It is a yardstick of the degree of paranoia in former Vice President Dick Cheney’s messiah complex that he ordered the CIA counter terrorism programme to be kept secret from Congress, let alone that he also authorised secret wire tapping in defiance of the law.
All the evidence suggests that if he had had the good sense to put them both in the USA PATRIOT Act, and who knows, the outing of Valerie Plame as well, they would have been passed into law on the nod from both sides of Congress whipped into authoritarian frenzy by the title Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.
After all, few if any of the legislators who voted for this massive erosion of civil liberties, Democrats included, read any longer than the lengthy title. Russ Feingold was the sole Solon to vote against. While Democratic leaders are shouting loudly now, they were hoodwinked and stampeded like lemmings into the Aye lobby, goaded along by patriotism. Cheney of course was one of the herdsman for the lemmings, culpable on every level. Certainly the Congressional Intelligence committees would have been unlikely to blench at the idea of a program to assassinate Al-Qaeda leaders in a personal sort of way, when neither they nor their colleagues have shouted over-much about the use of drones and missiles with a proven record of “collateral” damage.
Quite apart from the moral aspects, the political fallout from the drone attacks suggests, as the French statesman said about one of Napoleon’s over-enthusiastic executions, they are worse than a crime, they are blunders.
John Nance Gardner, who served two terms as Vice President to FDR said the office was "not worth a bucket of warm piss." (The same spirit of non-boat rockery that led the lemmings to vote for the PATRIOT Act, transformed the “piss” to “spit”). But he was VP to Franklyn Delano Roosevelt. Cheney was VP to George W. Bush who proudly did not do “nuance” and who let him have a free rein, indeed a free reign, far beyond the very limited powers and prerogatives of the Vice Presidential Office. In retrospect, one can only be very relieved that nothing happened to Air Force One on 9-11.
Cheney’s behavior should certainly be the subject of a public investigation, and on the evidence available, there are prima facie arguments for prosecution. But the complicity of the Democratic leaders in this pattern of repressive actions probably inhibits them from following through. They certainly were prepared to blink, if not wink, when faced with evidence of water-boarding and other forms of torture.
They should follow the example of Senator Robert Byrd who lamented his vote for the PATRIOT act, which he described as “a case study in the perils of speed, herd instinct and lack of vigilance when it comes to legislating in times of crisis. The Congress was stampeded, and the values of freedom, justice and equality received a trampling in the headlong rush." Democratic leaders should ’fess up to their complicity: and go after Cheney with vigor.
And promise never again to let themselves be railroaded by spurious patriots, presidents, or vice presidents into surrendering their prerogatives as legislators and their ethics as politicians.
Showing posts with label Cheney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cheney. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Friday, September 12, 2008
Seven Years on
Back to Ground Zero
On September 11 2001, lower Manhattan became hell on earth. The images I witnessed that day are stuck in my mind
Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Thursday September 11 2008 15:00 BST
The clear and sunny blue skies of September 11 2001 are on the verge of joining "It was a dark and stormy night" as a cliché. But it was true, and most mornings of the 10 days since I had moved into downtown Manhattan by South Street Seaport, I rode my bicycle briskly round through Battery Park and up the newly-opened cycle path along the West Side Highway. I would normally have been speeding past the World Trade Centre about the time the first plane hit.
That morning, however, I was on deadline to write about the impending downfall of the US dollar. I had just typed a prophetic "The" when I heard the bang. I looked out my window, assuming one of the decrepit old buildings in the neighbourhood had just lost its battle with gravity, but the porters in the fish market in the square below were staring up open-mouthed, looking like gawkers at the alien ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They were staring at the exit wound in the tower, billowing black smoke.
The phone started ringing, and I was stuck on my fire escape talking to radio stations, since all mobile phones were out. On the streets crowds of refugees - covered in soot, dishevelled - filed along South St toward the Brooklyn Bridge, where their silhouettes made it look like an LS Lowry set design for a Potemkin film.
