Dick Cheney Still Does Not Understand How To Prevent Terrorist Attacks

Dick Cheney still hasn’t figured out where the Bush Administration went wrong as he gives bad advice to Barack Obama:

Cheney told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the Bush administration’s “alternative” interrogation techniques were “absolutely essential” to preventing further assaults like the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Critics said those techniques amounted to the torture of prisoners in American custody.

“President Obama campaigned against it all across the country, and now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack,” Cheney said.

Since taking office in January, Obama has announced plans to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to halt the military trials of suspected terrorists there, and to make CIA officers follow the Army field manual’s rules on interrogations.

How exactly will stopping torture increase the risk of another attack? As The Washington Independent points out, it is a  “widely known fact that information extracted through torture is unreliable.” Dick Cheney apparently confuses events on 24 with the real world.

There was plenty of more reliable information which could have helped prevent the 9/11 attack which the Bush administration ignored. The Clinton administration left the Bush administration warnings about al Qaeda. The Bush administration not only ignored these warnings but lied about receiving them. Then there was that classic CIA briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” just before the attack.

As Al Gore discussed in The Assault on Reason, paying attention to this warning should have led to a review of the State Department/INS watch list which already contained the names of many of the 9/11 terrorists. Others could have also been identified before the attack as they were using the same addresses or frequent flier numbers. In 2006 Keith Olbermann also reviewed the many warnings which were ignored.

Dick Cheney is among the last people qualified about how to prevent an attack. There is no need to resort to war crimes as committed by the Bush administration to protect the country when all that was really needed was a return to competent governing. The 9/11 attack occurred on their watch, and their subsequent actions, including violations of the Geneva Convention, have only increased the danger of future attacks and have weakened the United States.

2 Comments

  1. 1
    nomoreGOP says:

    Cheney = evil.

    At the VERY VERY LEAST that man should be in jail. Period.

    The whole Halliburton/KBR situation is so blatantly a conflict of interest it is disgusting.

  2. 2
    Eclectic Radical says:

    I am not willing to define the Republican Party, Dick Cheney, or even the corporate criminals who are my favorite target of invective as ‘evil.’ They are ‘privileged’, and they have a significant belief in the rightness of their ‘privilege’, and their ‘privileged class’ is certainly open to a diverse membership… provided that membership thinks the right way and meets the property qualification.

    I understand the view that neoconservatives have of government. It is rather simple: our privilege is rightly ours, we should be free to exercise our privilege as we see fit, and what is good for us is ultimately good for everyone because we are the ones who matter. This political theory goes back to George Clinton and Thomas Jefferson, and before them to the Senatorial class of the Roman Republic. The argument is always based on shared tradition and values, which the elites claim to be defending against dangerous radicals seeking to overthrow the order.

    I think, sadly, many of them believe it. They believe their privileges to be God-given and they believe their sense of privilege to be entirely compatible with the fairy-tale, idealized vision of freedom and democracy they advocate.

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