Tag: Dick Cheney

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Fracking

Fracking was invented way back around World War II, as a means of getting oil to come out of the ground more easily. Back then they used napalm. The process was invented by Halliburton, the company Dick Cheney headed before becoming vice-president.

Halliburton didn’t want you to know what chemicals are used in fracking– besides the millions of gallons of water. Could be benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, diesel fuel, sand. But there was this contentious little law– something about drinking water– that made it illegal for them to inject these deadly chemicals into the ground near anybody’s sources of drinking water. No problem. With former oil executive Bush in charge, Dick Cheney was appointed to meet with oil industry executives– in secrecy– to draft some new laws, one of which gave the oil industry an exemption to the Safe Drinking Water Act.

This is how the system works.

Did you know that in Alberta and British Columbia, you only own the top layer of the ground beneath your house? What’s below that– including any natural gas or oil– belongs to the government. Now, you might think your government would at least make sure that any money to be made from the deposits under your home would benefit you directly. And you might also believe in the tooth fairy.

In fact, you are not entitled to one red cent for any oil or gas beneath your house.  The government doesn’t care about your rights or your property: they will hand over the oil and gas to Exxon or Shell or some other carbon company and they, in turn, will reward the government with “Royalties” they can then spend on things they can give the taxpayer.

And the government’s share of the profits from this mineral wealth guarantee that the government is going to support these industries if you try to fight them.

And do you think the cost of the water used, and the damage to the environment, is an expense to the oil industry? Are you mad?

In the U.S., you might own the mineral rights. You might not. It depends on state law and previous agreements with previous owners. You might very well purchase a property only to discover that you own nothing beneath the surface In principle, just like in Alberta and British Columbia, though, mineral rights to anything below the surface are owned by the property owner.

How can you own part of an oil deposit if it encompasses several properties? Under the “rule of capture”, whoever pumps out the oil first gets it. You snooze, you lose.

Some oil companies have, in fact, been caught digging their wells on an angle in order to pump out the oil below somebody else’s property.

So once again, it’s socialism for the investors– they get to share the property below your house– and free enterprise for the working classes– you have to go out and work for a living. And then you have to pay them for the oil. And then you might find out that your drinking water has been contaminated by the toxins they inject into the ground to free up that oil and gas. And then you find out that you won’t be compensated because Dick Cheney and George Bush saw to it that the oil industry will not be liable for any damage done to your drinking water.

True, but unbelievable.

More on who owns your oil.  But not much more.

Even more.  Better information from Wiki.

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Kidnapping: Military Contractors

If private contractors were hired to fly victims of “extraordinary rendition” out of the country, to places like Syria– yes, indeed– so they could be tortured– under what legal mechanism have they succeeded in not being arrested and charged with kidnapping?

They were. Some of them were enthusiastic. Some of them were reluctant. Almost all of them complied. They trusted that a lying, scheming amoral government would cover their asses. And pay them well. And they did.

We’ve seen a glimpse of “legal mechanism”. The Federal Government has intervened in court cases begging the judges to refuse to hear the cases because it would “endanger national security”. Most judges– so far– to their everlasting disgrace– have complied. If I was a U.S. citizen I’d be organizing some kind of campaign to have those judges impeached.

I cannot express, in words, my contempt for the judge who accepted that rationale and informed the victim and the victim’s family: all of the most sacred rights you are entitled to as a human being can be disposed of in an instant because Dick Cheney wet his pants at the thought of the Moslem hoards rolling down the streets of Palos Park, Illinois.

Everything that people have fought for for a thousand years, from the Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1965–everything–is tossed out the window with that simple phrase. National Security.

And all the lying scumbags in the Republican Party with their obscene little flag pins in their lapels and their tearful demonstrations of patriotism and loyalty should be impeached. And the complicit scumbags in the Democratic Party who tsk-tsked the left wing about having to be responsible and after all we can’t be seen as “soft” on terror…. impeach them all.

They won’t be impeached. They will be re-elected to office by a people who do not deserve democracy.

There is no “war” on terror.

There was no crisis. There was no emergency.

There was a dramatic attack and many casualties, but there was absolutely nothing in 9/11 to justify the hysterical, overwrought panic that turned weasels like Dick Cheney into whimpering simpering bed-wedding weasels like Dick Cheney.

