"Think About It, Rush..." Dick Cheney: Dishonest or Deluded?

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6751

"Think About It, Rush..." Dick Cheney: Dishonest or Deluded?
by Gary Leupp | Apr 13 2007 - 8:46am


Last week, in a telephone interview from his undisclosed location, Vice President Cheney spoke with reliably deferential commentator Rush Limbaugh on Fox News. Limbaugh noted that the House Armed Services Committee now under Democratic leadership has decided to abandon the phrase "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) from its defense budget documents because it "doesn't like the phrase." Actually it's because the leadership feels that it tendentiously connects the (Afghan War) response to the 9-11 al-Qaeda attack with the separate war in Iraq, which has of course been the neocons' intention all along. But you know how Limbaugh likes to simplify things for his viewers.

Cheney predictably called the decision "just dead wrong," adding: "Think about it. Just to give you one example, Rush. Remember Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. He ran a training camp in Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda, then migrated after we went into Afghanistan and shut 'em down there, he went to Baghdad. He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al-Qaeda operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then of course led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June. He's the guy who arranged the bombing of the Samarra mosque that precipitated the sectarian violence between Shi'a and Sunni. This is Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq, and as I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq. There's no way you can segment out and say, 'Well, we'll fight the war on terror in Pakistan or Afghanistan but we can separate Iraq. That's not really, in any way, shape, or form related.' It's just dead wrong. Bin Laden has said this is the central battle in the war on terror."

"Think about it," he says, as he proceeds to defy the rational thinking process behind the belated rejection of the cynically misleading Orwellian GWOT term. "Just to give you one example," he says, as though he's got lots more in his briefcase but Fox News is allowing him only so much time to unload all the evidence. (Recall that Cheney was the leading proponent of the story that Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague before the 9-11 attack, but this and other concrete charges have been one by one discredited.)

Zarqawi "went to Baghdad," and "organized the Al-Qaeda operations" there before U.S. forces invaded Iraq and killed him. This is, in fact, as Dan Froomkin pointed out in the Washington Post, "wrong from beginning to end. For instance, Zarqawi was not an al-Qaeda member until after the war. Rather, intelligence sources now agree, he was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents."

Just as the Vice President was speaking, a report by the Pentagon's Inspector General, Thomas F. Gimble, was released. It documents how the neocons patronized by Dick Cheney, including Douglas Feith who directed the "Office of Special Plans" in the Pentagon, disseminated disinformation about al-Qaeda-Iraq ties in order to help justify the coming war. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, rather too politely summarized the report in part as follows:

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[Wapsie B]

1. Hmmmm........and how many military deferrments are there between Rush & Cheney?

Amazing that people like Crash Cart can be put in charge of anything in this world, let alone the U.S. Military.

[sam sarrha]

2. i think the Functional Question here is about Psychopathy..* executed 152 before the 650,000 lost