Once the crowds had gone and the phones had stopped ringing, I headed toward the Twin Towers with recorder and notebook in hand. The police manned roadblocks around the site, but I suspected, correctly, that they would not have closed the footpath along Hudson. Trudging through the ashes around the site drifting like fallout brought the revelation that some proportion of that ash was people, leading to even deeper appreciation of the Downtown Hospital staff who had been handing out face masks. Retrospectively, the discovery that there was much more asbestos than human ash made using them seem even better.
Round by South Cove, the firefighters had levered open a convenience store as a supply depot near where their trails of hoses drew water from the Hudson. They were going in for bottles of water and snacks before returning to the site. The road was a surrealist vision of hell. Trucks and cars scattered like a kid's toys, and over all, like thick snow, the drifting ash.
I was interviewing the dazed and exhausted firemen, letting them use my cell phone to call and reassure their families since it was getting a signal from across in New Jersey when one came out, a bottle of water in one hand and a banana in the other. As he wolfed it down, he looked around, puzzled. "I was looking for a garbage can," he explained as he surveyed the ruins and - in a gesture epitomising the new rules - hurled his banana skin into the piled-up fall out.
As soon as our lease was up, a year later, we left. The memories, of the processions of refugees, the military convoys that arrived overnight down the FDR Drive, the ashes and the pervasive stench of the gates of hell as the Towers burnt for months afterwards, all lingered.
Today, downtown Manhattan seems to be booming. The fish market has closed, taking away much of the local colour – and a pervasive cloacal smell and all-night racket. People have moved in, and brought life to an area that used to close down at five – except for the fish.
It also brings a smile that the foreshore in front of the old hotel/brothel that our apartment was in was reclaimed with the blitzed rubble of my hometown Liverpool, brought over as ballast on the Atlantic convoys. But there's little else to smile about. When I wondered through Wall Street recently, I could still see the crowds fleeing, smell the acrid smoke of the world's longest-lasting funeral pyre, and when I looked at George Washington's statue outside Federal Hall, I could still see him, in my mind's eye, with a layer of white ash on his wig.
They have only just begun filling the hole where the Towers were – and they still have not found Osama bin Laden. I don't have to go into a fugue to see that seven years later, the world is pretty much debris-strewn since the current George W in the White House threw out the constitution, international law and pretty much everything else – and it's clear that their social instincts never really minded littering on a global scale anyway.
On September 11 2001, lower Manhattan became hell on earth. The images I witnessed that day are stuck in my mind
Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Thursday September 11 2008 15:00 BST
The clear and sunny blue skies of September 11 2001 are on the verge of joining "It was a dark and stormy night" as a cliché. But it was true, and most mornings of the 10 days since I had moved into downtown Manhattan by South Street Seaport, I rode my bicycle briskly round through Battery Park and up the newly-opened cycle path along the West Side Highway. I would normally have been speeding past the World Trade Centre about the time the first plane hit.
That morning, however, I was on deadline to write about the impending downfall of the US dollar. I had just typed a prophetic "The" when I heard the bang. I looked out my window, assuming one of the decrepit old buildings in the neighbourhood had just lost its battle with gravity, but the porters in the fish market in the square below were staring up open-mouthed, looking like gawkers at the alien ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They were staring at the exit wound in the tower, billowing black smoke.
The phone started ringing, and I was stuck on my fire escape talking to radio stations, since all mobile phones were out. On the streets crowds of refugees - covered in soot, dishevelled - filed along South St toward the Brooklyn Bridge, where their silhouettes made it look like an LS Lowry set design for a Potemkin film.
Once the crowds had gone and the phones had stopped ringing, I headed toward the Twin Towers with recorder and notebook in hand. The police manned roadblocks around the site, but I suspected, correctly, that they would not have closed the footpath along Hudson. Trudging through the ashes around the site drifting like fallout brought the revelation that some proportion of that ash was people, leading to even deeper appreciation of the Downtown Hospital staff who had been handing out face masks. Retrospectively, the discovery that there was much more asbestos than human ash made using them seem even better.
