Let’s not make any mistake nor have any question how we feel about Dick Cheney. Our attitude is firmly set after much study and analysis of his recent speeches and his actions while in office. When he says one thing and clearly does another, that can be interpreted as lying. That is, in fact, how we interpret it…Cheney a liar. It is well documented that he evaded induction into the military by obtaining five separate deferments during the Viet Nam war. That is subject to interpretation. Our interpretation is that he is a coward. In addition, we believe that he is an un-indicted war criminal.
Dick Cheney spent his whole life in government, working supposedly for the citizens of Wyoming and the United States. But when he left government, he joined Halliburton Corporation. Some people might say that he joined a group of greedy, racist, Right Wing oilmen to enrich himself. There is no evidence to prove that this was his intention. We know, of course, that he did enrich himself. We know that some oilmen who are customers of Halliburton at least have been proven to be racists. And we know that Cheney himself was associated with a group in Texas who used racist themes to attack political opponents. We know that he had no appreciable oil industry experience. He had experience exclusively in government from the day he entered the workforce. He has, in fact, been the ultimate bureaucrat.
It is publicly estimated that his wealth is between forty and seventy million dollars. It was earned by introducing the Halliburton Corporation to procurement people in the military of the United States government. It was earned by helping Halliburton obtain billions in government contracts. Cheney, after leaving his position as Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush, knew that he had many contacts with senior officers in the military who had been subordinate to him during the first gulf war. He could use these contacts to bring huge military assignments to Halliburton, who–up to that time–had government work “only” in the hundreds of millions of dollars. By the time Cheney returned as Vice President, his intemediation with the military had brought approximately $3.5 billion to Halliburton/Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR).
There is great speculation by many people as to whether George W. Bush was President or Richard Cheney. There is some evidence that Cheney really ran the country. First of all, a group of Right Wing Republicans in Texas who had promoted and funded and engineered the election of George W. Bush as Governor of Texas clearly had association with key national Republican figures when they decided to run Bush for President. Who would be a better liaison than the President of Halliburton who had proved his loyalty by bringing them billions in contracts? They already knew what we now know. Bush was a patsy, an ignorant, shallow, prodigal son of an authentically heroic and patriotic, if Conservative, former President. In other words, someone who could be manipulated at will by someone who knew the details of working inside Washington politics.
Bush could never lead the country, let alone achieve what these men wanted…more oil, more money, tax breaks, more control of government….and wars that would bring more military contracts. So who would lead this bumpkin in the right direction? Cheney was the obvious choice, because they knew that he would do anything for power. He had already sold out for millions. To an ex-politician on the make, international power was the next step up. And Cheney was used to pulling strings in the background. It was a perfect setup.
In order to make the process less obvious, they pretended to search for a Vice Presidential candidate, but strangely none could be found. (Not one, healthy, attractive, intelligent Vice Presidential candidate existed in the Republican Party in 2000? No one wanted to be in the catbird seat for President in four or eight years?) So Cheney became Vice President. His first act was to gather together the top officials of the energy industry in the first of innumerable secret meetings to decide how to make money for the people who had showed good faith. These were the sponsors who had put a $60 million campaign fund together before George W. Bush had even agreed to run for President. They needed to be rewarded with some of the spoils of the oil-war Cheney and Rumsfeld had planned for Iraq. He even produced a map. Don’t believe it? See it for yourself.
So, did Cheney take the country to war for oil? Why should people believe that a man would waste the lives of over 4,000 young, vibrant American volunteers for our defense and the tens of thousands of other horrible wounds and all the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi dead simply to gain more oil for his energy industry pals?
We should think so because this was not Cheney’s only callous act of cruelty to American citizens. Cheney allowed his pals at ENRON to loot California with criminally high energy prices that defrauded not only the citizens of California of billions individually but also the state government of approximately $30 billion, created rolling blackouts and increased electrical utility bills for consumers by ten fold, Cheney refused even to meet with the two Senators from California while he gave Ken Lay, ENRON president greater access to the White House than the Secretary of State. Cheney claimed, while knowing that the truth was otherwise, that these were simply market conditions. By 2009, the residual effects of this looting of the government of California from those extorted prices has grown into the tens of billions and has been one of the principal causes of the current funding crisis in California. None of this could have happened without Dick Cheney.
ENRON and, by extension, Cheney…who could have ended the criminal activity if he had wanted, literally caused the deaths of many ill and elderly in California. Several ENRON executives went to prison. Others collaborated with authorities to show the deliberate culpability of top ENRON executives. Cheney’s refusal to stop the extortion was as criminal as those who eventually went to prison. (Not Cheney’s pal Ken Lay, however, whom many think killed himself rather than face prison.)
So would the man who worked for Halliburton to find them military contracts, using his government connections, who ignored the deaths and the virtual bankrupting of individuals, companies and government in California…would that man send our valiant military to war to enrich his oil patch friends? Well, in our opinion he did. Having done so, he is in our minds a war criminal. Only this past week, Dick Cheney, in the most arrogant statement by a criminal perhaps in the nation’s history, confirmed that he was lying in 2003 when he said that Saddam Hussein had been connected with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Those things are not in dispute.
We also now know that he had ordered false intelligence be prepared to reinforce that statement. And finally, we know that, after the Iraq War had been launched and while the Afghanistan War was continuing, he ordered that the telephones of U.S. citizens be tapped illegally. Further, when it was made clear that another of his false
allegations against Saddam Hussein–that he had weapons of mass destruction–had been refuted, Cheney struck back. He saw to it that information about an American covert agent was released to the public, quite probably causing the arrest, detention, torture and or death of all her contacts in the Middle East. This is against the the Espionage Act of 1917 and was an unauthorized promotion of the release of secret information. It was clearly treason and people should be tried for it, among them Cheney the principal instigator.
All this is “just getting started” on Dick Cheney. Much more could be said. His
numerous personal political attacks on opposition politicians. Condoning the actual imprisonment on trumped-up charges of a sitting Governor. Granting contracts to companies that not only cheated the U.S. military of hundreds of millions of dollars, but were so negligent that they caused the deaths by electrocution of approximately 9 American soldiers…in their own showers! Inserting political appointees in the GSA, the Justice Department and the Defense Department who, rather than performing standard functions illegally began to advance the Neoconservative political agenda.
There are people still alive today who have looked into the face of a man referred to simply as Gehlen. He was the head of the most feared unit of the German Gestapo, a man with no compassion, devoid of any human feelings. Those who had been in his presence say that he was so impersonal that they could almost feel an aura, a chill surrounding him. Cheney is no less amoral and discompassionate. Gehlen switched sides and to our everlasting shame, the Western powers used his knowledge and gave him his life in exchange. Unless Cheney is punished, we will carry that shame for all the dead who did not deserve the fate he created for them.
Cheney has no redeeming values that are useful to anyone in society. Every day that he lives and roams about in public, he creates more trouble than he is worth. He admits no guilt, shows no regret, or has no remorse for all the lives he has cost. Dick Cheney should be in prison.