major account in
the 'Washington Post' on Monday, Cheney and his top aide, I. Lewis ''Scooter''
Libby, continued to press the story on the administration long after
intelligence had dismissed it, even insisting on the eve of Secretary of State
Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. Security Council last February that it
be included in Powell's indictment of Iraq's defiance of that body.
Powell kept it out, and 10 days ago, in a major blow to Cheney's
credibility, Bush himself told reporters that the administration had ''no
evidence'' that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein played any role in the
9/11 attacks.
Cheney's suspicions -- and their lack of any grounding
in reality -- have now become fair game in the media. ''Cheney in Wonderland''
was how the 'Los Angeles Times' titled one editorial, while accounts in
'Newsweek' and the Post have gone to unusual lengths to debunk the theories.
There had long been hints that Cheney was not quite the reasonable and
deliberate presence that he so effectively conveyed throughout his long
career.
At the beginning of the administration, it was he who
championed Rumsfeld, his former boss in the Nixon and Ford administrations,
for the defence post, and then insisted, over fierce objections by Secretary
of State Colin Powell, on placing Paul Wolfowitz in the number two position at
the Pentagon.
He also insisted, again over Powell's misgivings, on
making ultra-unilateralist John Bolton, then vice-president of the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) (where Cheney's spouse, Lynne Cheney, is a fellow),
undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Cheney also made Libby his own chief of staff and national security
adviser. A hard-core neo-conservative who had worked with Wolfowitz in 1992 on
a controversial draft strategy that called for global U.S. military dominance,
Libby later served as general counsel to the Cox Commission, a congressional
body convened to investigate alleged Chinese spying and acquisition of
advanced-weapons technology.
Its final report was almost universally
derided as flimsy, exaggerated, and inaccurate, by both technical and China
experts.
Libby also represented Marc Rich, a billionaire fugitive who
reportedly enjoys very close ties to Israeli intelligence and whose pardon by
Bill Clinton in the last days of his presidency became a major scandal, but
one quickly hushed by the incoming Bush administration.
Cheney also
reportedly played a key role in the appointment of another controversial
neo-conservative, Elliott Abrams, to head the Middle East office on the
National Security Council.
Abrams, a strong right-wing critic of the
Oslo peace process, has identified closely with positions of the Likud Party
in Israel. Cheney himself told Israel's defence minister in a meeting in early
2002 that he though Palestinian President Yasser Arafat ''should be hanged''.
At the same time, in what was widely interpreted as an effort to
intimidate the Near East bureau of the State Department, which has generally
favoured a more even-handed position toward Israelis and Palestinians,
Cheney's daughter Elizabeth was appointed by the White House to serve as
deputy assistant secretary of state of that office in early 2002.
It
was also Libby and Cheney who reportedly visited the headquarters of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) several times in the run-up to the war in
Iraq, in what was seen as pressure on CIA analysts to take a darker view of
Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction.
In spite of the change in Cheney's media image and the questions
raised about the propriety of his ties with Halliburton and the soundness of
his judgment, there is little indication that his influence with Bush has been
reduced.
While Powell appeared to have been given the authority to
negotiate a new Security Council resolution that would dilute Washington's
authority over reconstruction and political affairs in Baghdad earlier this
months, Cheney led an internal effort to retain full control, even as Powell
was negotiating in New York, say several knowledgeable sources.
''He
has been far more inflexible than Rumsfeld,'' added one. (END/2003)
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