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Overview
Cheney’s War Crimes brings together for the first time the many strands of the Shakespearean tragedy that is the story of Dick Cheney. It gives an insider’s account of his extraordinary seizure of power in becoming the de facto president; makes shocking disclosures about the chaos and confusion in response to the 9/11 attacks; and tells step by step how Cheney led the nation into two destructive wars in the Middle East.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781477274675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 228 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHENEY'S WAR CRIMES
The Reign of a De Facto PresidentBy Holcomb B. Noble
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013 Holcomb B. NobleAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-6978-7
Chapter One
WHERE WAS DICK CHENEY?
At 8:54 a.m. somewhere over Ohio on September 11, 2001, one of the four hacked airliners on scheduled flights from the East Coast to the West Coast strayed off course, turned back east and headed for, you could say, two of the most significant buildings in, or symbols of, America: the White House and the Pentagon. Presumably no one but those two hacking pilots would decide whether to strike one or the other or both when they got closer to their targets. About ten minutes before the first two hacked planes of the morning, AA 11 and UA 175, destroyed the World Trade Center, the third plane, AA 77, swooped down over Washington D. C. and hit the Pentagon, killing 125 people inside. The fourth plane, UA 93, turned off course about thirty-five minutes later, and, after a group of bravely resisting passengers attempted to take control, forced the plane down in a field in Shanksville, Pa. They were more heroic than they or anyone knew at the time, as they probably saved the lives of the soon-to-be de facto leader of the United States and the others not evacuated from the White House. And the White House itself.
It is now clear that from the time of the first hacking that morning the United States government committed a series of monumental national-security failures. The major immediate failure was Cheney's in that he appeared at the emergency control bunker beneath the White House some fifty-five minutes after the time he later implied. Where he was in the meantime, as the third and fourth hacked planes streaked toward the nation's capital, no one seemed to know. Both he and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were desperately needed: with the president away in Florida, they were the only two now authorized by military protocol to order the shooting down of the attacking commercial planes with civilian passengers aboard. But Rumsfeld was also missing. Cheney's second major failure, and in this case Bush's as well, was in ignoring the CIA, the FBI and counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's, warnings that a catastrophe such as 9/11 could happen at any time.
The first failures were that the Boston FAA flight controllers who violated protocol by not notifying the military and requesting Air Force assistance when the first hacking, of AA 11, occurred at 8:19 that morning, according to the final report of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the events leading up to and including 9/11. Nor, apparently, did the Cleveland or Indianapolis FAA controllers inform the military of the course changes of both the second and third planes, AA 77 and UA 93. Those were "alarming" occurrences indicating a "catastrophic system failure," and the FAA should have asked for immediate military assistance; the 9/11 commission report suggested they had not. As a result of these and other failures, AA 77 was able to reach Washington, swoop low right through what one would have expected to be a swarm of Air Force jet fighters. But it was never made clear precisely how long they were delayed before they were able to scramble and take to the sky. In any case, AA 77 was able to penetrate the center of the largest national defense system in the world without a shot being fired.
After the second World Trade Center Tower was hit, at 9:03, the entire world, including the vice president, seemed to realize that the United States was under terrorist attack. Cheney said he was lifted right off his feet by Secret Service and carried to the bunker. But the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the attacks, concluded that he did not arrive until fifty-five minutes later. Why? Where was he? No one then seemed to know. Now we do know, thanks in large part to Jane Mayer's reporting for The New Yorker and her book, The Dark Side, which will be treated in detail in chapter 5: "9/11 The Cheney Version. As for Rumsfeld, Brigadier General W. Montague Winfield of the Pentagon's command center said, "For thirty minutes we couldn't find him."
During this critical time the emergency-operations bunker was without its acting commander-in-chief of the military or its secretary of defense to direct the defense of the nation at the height of the new wave of attacks. And White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke had warned Cheney that more attacks should be expected. During his and Rumsfeld's absence, at 9:38, AA 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Perhaps they could have successfully ordered it shot down and saved the lives of 125 people in the building. The fate of the passengers aboard AA 77 had probably already been sealed, as with the passengers aboard UA 93, which crashed when its passengers staged a revolt and forced it down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Few seem to have realized that those brave passengers may well have saved the life of the Acting President of the United States and the others still in the White House by leaving only one plane to attack Washington DC, whose pilot, for whatever logistical reason, decided to hit the Pentagon, which had not been evacuated, instead of the White House.
Chapter Two
TWO GUYS
What did we expect?
Two such different guys, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, with such vastly different pasts, characters, backgrounds, interests, attitudes, temperaments. Yet they got along beautifully. That may have been part of the problem. Perhaps they got along too beautifully. Perhaps it would have been better, especially during their first term in office, when the principal damage was done, had George stood up to Dick more—at least on the small things (to paraphrase Woody Allen) like the war in Iraq. But each man's particular characteristics and skills might have made this impossible. Certainly, had the tables been turned, it's hard to believe, if Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq and Cheney did not, it seems that we would have not gone to war in Iraq.