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Pardon Me

I thought for sure that George Bush would issue a large number of pardons during his last few days in office, eight years after Republicans expressed dire outrage at Bill Clinton’s last minute pardons. He did not. I’m guessing he thought it would look hypocritical. He deserves credit for that, if not for much else.

Apparently, VP Cheney lobbied long and hard for a pardon for “Scooter” Libby, reflecting the more traditional Republican approach to justice: severe punishment for the poor and minorities for even minor crimes, and bottomless generosity and grace towards our friends.

Libby was convicted of perjury by a trial jury and the fact that he was buddies with the VP should not have played any role at all in the consideration of a pardon– and the fact that Bush resisted it is a little amazing, but was clearly the right decision. Libby likely lied to cover up the role played by Cheney and Rove in the outing of Valerie Plume. To pardon him would be a clever way for any president to lie at will, induce lower-ranking aides and officials to take the blame, and then issue pardons to them. Bush was right in every respect to withhold the pardon.

All Libby had to do to avoid any punishment at all was reveal who lied and who leaked. The Bush Administration tried to discredit political opponents who knew the truth about the doctored intelligence on Iraq. The tragedy is that Cheney and Rove both walked away.

I believe that George W. Bush, contemplating the legacy, the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan that Cheney had pushed him into, left office in a rueful state.  He stood up to someone who had pushed him into bad decisions as his last act as President.  That was almost honorable.

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Bush-Libby

In 2001, George Bush Jr., following his Christian principles, and his instincts for justice and integrity and honor, appointed Reggie B. Walton to the Federal bench. No more molly-coddling criminals under my administration! Walton was known for his tough as nails approach to sentencing– the only way to stop crime in this country is to make sure that criminals pay the full penalty for their offences! By Golly, America wanted frontier justice and George Bush delivered!

When the U.S. sent Mayer Arar to Syria for some good, old-fashioned torture, and it was later revealed that it was all a mistake– no apologies! We are tough even on uncommitted crimes!

Until… until Dick Cheney’s good friend “Scooter” appeared before Reggie B. Walton and Reggie B. Walton did exactly what George Bush Jr. appointed him to do– deliver a tough sentence.

And then George W. Bush commuted his sentence (note: but he did not pardon him, which would have allowed Libby to continue practicing law).

Since then, Republican apologists have been performing the kind of verbal acrobatics that would make even George Orwell blush. Bush doesn’t want to undermine the judge, according to his White House Spokesflunky Tony Snow: “The point here is to do what is consistent with the dictates of justice”.

There you go. To do “what is consistent with the dictates of justice”. One of the fundamental principles of justice, of course, is equality under the law. So if a judge sentences Scooter Libby to two and a half years in jail and that turns out to be about average for obstruction of justice, then — then…. well, let’s not be coy here: nobody ever thought George Bush or his gang wanted the law to apply equally to themselves. Don’t forget that none of those raging militarists in the White House ever served in a wartime army either. Other people do that stuff. When they come back, we slash their veterans benefits. It’s the Republican way.

So when other people commit crime, the Republicans want the law to be merciless, uncompromising, and relentlessly destructive. But not, of course, for our crimes.

What Bush has done is absolutely the opposite of the “dictates of justice”: he has applied the law unequally. He has over-ruled a judge and jury. He has short-circuited due process. Don’t buy all the whining about a “conviction” being sufficient punishment– they don’t believe that about any other criminal– why should we think they really believe it about Libby?

But it doesn’t even matter if Bush agreed with the verdict or the sentence at all. It is completely irrelevant, if a country has a constitution and an independent judiciary. What Bush just did, from the point of view of any one who believes in constitutional government, was despicable.

He has done a favor for his friend. He has offered compassion and clemency to someone who did him a favor by taking the brunt of the Valerie Plame scandal and not implicating his superiors.

There are two ways Bush could have made things right. He could have advocated understanding and compassion for every single person who comes before Judge Walton.

Or he could have let Libby serve his full sentence, just like everyone else.