Round by South Cove, the firefighters had levered open a convenience store as a supply depot near where their trails of hoses drew water from the Hudson. They were going in for bottles of water and snacks before returning to the site. The road was a surrealist vision of hell. Trucks and cars scattered like a kid's toys, and over all, like thick snow, the drifting ash.
I was interviewing the dazed and exhausted firemen, letting them use my cell phone to call and reassure their families since it was getting a signal from across in New Jersey when one came out, a bottle of water in one hand and a banana in the other. As he wolfed it down, he looked around, puzzled. "I was looking for a garbage can," he explained as he surveyed the ruins and - in a gesture epitomising the new rules - hurled his banana skin into the piled-up fall out.
As soon as our lease was up, a year later, we left. The memories, of the processions of refugees, the military convoys that arrived overnight down the FDR Drive, the ashes and the pervasive stench of the gates of hell as the Towers burnt for months afterwards, all lingered.
Today, downtown Manhattan seems to be booming. The fish market has closed, taking away much of the local colour – and a pervasive cloacal smell and all-night racket. People have moved in, and brought life to an area that used to close down at five – except for the fish.
It also brings a smile that the foreshore in front of the old hotel/brothel that our apartment was in was reclaimed with the blitzed rubble of my hometown Liverpool, brought over as ballast on the Atlantic convoys. But there's little else to smile about. When I wondered through Wall Street recently, I could still see the crowds fleeing, smell the acrid smoke of the world's longest-lasting funeral pyre, and when I looked at George Washington's statue outside Federal Hall, I could still see him, in my mind's eye, with a layer of white ash on his wig.
They have only just begun filling the hole where the Towers were – and they still have not found Osama bin Laden. I don't have to go into a fugue to see that seven years later, the world is pretty much debris-strewn since the current George W in the White House threw out the constitution, international law and pretty much everything else – and it's clear that their social instincts never really minded littering on a global scale anyway.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Demon du jour
Here is the full text of the Comment is Free piece Demon du jour
The comments, for which you have to check the Guardian site, are fun, mostly taking the blindly binary approach that I was questioning. In this mirror universe, calling someone a mass murderer is apparently revisionist whitewashing if you do not admit they kicked the dog and robbed kid's piggy banks as well.
Are Ahmadinejad, Cheney, Mao and Chavez really as evil as everyone says?
Ian Williams
February 21, 2007 8:30 PM | Printable version
The allegation that George W Bush has read and enjoyed the 814 page Mao: The Unknown Story, is on the face of, amazing. I have just finished reading it - and, for a start, it does not have many pictures. But on another level - once you have overcome a natural scepticism about his reading prowess - you can see why both the subject and treatment of the massive biography would appeal to the president, even if he only received an executive summary.
On the one hand, Bush has taken Mao's aphorism that political power comes from the barrel of a gun to levels way beyond the puny weaponry of Mao's army, not to mention emulated Mao's idiosyncratic uses of the word "democracy".
And on the other hand, the president has previously said that he does not "do nuance", and neither does this book - which is so relentlessly negative that it almost provokes sympathy for a man who was, as the authors exhaustively document, responsible for the deaths of millions. Likewise, demonization is the weapon of choice in this administration. They practiced it on Saddam Hussein, on Fidel Castro, and on Yasser Arafat, and are currently honing it for use on Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Most Americans probably assume that these people kick their dogs, abuse their children and are totally faithless to their friends and spouses. But it doesn't work that way. Dick Cheney can be a sinister force for evil - and still love his lesbian daughter.
Even the worst rulers are complex. Think of a leader who died, faithful to one woman for many years, who was a vegetarian, a pet-lover, a non-smoking teetotaler and a sincere believer in all the causes he had espoused for thirty years. One worries whether to name him, in case Adolf Hitler is mistaken for some evangelical saint.
In fact, Milton had a more complex picture of Satan than much of the contemporary western media does of its enemies. Once people are tainted with evil, it is assumed that, like some figure from Marlowe or Webster, everything they do is evil.