The president was a trim, neat, nice-appearing chap, as the landed gentry of his grandfather's generation in New England liked to say. The Bush family was socially prominent and very rich, having begun to build the family fortune in the nineteenth century and augmented it in the 1930s on ties to and investments in oil and German armaments. But George W. himself seemed cut from a somewhat slightly different cloth. He liked to lift weights and work out regularly at the White House gym and then strut with some pride about his musculature. Although he became titular head of the most powerful nation on earth, he happened to have little interest, according to those in the White House then, in the principles and policies of the nation he was elected to run, as the Supreme Court ruled that he had been. Bush's idea of governing was to charm other world leaders, look into their eyes, and make judgments on that basis about their trustworthiness and value—as he said of his meeting with President Putin of Russia. Like Willie Loman, what he wanted above all was to be well-liked.
He was not strong in resolve but was easily manipulated. He was a Connecticut Yankee who had transplanted to Texas, a Yalie without portfolio—that is, without the requisite intellect. He would express such profound economic lamentations, for example, as "most of our foreign imports now come from overseas." Grandson of a United States senator, and son of a former president, once in the White House, George W. worshipped a new master. A born-again Christian, he believed his job was to complete God's mission to win victory in the Middle East, though neither he nor Cheney ever managed to articulate coherently what victory meant.
Cheney, unlike Bush, could be a really mean-appearing chap, depending on which side of the smile/sneer you focused on. He was highly self-confident, highly intelligent, blunt, and plain-spoken, but in the end not your taciturn Western cowboy. He could talk for hours, becoming charming, persuasive, dead sure of the words he spoke, himself a leader, a manipulator, obsessive about policy—his own unapologetic, antiquated imperialist policy. In that, he knew precisely what he wanted, though perhaps only once did he honestly reveal it in public. Even if what he wanted happened to be morally, legally, strategically, philosophically wrong, he was the take-charge guy who believed what he wanted was best for his country and, not incidentally, for himself, and he was brilliant in carrying it out. As he said in his secret report in 1992, he wanted America to dominate the world militarily to gain continued access to its material assets and natural resources (oil and natural gas in particular) and to maximize the nation's international influence. Cheney wanted this whether it meant crossing the border of a foreign country to obtain such access or not, whether it meant committing war crimes in the process or not. And he knew how to turn President Bush around almost immediately in 2001, once they were in office, on the Bush election-campaign vows against nation-state building and becoming the world's policeman or controlling carbon emissions.
Bush was the jolly, jokey nice guy with the obvious strains of a superiority–inferiority complex and without an evident care in the world now except to place his faith in his God, which was duck soup for Dick Cheney and their private weekly luncheons together. Yet here they were together in a relationship the framers of the Constitution did not envision: with George W. off praying for victory in the Middle East and working out in the White House gym, Cheney was getting almost everything he wanted as de facto president.
Most of what they had in common were negatives. Both had drunk-driving convictions in their youth; both avoided serving in Vietnam; both had really undistinguished records at Yale. Cheney, much the smarter of the two, got his act together as a young man, clearly with the help of the woman her married—"one of the best decisions I ever made was asking her [Lynne Vincent] out on our first date" on January 30, 1958—and was on his way to a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin and career as a political science professor when, at the invitation of Robert F. Kennedy, of all people, he attended a weekend seminar on politics and decided he'd rather be in politics than teach it.
As teenagers both had a keen interest in football. Bush was a cheerleader at the exclusive New England prep school, Andover Academy. He "tagged along in his letter sweater behind the cool members of the football team thinking he was one of them, which he definitely was not," as one of his former classmates told me. Cheney loved football as well, though there was a difference: he was a highly aggressive and popular high- school player.
But the differences outweighed the vague similarities. From a background very different from Bush's, Cheney was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, the son of a moderately paid Federal soil-conservation agent. After leaving a forty-year career in public service, he had spectacular success in his first venture into large corporate business—if money-making for his company and himself was the measure—becoming CEO of Halliburton, one of the largest oil-based corporations in the world, and his net worth and annual income rose dramatically along with the earnings of the company. This was far different from Bush's business experience, with its repeated failures: His appropriately named oil-exploration company, Arbusto, lost money and was bought out by Spectrum 7 Energy, which hired Bush to run it, and it was a near failure. It too was acquired, this time by Harken Energy, and he was given shares of stock and a directorship. But in 1991 the SEC said he had violated federal securities law four times while servicing as a director. Bush's father was the American president at the time of the investigation, and the case was dropped. One cannot put too fine a point on the differences in the business experiences of Bush and Cheney. There is a question about how well Dick Cheney ran Halliburton; some contend that its accounting practices were changed under his five-year reign to make the company look more successful than it was. Nevertheless, Cheney's greatly increased earnings along with Halliburton's contrast significantly with George W.'s failures.