If you’re not outraged enough, consider this: as Bush was giving speeches about how “harsh” and “unfair” the Libby sentence was, he was simultaneously advancing new legislation that would make it even more difficult for judges to give more lenient sentences to any criminals, after taking into consideration special circumstances.

There’s a point at which it’s hard to even muster a fresh feeling of outrage at an administration this bad. This is raging hypocrisy. This is vindictiveness, spite, hatred, and stupidity, on a scale I could not have imagined 20 years ago, when even Nixon had more common sense than anyone in the Bush White House.

Why is there no scandal? Why is there no move to impeach Bush? Because most people believe what they see on TV?

Why not just pardon him? Now.

Yes, now– because Bush will indeed pardon Libby when he leaves office– no question about it. He’ll also pardon the rest of his friends after they are indicated, charged, and whatever. He’s got nothing to lose now– Bush is probably becoming dimly aware of the fact that his administration is going to go down in history as the worst ever.

I was surprised that Giuliani and Romney both endorsed the commutation. I think they may come to regret this. But then again, there is an important message here that they may wish to send out to their supporters and colleagues and campaign workers, and that message is: We will take care of you! If you have to do something of “borderline legality” on behalf of the campaign– don’t worry. We will take care of you.

[2022-05-07] As you probably know by now, I was wrong.  Bush, I think because he had become dimly aware of how Dick Cheney and others had mis-used him and led him down a garden path of quagmire and mediocrity, did not pardon Libby, to the consternation of Dick Cheney who fully expected Libby to be rewarded for taking the fall for his (Valerie Plame) scandal.

This is probably the most honorable thing George W. Bush did.  Then, to highlight the fact that it was honorable, Donald Trump came along and gave Libby the pardon he craved.  Bush never looked more honorable.

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America Shoots Down a Passenger Jet: Medals for Everyone!

On July 3, 1988, the United States shot down an Iranian jetliner killing 290 innocent passengers.  A missile was fired from the Vincennes, a U.S. navy destroyer patrolling the gulf.  Sea of Lies – What Really Happened?

The Americans have maintained that this was all a very innocent mistake, or, more likely, the result of provocative, confusing actions by Iranians. I can’t see how a reasonable person would accept that explanation, when the U.S. government itself acknowledged that it had lied about several critical elements of the story, including the alleged location of the Vincennes when it fired the missile: it was inside Iranian territorial waters.

What you had was some trigger-happy ugly American captain, William Rogers, who thought it would be just splendiferous to shoot down something, anything, please! There were other Americans involved, including the captain of an aircraft carrier who made it clear that he thought Rogers was being willfully reckless and provocative and stupid.

Rogers was never punished. By golly, they gave him and his crew a medal. I’m not kidding.

Now, if you were a reasonable person, and not emotionally vested in America the Great and George Bush the magnificent, wouldn’t you think, well, the Arabs might have a reason to be suspicious of our intentions in the Middle East.

Add to that a couple of other pertinent facts.. Egypt is not a democracy. They are America’s friend, however, and more than happy to torture people for George Bush. Jordan is not a democracy. Libya is not a democracy. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy.

The Palestinian Authority was elected fair and square, but America won’t talk to their leaders because— well, they elected the wrong leaders.

It is very hard to explain why, if America wants to bring democracy to the middle east, it doesn’t urge Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Libya to hold fair elections. Are fair elections too much to ask? About simply taking a mild step or two towards democracy by, say, not locking up and torturing your political opponents?

We know why.

We know the real reason why.

And that’s why we know the real reason why America is now trapped in Iraq. It was never about freedom or democracy or Saddam. Never.

But — let’s be fair– I’m not sure that Bush knows it was never about democracy.

But Dick Cheney knows.

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Torturing the Pharisees and Scribes

Church Groups Getting Ready for the Election:

Evangelical Christians in the United States, by an overwhelming margin, support George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in this election which means they support their policies which include torture.  They can’t hide from this: evangelical Christians support the use of torture to deal with terrorism.

I think every conservative, evangelical, Hillary-bashing congregation should dedicate at least one Sunday this fall to an in depth discussion of how Jesus would torture the Pharisees if he really, really needed some information from them. Suppose they were holding Mary and Peter hostage somewhere.  Or or the Holy Grail.