I should warn that if ever I grow up, the title of my memoirs will be "I was a Teenage Maoist". I was in China during the Cultural Revolution, had a drinking competition with Chou En Lai and had the temerity to argue about English Literature with Chiang China, aka Mme Mao. The period was a useful prophylactic against the temptations of rigid political lines in later life.
Yet the new Mao book is over the top. Certainly Mao had enough hagiographies written about him in his time. But demonographies are equally uninstructive and this one fails to explain how he mesmerized a nation. The authors show him as having a monstrous ego - but do not mention, let alone explain, why he refused to allow any places to be named after him. When I was there, they had just built the Beijing metro, and party officials chuckled at their own temerity to say that the station by the Forbidden City was called "Chairman station". The Mao book presents no such complexity.
According to the book, naked self-interest motivated every decision Mao made, and the Chinese economy was a shambles when he died. But that does not explain the foundations from which the Chinese economic miracle sprang. As with Stalin's terror, there were many beneficiaries, and millions who believed along with Mao that they were building a better world. The book, and demonography in general, finds it easier to load all the sins and responsibilities on the designated demon - which abandons the responsibility to think about motivations and backgrounds, let alone the context that made such terror possible.
While it may work for whipping up war fever, this form of writing actually disarms us against real totalitarianism - against what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. A binary, black and white, cowboys-and-Indians depiction of political figures does not equip us to deal with the real world.
In fact, the most dangerous tyrants are totally sincere. They are romantics, and think they're advancing humanity and civilization. On account of their monstrous egos, they tend to see themselves as the means of such advance. (The old aphorism about the road to hell applies here.) From the Crusades to the Inquisition, from the Nazis to the Bolsheviks, it's people with "good" and even selfless intentions whose efforts to make a better world have created hell on it.
They know best, regardless of the fickle and fragile human material they have had to work with. But far from being the work of one evil tyrant, the successful demons have always known how to appeal to masses of people. It takes more than one man, or woman, to conduct a purge, a holocaust or a Great Leap Forward - or even a jihad or crusade.
To take a recent example, by loading all the evil on Osama Bin Laden as an individual, we do not have to think about his political origins, the role played by Washington in nurturing him and his ilk as proxy warriors in Afghanistan, let alone the genuine grievances that he has been able to play upon in the Arab and Muslim World.
Such one dimensional depictions are also easy to drop on demand. Just as Saddam Hussein changed overnight from the West's man in the Middle East - when he was rocketing Tehran - to the devil incarnate after Kuwait, you will have noted an almost complete silence about what's-his-name-with-the-turban, who inconveniently hid in Afghanistan rather than Iraq or Iran when wars were wanted in Washington.
Down with demonization! We should be trying to understand these people - not in the hand-wringing way of the stereotypical liberal social worker - but to understand what motivates them so that we can dissipate the romantic illusions of those who always know what is best for others, whether it is Hugo Chavez - or the Project for a New American Century.
The comments, for which you have to check the Guardian site, are fun, mostly taking the blindly binary approach that I was questioning. In this mirror universe, calling someone a mass murderer is apparently revisionist whitewashing if you do not admit they kicked the dog and robbed kid's piggy banks as well.
Are Ahmadinejad, Cheney, Mao and Chavez really as evil as everyone says?
Ian Williams
February 21, 2007 8:30 PM | Printable version
The allegation that George W Bush has read and enjoyed the 814 page Mao: The Unknown Story, is on the face of, amazing. I have just finished reading it - and, for a start, it does not have many pictures. But on another level - once you have overcome a natural scepticism about his reading prowess - you can see why both the subject and treatment of the massive biography would appeal to the president, even if he only received an executive summary.
On the one hand, Bush has taken Mao's aphorism that political power comes from the barrel of a gun to levels way beyond the puny weaponry of Mao's army, not to mention emulated Mao's idiosyncratic uses of the word "democracy".