By far the greatest difference between these two men was their health. George W., with his regular workouts, seemed as healthy as a Texas horse, but he had no desire to use his will to stay fit for other things, like keeping his country defensively fit, and following through on it. The overweight Cheney had a long history of serious health problems, like several heart attacks, a pacemaker, a defibrillator, aneurysm, a by-pass, an external blood pump, a heart transplant, and a number of visits to hospitals for monitoring and observation. But his ill health only seemed somehow to have strengthened his resolve to get what he wanted accomplished. He had a cast-iron constitution, a will of steel. He once drove 1,770 miles to accept the fellowship in Washington offered by Robert Kennedy, rent an apartment for his young family and be back by Monday morning cramming for preliminary graduate exams at the University of Wisconsin. He passed the exams.
Some four decades later, on July 14, 2010, Dick Cheney issued a statement that he was entering a new phase of "increasing congestive heart failure," saying that his heart had stopped pumping enough blood into the body. Increasing congestive heart failure is a serious matter. Even then he did not give up. He chose, on the advice of his doctors, to try the newly developed external pump, which was not designed to last indefinitely. Dick Cheney continued to believe he could and would go on and "resume an active life."
Indeed, the heart pump plus extensive help from his daughter, Liz, enabled him, after he retired, to write a very interesting and detailed 700-page memoir. Large sections of it read as if they were dictated from his total recall in detail of events decades earlier, details that seemed to conform to the historical record. The exceptions seemed to occur where ideological paths crossed, in which cases he tended to lie or cover up, sad to say, like a politician.
At any rate, Cheney surely was a great politician, in the sense of getting done most of what he believed was best for the country. Still, it seems clear that in so doing he lied more often and more seriously more than most. Why did we go to war in Iraq? Not, as he said over and over again, to free the Iraqi people, who did not want us there to free them. Not because Saddam was tied to 9/11 or because he had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction. None of these statements were true, and Cheney knew or should have known they were not true.
Several of his friends or acquaintances believe that his personality changed dramatically after the open-heart surgery. Perhaps the most brutal comment comes from John Perry Barlow, a fellow Wyomingan, an Internet privacy advocate and former Grateful Dead lyricist who worked on Cheney's first congressional campaign. Barlow e-mailed Todd S. Purdum of Vanity Fair that Cheney's "dark intellect has become one of the most dangerous forces in the world; he has become a global sociopath, a creature of enormous power and intellect combined with all the empathy of a HAL 9000"—referring to the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The late James M. Naughton, a former New York Times colleague who became managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, told me not long before he died, that he was simply baffled by the change in Cheney since he had first known him and mentioned how much fun he had with Cheney in the 1970s as a fellow practical joker at the White House during the Gerald Ford presidency. Naughton portrays a side of Cheney that one would never then have suspected. Cheney was the chief of staff for President Ford. Back then, according to Naughton, Cheney involved himself in several jokes, both together with Naughton and at his expense.
At one point Naughton had brought a huge costume chicken head for $100, and it was Cheney who urged him to wear it to one of Ford's press conferences. Then he dared Naughton to move right up front—calling him chicken if he didn't. There, the man from The Times, dressed in a chicken head, could be photographed by the press and TV cameramen. After the press conference, Cheney insisted that Ford stand up close to the chicken, and the next morning in the nation's newspapers and television networks, there was the laughing president of the United States, face to beak, with the head of a serious chicken. "What have I done?" Naughton said to himself immediately afterward, suddenly fearing that his career at the august Times was over. But no one criticized him. In fact, the then publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, after saying he found the story very funny, asked Naughton if he had put the chicken head on his expense account. Naughton said he had not. But the word got out and he was reimbursed the $100. In later years Cheney's relationship with The New York Times was not so cordial. In fact he banned The Times reporters from Air Force Two for the duration of the 2004 presidential campaign.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CHENEY'S WAR CRIMES by Holcomb B. Noble Copyright © 2013 by Holcomb B. Noble. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................xiChapter One: Where Was Dick Cheney?....................1
Chapter Two: Two Guys....................5
Chapter Three: Oil....................15
Chapter Four: The Coup....................35
Chapter Five: 9/11, The Cheney Version....................51
Chapter Six: Moving the War....................81
Chapter Seven: The New Colonies....................101
Chapter Eight: Torture....................113
Chapter Nine: The Hidden Eye....................133
Chapter Ten: Killers for Hire....................141
Chapter Eleven: Father Partisan....................155
Chapter Twelve: Daughter Liz....................161
Chapter Thirteen: Indictment for War Crimes....................169
Chapter Fourteen: So?....................187
Bibliography....................191
Index....................195