So, how would Jesus torture?  Cattle prods? Water-boarding? Sleep-deprivation and beatings? What would Jesus do? The results could be collected into a position paper and presented to George Bush at one of those frequent prayer breakfasts or other meetings

Conservatives love emergencies. That’s when they get to take control. If you let them. They thrive on fear– because they assume that others are prepared to do to us what they are prepared to do to others.

The question Al Qaeda has to ask itself is, “where is America’s oil”.

The answer: right below your feet.

 

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Defending the Invested Policy

Without the slightest doubt, the U.S. invasion of Iraq is a failure. Even if you give the most generous room for interpretation and the most optimistic spin on the future, nobody who advocated this strategy believed that 3,000 people a month would by dying by now in sectarian violence.

The lamest argument in defense of Bush’s Iraq strategy is that, if even more people die and more things are blown up, eventually, there might be a moderately stable democracy. Might. Moderately stable. Like who? Like what? How deeply will the families of dead Iraqi’s appreciate the blessings of their new democracy? Will they ask themselves, what is the point?

So, it is difficult to defend the strategy, if you want to confine the discussion to actual facts and issues. The solution is to describe the brutal sacrifices’ made by individual U.S. soldiers and then argue that it would not be honorable to not sacrifice more in order to ensure that George W. Bush never has to go on TV and say, “our policy on Iraq was foolish and it failed and we have made a bad situation much worse. We are now faced with making very difficult decisions. I am responsible for the wasted deaths of thousands of U.S. servicemen. Life sucks. I suck. I resign.”

Eventually, it Won’t be a Mistake

How the debate has shifted. It should tell you something very important about Iraq policy when the argument for staying is that, if we leave now, it will be an even bigger disaster.

The miracle is that George Bush gets to make this argument while casually skipping over the intermediate step, the one in between “piece of cake” and “cut and run”, and that step is, “we failed”.

The deck here is stacked against prudence. If the strategy of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein was stupid, the only way to not have to admit it is to argue that if we keep making the same mistake over and over again, eventually it won’t be a mistake.

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They Are Not in Our Party

It’s nice to know that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove both phoned Mr. Joe Lieberman on the eve of his primary defeat in Vermont to wish him luck and offer encouragement.

Are the Democrats paying attention?

You should be asking Rove and Cheney who to nominate this fall for the Senate.

Wait a minute– THEY ARE NOT IN OUR PARTY!

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Sock Puppet Security

Britain claims it caught 20 terrorist plotting to blow up lots and lots of airplanes, therefore the invasion of Iraq was a great idea.

You may have noticed Robert S. Mueller III, of the FBI, carefully linking the plotters to Al Qaeda, though he admits no proof of their association with Al Qaeda has been advanced by anyone. Responsibility, anyone? It doesn’t matter. It works. The letter writers to the New York Times insisted that this was obviously an Al Qaeda plot.

And once again we have sensational charges, gloating security czars, and that bizarre Republican insistence that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and Al Qaeda.

How easily the frightened are led.

As with almost all of the previous sensational thwartings of nefarious terrorist plots, there is no specific description of any particular actions by any individuals which actually took place. Yet. We might get such details. We might not. We might, in a few weeks or months or years, discover that we have another group of foolish Islamic would-be radicals shooting their mouths off in internet chat rooms, or getting informed on by dubious individuals with a vested interest in scoring with the cops.

The New York Times received numerous letters from pro-Bush people sneering at their editorialists and insisting that this proves that Bush is right to spy on Americans without warrants or congressional over-sight. These letters disturb me. They assume that the sensational charges are probably true. They seem to assume that confrontation and war-like militaristic gestures make us more secure. They definitely assume that we need to live in a police state because America is under siege by powerful enemies who stalk us at every turn, and that this was never the case before recently, and that the Soviets– are you ready for this?– were really a very mild threat compared to Al Qaeda.

They also buy into the absurd logic that no measure is too extreme if it there is even the most wildly improbable possibility that it might save one life. This is the ultimate in selective logic: it plays into the politics of the authorities, because they choose which absurdly improbable action they address, even if it saves only one life.

