When Dick Cheney was the vice president of the United States, he did not talk much, and after he left office at the end of George Bush's term, he no longer shuts up. He is a war criminal and leader of a cabal that entangled the US in three wars, all losing efforts: Afghanistan, Iraq, and terror. He destroyed the American economy, which led to the ongoing global financial crisis. Naturally, Cheney defends himself, because he stands accused. However, what he says is dominated by impertinence, and only one issue suffices here: he criticized the probity of the Justice Department under a Democratic administration, and specifically about interrogating CIA personnel on the torture of detainees. Cheney stands accused before any CIA people and lawyers who wrote memorandums authorizing torture. And even before them, there is the entire Guantanamo issue. More than 800 people facing accusations were brought there at first; the number has dropped gradually, with only a handful facing formal chargers. There are now fewer than 200 detainees, and the Obama administration wants to transfer them to ordinary facilities and close Guantanamo. More importantly, there is the demand for an investigation into the suicide of three inmates on 9 June 2006. Among the ranks of human rights lawyers, some believe that the three, two Saudis and a Yemeni, were killed and did not commit suicide. If the charge is proven, it will be a massive indictment of the entire Bush administration, making it easier to charge Cheney with backing the torture of detainees. There are other aspects to the case as well. Some have demanded an investigation into the disappearance of emails written by Bush administration lawyers who authorized torture, going back to 2002, and to a difficult period, when the administration was manufacturing reasons to launch a war on Iraq. We now know that 22 million documents from the Bush administration were handed over to the current White House, but after George Bush returned to his ranch in Texas and lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee were found to have acted inappropriately in authorizing torture, David Margolis, from the deputy attorney general's office, reduced the charges to poor judgment. Before people forget, I will remind them that the Bush-Cheney administration said after the terror of 11 September 2001 that the war was about “our freedoms and our values,” meaning that the al-Qaida terrorists were not incited by the total commitment to Israel and its criminal occupation, but by Americans being free in their country. I will also remind them that Madeleine Albright said in a television interview that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from a decade of siege were justified by the results. This was also the view of the Bush-Cheney administration, whose unjustified war on Iraq caused the death of around 1 million Iraqis, and insisted that the toppling of Saddam Hussein, i.e. a single person, equaled the death of those poor unfortunates. Cheney bears full responsibility; he was the leader of the war cabal that brought together advocates of US imperialism ruling the world and neoconservative Likudniks whose loyalty was to Israel. They only achieved the acceleration of America's fall as the world's only superpower and the rise of China to the number one economic ranking. China today is the leading creditor of the US and most of these debts are going to the wars of the Bush administration. The US has borrowed from China and other countries to fight in our lands. I do not know if Dick Cheney will be ever taken to court for war crimes; he is guiltier than Radovan Karadic, who is now on trial the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, charged with killing a hundred thousand Muslims, compared to Cheney's 1 million, along with young people from the US and western allied countries. Personally, I do not expect that Cheney will stand trial. The evil cabal still exists and is defending itself – it is not just Cheney. In recent days I observed some reasons for the strength of the neoconservatives, despite their loss of official posts. This month's annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which was formed in 1973, and the Young Americans for Liberty, was useful in helping us discover the reasons for the weakness and strength of this cabal. Cheney was greeted enthusiastically at the convention. He said that Barack Obama would be a one-term president, like he wants, and was followed by his daughter Liz, who attacked the Obama administration's domestic and foreign policies, forgetting the destruction brought to the country and the world by the Bush administration, in which her father served. However, the thousands of participants abandoned the Cheney wing of the party after the speeches, as they chose Texas Congressman Ron Paul as their 2012 presidential candidate in a straw poll, favoring him over everyone else, including Mitt Romney, who was the winner of the three previous conventions. This time, Paul received 31 percent of the vote, followed by Romney with 22 percent, and the rest, such as Sarah Palin (7 percent) and others. Paul is a Libertarian, which should not be confused with a Liberal. Libertarians want to increase personal freedoms and reduce the government's intrusion into people's lives. Paul opposed the Iraq war and has been a rare, sane voice amid the advocates of war. It appears that American conservatives, most of whom are Republicans, without using the word “base,” and the young people in the party, i.e. its future, have begun to realize the wisdom of the Texas congressman and have begun distancing themselves from the war cabal. [email protected]