And on the other hand, the president has previously said that he does not "do nuance", and neither does this book - which is so relentlessly negative that it almost provokes sympathy for a man who was, as the authors exhaustively document, responsible for the deaths of millions. Likewise, demonization is the weapon of choice in this administration. They practiced it on Saddam Hussein, on Fidel Castro, and on Yasser Arafat, and are currently honing it for use on Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Most Americans probably assume that these people kick their dogs, abuse their children and are totally faithless to their friends and spouses. But it doesn't work that way. Dick Cheney can be a sinister force for evil - and still love his lesbian daughter.
Even the worst rulers are complex. Think of a leader who died, faithful to one woman for many years, who was a vegetarian, a pet-lover, a non-smoking teetotaler and a sincere believer in all the causes he had espoused for thirty years. One worries whether to name him, in case Adolf Hitler is mistaken for some evangelical saint.
In fact, Milton had a more complex picture of Satan than much of the contemporary western media does of its enemies. Once people are tainted with evil, it is assumed that, like some figure from Marlowe or Webster, everything they do is evil.
I should warn that if ever I grow up, the title of my memoirs will be "I was a Teenage Maoist". I was in China during the Cultural Revolution, had a drinking competition with Chou En Lai and had the temerity to argue about English Literature with Chiang China, aka Mme Mao. The period was a useful prophylactic against the temptations of rigid political lines in later life.
Yet the new Mao book is over the top. Certainly Mao had enough hagiographies written about him in his time. But demonographies are equally uninstructive and this one fails to explain how he mesmerized a nation. The authors show him as having a monstrous ego - but do not mention, let alone explain, why he refused to allow any places to be named after him. When I was there, they had just built the Beijing metro, and party officials chuckled at their own temerity to say that the station by the Forbidden City was called "Chairman station". The Mao book presents no such complexity.
According to the book, naked self-interest motivated every decision Mao made, and the Chinese economy was a shambles when he died. But that does not explain the foundations from which the Chinese economic miracle sprang. As with Stalin's terror, there were many beneficiaries, and millions who believed along with Mao that they were building a better world. The book, and demonography in general, finds it easier to load all the sins and responsibilities on the designated demon - which abandons the responsibility to think about motivations and backgrounds, let alone the context that made such terror possible.
While it may work for whipping up war fever, this form of writing actually disarms us against real totalitarianism - against what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. A binary, black and white, cowboys-and-Indians depiction of political figures does not equip us to deal with the real world.
In fact, the most dangerous tyrants are totally sincere. They are romantics, and think they're advancing humanity and civilization. On account of their monstrous egos, they tend to see themselves as the means of such advance. (The old aphorism about the road to hell applies here.) From the Crusades to the Inquisition, from the Nazis to the Bolsheviks, it's people with "good" and even selfless intentions whose efforts to make a better world have created hell on it.
They know best, regardless of the fickle and fragile human material they have had to work with. But far from being the work of one evil tyrant, the successful demons have always known how to appeal to masses of people. It takes more than one man, or woman, to conduct a purge, a holocaust or a Great Leap Forward - or even a jihad or crusade.
To take a recent example, by loading all the evil on Osama Bin Laden as an individual, we do not have to think about his political origins, the role played by Washington in nurturing him and his ilk as proxy warriors in Afghanistan, let alone the genuine grievances that he has been able to play upon in the Arab and Muslim World.
Such one dimensional depictions are also easy to drop on demand. Just as Saddam Hussein changed overnight from the West's man in the Middle East - when he was rocketing Tehran - to the devil incarnate after Kuwait, you will have noted an almost complete silence about what's-his-name-with-the-turban, who inconveniently hid in Afghanistan rather than Iraq or Iran when wars were wanted in Washington.
Down with demonization! We should be trying to understand these people - not in the hand-wringing way of the stereotypical liberal social worker - but to understand what motivates them so that we can dissipate the romantic illusions of those who always know what is best for others, whether it is Hugo Chavez - or the Project for a New American Century.
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