It makes me think we should have a “malaria alert”. Whenever there is a possibility of some child dying of malaria in Africa, we immediately embark on a host of bizarrely expensive and inconvenient measures. We spent tens of millions of dollars on pesticides and new hospital beds and vaccine development, and treatments. Don’t agree? Do you want to be the one responsible for a child dying of malaria when you could have prevented it? I suppose you believe there are no mosquitoes…

Women in Africa should form a committee and demand that their governments spend $1 billion erecting a giant, 3,000 foot tall mosquito, to commemorate all the children who died from malaria last year. You think that’s a strange idea? So you are in favor of children dying of malaria? It’s obvious that your child didn’t die of malaria, because you don’t understand. This is the right memorial. We must honor the memories of these children. This is a sacred bug. To question the need for this memorial is to buy into that defeatist attitude that somehow mosquitoes will just go away if we are only nice to them.

I suspect that we will find out that the plot was not quite as fully developed as we have been led to believe, especially since both Britain and the United States have more or less avowed that they will arrest, charge, and incarcerate people for even thinking about doing anything nasty. After all, do we wait for murderers and drug dealers to do their nasty deeds before we arrest them? Well, actually, we do.

It is striking also how many people seem to believe that, if there really were numerous people out there plotting to bomb and poison and disrupt our oil supplies, the government could be 100% successful at stopping these attacks. A reasonably astute statistician could prove to you with charts and graphs and mathematics that this just can’t be so. If there were 50 plots out there, and the police stopped 40 of them, they would be doing astoundingly well. But there would still be the ten.

The fact is, there hasn’t been a single attack on American soil since 9/11.

I’m not saying there couldn’t be an attack. In fact, I am a little surprised myself that there hasn’t. I am saying that we haven’t yet built a world in which terrorist attacks don’t take place: they always have and the probably always will. I simply take issue with this bizarre idea– and it really, absolutely is bizarre– that we suddenly live in a hugely dangerous world filled with grave threats to public safety. That this is different from the world we lived in in the 1960’s or 70’s.

Most people seem to believe it. That’s is why inland cities in the United States received homeland security grants for scuba gear.

(It is odd that anyone should undertake to “end terrorism” today at all. I don’t think anybody serious in the 1970’s would have proposed to “end” terrorism. I think that would have been perceived as a preposterous idea. It wouldn’t have been possible.)

That’s why pop machines in U.S. airports were sealed off. These idiots thought, what if they put nitroglycerin in a Coke can, smuggle it into a Coke machine in an airport, manage to remove the right can just before getting onto an airplane…..

This is sock-puppet security. The biggest piece of bullshit in the world right now is the Republican claim that they are doing a good job of security, if the only thing they do well, because Democrats are “soft” on terrorism. It becomes more and more clear by the day that these people are not merely incompetent. They are dangerously unbalanced. They are prepared to shoot down civilian aircraft on a degree of suspicion, but don’t for one moment suspect that a world better than this one could come about through intelligent, prudent leadership.

In Case You Believe the Authorities That we Have Never Been as Threatened as we are Now:

  • Munich
  • The IRA
  • The Red Brigade
  • The PLO
  • Libya (Khadafy– now our “friend”)
  • The Black Panthers
  • The Mafia
  • Lockerbie
  • Oklahoma City

Or That the World was at Peace Back Then:

  • El Salvador
  • Nicaragua
  • Guatemala
  • Ethiopia
  • Iran
  • Algeria
  • The Congo
  • South Africa
  • Zimbabwe
  • Rwanda
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Who Wants to Torture? Me! Me! Who’s Next?

“in a 45-minute meeting last Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney and the C.I.A. director, Porter J. Goss, urged Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who wrote the amendment, to support an exemption for the agency, arguing that the president needed maximum flexibility in dealing with the global war on terrorism”

The amendment they are talking about was attached to a $400 billion military spending bill by the Senate. The Senate– hey, hey!– voted 90-9 in favor of this amendment. The amendment bars the U.S. from the use of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” of any detainee.

That’s all. The least you would expect, you would think, from a Christian nation. But we are not a Christian nation. We countenance a president and vice-president who beg Congress to please, oh please, please, please, please, don’t stop us from using “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment in the war against terror…

Because, how else will we know if we’re better than them?

NY Times Story.