Impeach Richard Cheney

Matthew Yeglesias watches "Meet the Press" and asks a question:

Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: Breaking News: Dick Cheney is a Liar: Judd Legum:

On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded there was no relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. According to the report, "a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein's government 'did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.'" In fact, Hussein tried to capture Zarqawi.

This morning on Meet the Press, Cheney repeatedly cited Zarqawi as the link between pre-war Iraq and al-Qaeda. When Tim Russert mentioned the Senate Intelligence Committee report, Cheney said he "hadn't seen it."

What can you say? What can you do?

What can we say? That Richard Cheney should be impeached. What can we do? Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach him now.

And fire Tim Russert for being an obsequious enabling toad as well.

Comments

[Gene O'Grady]

Why drag toads into this? What have they done to you?

[Tom Marney]

IIRC, the latest CNN poll found that while a comfortable majority of Americans think that if the Democrats gain control of Congress they should conduct investigations of what the administration has been doing for the last six years, only thirty percent actually want Bush impeached. I wonder what that figure would be if the Vice President were a grownup Republican.

[Peter Eggenberger]

Is this exchange (from the Meet the Press transcript) actually obsequious toadying?

MR. RUSSERT: The committee said that there was no relationship. In fact...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I haven’t seen the report; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the fact is...

MR. RUSSERT: But Mr. Vice President, the bottom line is...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We know, we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went in to 9/11, then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of ‘02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: The bottom line is, the rationale given the American people was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he could give those weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda and we could have another September 11. And now we read that there is no evidence, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, of that relationship. You’ve said there’s no involvement. The president says there’s no involvement.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, Tim, no involvement in what respect?

MR. RUSSERT: In September 11, OK. The CIA said, leading up to the war, that the possibility of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction was “low.” It appears that there was a deliberate attempt made by the administration to link al-Qaeda in Iraq in the minds of the American people and use it as a rationale to go into Iraq.

[andres]

Peter: the problem is that Tim Russert did everything in that exchange except the obvious--to call Cheney a liar on national television. Whose job do you think would have gone first, Russert's or Cheney's? That's the real problem underlying the state of the mainstream media today.

[William G. Rhoads]

The Man Who Is Always Wrong. Back in 2002, on the basis of reading the newspapers, I decided that Dick Cheney is ALWAYS WRONG in his public and leaked statements! That is as good as having someone who is always right, for whatever Cheney says, I can believe the oppposite. Such people who are always wrong are rare, so Cheney does have his value.

Some aspiring political scientists, or Democrat Party activitists, should collect all of Cheney's statements on subjects of some importance, starting with the 2000 election, categorize them by objective correctness, and publish the results. I'll bet that he was right very seldom, ambiguous or indeterminate a little more, and wrong, plain wrong almost all the time. I think I'm not the only person who will find the results interesting.

[Tom Marney]

We had a weatherman like that in Atlanta once. He ended up being busted for kiddie porn or something.

[andres]

Come now. This administration has violated several Geneva Convention codes, three Bill of Rights Amendments, and the post-Nuremberg UN treaty outlawing wars of aggression. How could impeachment, however impractical politically, not be a warranted response to this conduct?

[Ben Lin]

Cheney is one of the diehard neocon who could see nothing that he does not want to see if it is in his face. Pity we have such a (Vice) President leading us into a sea of accusations toward the U.S., which we have never seen before.

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/09/paul_krugman_pr.html#c22241900

September 11, 2006

Paul Krugman: Promises Not Kept
Edited by Mark Thoma

Paul Krugman looks at why the trail for those responsible for 9/11 has gone "stone cold":

Promises Not Kept, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: Five years ago, the nation rallied around a president who promised vengeance against those responsible for the atrocity of 9/11. Yet Osama bin Laden is still alive and at large. His trail, The Washington Post reports, has gone "stone cold." Osama and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are evidently secure enough in their hideaway that they can taunt us with professional-quality videos.

They certainly don't lack for places to stay. Pakistan's government has signed a truce with Islamic militants in North Waziristan, the province where bin Laden is presumed to be hiding. Although the Pakistanis say that this doesn't mean that bin Laden is immune from arrest, their claims aren't very credible.

Meanwhile, much of Afghanistan has fallen back under the control of drug-dealing warlords and of the Taliban, which sheltered Al Qaeda before it was driven from Kabul. ....

The path to this strategic defeat began with the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Never mind the anti-Clinton hit piece, produced for ABC by a friend of Rush Limbaugh; there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials. But there was a clear shot in December 2001, when Al Qaeda's leader was trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. He made his escape because the Pentagon refused to use American ground troops to cut him off.

No matter, declared President Bush: "I truly am not that concerned about him," he said ... in March 2002, and more or less stopped mentioning Osama for the next four years. ...[J]ust six months after 9/11 ... the pursuit of Al Qaeda had already been relegated to second-class status. A long report in yesterday's Washington Post adds [that] ...: early in 2002, the administration began pulling key resources, such as special forces units and unmanned aircraft, off the hunt for Al Qaeda's leaders, in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. ...

During the first 18 months after the Taliban were driven from power, the U.S.-led coalition provided no peacekeeping troops outside the capital city. Economic aid ... was minimal in the crucial first year... And the result was the floundering and failure we see today.

How did it all go so wrong? The diversion of resources into ... Iraq is certainly a large part of the story. Although administration officials continue to insist that the invasion of Iraq somehow made sense as part of a broadly defined war on terror, the Senate ... has just released a report confirming that Saddam Hussein regarded Al Qaeda as a threat, not an ally; he even made attempts to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

But Iraq doesn't explain it all. Even though the Bush administration was secretly planning another war in early 2002, it could still have spared some troops to provide security and allocated more money to help the Karzai government. As in the case of planning for postwar Iraq, however, Bush officials apparently refused even to consider the possibility that things wouldn't go exactly the way they hoped.

These days most agonizing about the state of America's foreign policy is focused, understandably, on the new enemies we've made in Iraq. But let's not forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 are still at large, five years later, and that they have re-established a large safe haven.

[William]

And did he not see the October 2005 CIA report either? I hope he is asked about that.

[Karlsfini]

"But let's not forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 are still at large, five years later, and that they have re-established a large safe haven."

Anne, and also let's not forget that 5 years later there has yet to be a real investigation of 9/11.

As of today, according to CNN, nearly half of Americans don't believe the administration's conspiracy theory. (That would be the brighter half.)

There's a great deal yet to be learned about 9/11.

[Dean Moriarty]

What's interesting about Cheney's statement is that it is doubly dishonest. Not only have the Zarqaqwi ties to Saddam been vitiated, but Cheney's can't even get the geography right. Zarqawi was in northern Iraq, and area not even controlled by Saddam, and was in a location that left him vulnerable to attack from US forces...

[BroD]

If Al Qaeda can do professional-quality videos, why can't Disney?

[Dirk van Dijk]

I spent the better part of yesterday remembering two childhood friends who never made it out of the towers. Nothing and I repeat nothing could dishonor the memory of Teddy and Tommy more than what this administration has done. It has turned 9/11 into an American version of the burning of the Reichstag, and as a pretext for a pointless war in which the U.S. has squandered 200+ years of international goodwill. Mr. President, I hope Jesus can forgive you, because I never will.

[boonie]

"I spent the better part of yesterday remembering two childhood friends who never made it out of the towers."

On bad days, I don't think any of us made it out...