It was a hoot and a holler this morning seeing the frothing, outraged mug of Dick Cheney on network television calling Edward Snowden a “traitor”. I was so struck with the irony of it: the putative biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold calling "the kettle black", that I doubled over with laughter, even incepting another bronchitis -coughing spasm. Let’s recall here that it was Cheney who had a plan underfoot to bogusly attack Iraq from 1992 (under the banner of the 'Project for the New American Century') operating under the presumption that Poppy Bush (George the First) would be re-elected. Well, he wasn’t, Clinton took the election thanks to Ross Perot splitting the ‘puke vote. This meant Cheney’s plan had to be put on hold until another Bush could get in, and that wasn’t until 2000 – when five treasonous Supreme Court justices interrupted a Florida recount to hand the election to Junior.Even then it wasn’t a done deal, a pretext still had to be found for invasion and occupation. The gift fell into the laps of Bush, Cheney and their Neocon warmonger cohort with the devastating 9/11 attacks. People will argue over 9/11’s real origins until their dying day but one thing we do know: the Bush Criminals profited handsomely in the wake, with Bush’’s approval rating shooting up into the 90s (from below 35%) even as the national security state and military –industrial complex got the go ahead for the biggest spending in 60 years. At the very least, while many of us don’t believe these vermin deliberately blew up the Twin Towers, we do think it highly probable they KNEW what was coming and sat back and did nothing. In other words they let it happen. It was simply too great a benefit ‘plum’ to do otherwise. See also: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-responsible-was-bush-for-911.html
It also finally enabled the original Cheney Iraq invasion-occupation plan to be put into motion. All the Neocon memos surfacing from just after 9/11 (many from Paul Wolfowitz & Cheney) showed repeated underscored emphases like: “TIE SADDAM TO 9/11! HOW?” Indeed, how? Since Saddam was a resolute secularist who had no tolerance for religious extremists of either the Sunni or Shi’ite Muslim stripe. But the traitor Cheney and his Neocon ilk were determined to make the connection and have the corporate U.S. media coopted to assist in the PR blitz that lasted from October, 2002 until March, 2003 when the Cheney-bred dogs of war were unleashed. To that end, the Cheney-directed Neocons employed every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of WMD (from an Iraqi traitor rat named 'curve ball') - to pump up a bogus case for invasion just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.
The end results were absolutely disastrous, for both the Iraqi people and the U.S.: a wasteful occupation that in the end cost us over $3 trillion and more than 4400 American lives as well as 600,000 innocent Iraqi lives (according to WHO, the World Health Organization). Meanwhile, the bloody Nazified takeover as well as hyped rhetoric (“Axis of Evil”) drove the other two members of that defined “axis”, Iran and North Korea, to develop their own nuclear weapons – realizing this would likely be the only deterrent to the crazed Amerikkan pre-emptive warmongers. So, if Iran and North Korea do have ‘x’ atomic bombs today, you can lay the blame on Dick Cheney’s lap as well as his accomplices, aka the Neocon rats like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Richard Perle et al.
Make no mistake that Cheney is the real traitor, whose costly pre-emptive war will cost us well into the future, including the brain-damaged vets needing aid, and benefits. To call a real hero like Snowden a traitor is not only to miss the mark on the meaning of the word, but how far our own country has gone down the sewer of decline and mental damage in the last twelve years. The fact the media would put a turd like Cheney on to bloviate and cast aspersions on Snowden also reveals the extent to which the media itself have devolved into total state propaganda whores. (Evidenced even now as most pile onto Snowden, decrying everything from his lack of education, to going to Hong Kong for his revelations and being a "narcissist". Many other people I once respected have disclosed themselves to be shills, including Bob Schieffer and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz)
As for Cheney's claim that the current NSA dragnet surveillance would have stopped 9/11, don't make me freakin' laugh! The actual problem was that the Bushies ignored reams of key information, such as the August, 2001 President's Daily Brief highlighting "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Bush received this while at his Crawford, TX retreat. (He took more vacations than any other president in his first year alone.) And how did Bush respond to this? He gave a quick glance then went to clear some ....bush. But what ought to have made his eyeballs pop out was the short paragraph reading (9/11 Commission Report, p. 255-56):
"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [—] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."
Then there was the monumental intelligence failure documented by former FBI agent Coleen Rowley who testified in front of the Senate and for the 9/11 Commission about the FBI's internal organization and mishandling of information related to the September 11, 2001, attacks. She noted how the FBI failed to take action on information provided by the Minneapolis, Minnesota Field Office regarding its investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.
In contrast to Cheney's bullshit claims, the fact is that there was a surfeit of information and data - so much that the Bushie brats either chose to ignore it, or be over selective in what they'd attend to. But again, that's being generous, Those of us who are deep politics citizens and standard politics cynics can't leave out the conviction the Bushies allowed 9/11 to occur on their watch, to reap massive political gain. The past twelve years' growth of the military and super spy complex more than validates that, not to mention how Bush's history has now been so reconstructed at his Dallas' library that only Americans paying attention would know how much of it is bull crap.
See also: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1544.htm
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Footnote: In a live Q & A on The Guardian website, Snowden fired back at Cheney, lambasting him as the one who engineered the warrantless wiretaps - before the FISA law was revised to make the illegal, legal. See Snowden take down the lying mutt Cheney in the Q&A published at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-us-fair-trial?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20aux-1%20Mini-bento:Bento%20box%208%20col:Position1
In the course of the Q&A Snowden also gives much more background into the NSA surveillance program including the use of "weasel words" by the spy masters to try to squirm out of what they're really up to. I guaran-damn tee you this is the only place you will see these things revealed.
Snowden also pointedly observed that to be called a "traitor" by the likes of Cheney was actually an honor, given, of course, Cheney is the real traitor!
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