Cheney & Walter Reed
Show Notes:
One this week’s show we look at the Military Industrial Complex, private contractors and of course, Halliburton. Wouldn’t you know it...there’s a Cheney connection with the Walter Reed Army Hospital scandal. Every time something stinks or lots of money is missing Dick Cheney’s name comes up in the discussion. He cut his chops in the Nixon administration and he’s flexing his power in the current one. Clips from Air America and you tube and music from the Podsafe Music Network.
For the best coverage of the Libby trial go to www.firedoglake.com
Here’s a few other articles of interest....
CNN:
Sources: Cheney curses senator over Halliburton criticism
Friday, June 25, 2004 Posted: 11:53 AM EDT (1553 GMT)
Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton before he became George Bush's running mate.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Typically a break from partisan warfare, this year's Senate class photo turned smiles into snarls as Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly used profanity toward one senior Democrat, sources said.Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who was on the receiving end of Cheney's ire, confirmed that the vice president used profanity during Tuesday's class photo.
A spokesman for Cheney confirmed there was a "frank exchange of views."
Using profanity on the Senate floor while the Senate is session is against the rules. But the Senate was technically not in session at the time and the normal rules did not apply, a Senate official said.
The story, which was recounted by several sources, goes like this:
Cheney, who as president of the Senate was present for the picture day, turned to Leahy and scolded the senator over his recent criticism of the vice president for Halliburton's alleged war profiteering.
Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton, and Democrats have suggested that while serving in the Bush administration he helped win lucrative contracts for his former firm, including a no-bid contract to rebuild Iraq.
Cheney's office has said repeatedly that the vice president has no role in government contracting and has severed all financial ties with the Texas-based oil services conglomerate.
Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. He resigned when he became George Bush's running mate.
In response to Cheney, Leahy reminded Cheney that the vice president had once accused him of being a bad Catholic, to which Cheney replied either "f--- off" or "go f--- yourself."
Leahy was referring to charges leveled by some conservatives during the confirmation battle of Bush judicial nominee William Pryor last August. Some supporters of Pryor, who is Catholic, claimed Senate Democrats were "anti-Catholic" for opposing the Alabama attorney general's nomination to the federal bench.
Leahy would not comment on the specifics of the story Thursday, but did confirm that Cheney used profanity.
"I think he was just having a bad day," said Leahy, "and I was kind of shocked to hear that kind of language on the floor."
Kevin Kellems, a spokesman for the vice president, said, "That doesn't sound like the kind of language that the vice president would use, but I can confirm that there was a frank exchange of views."
CNN's Steve Turnham contributed to this report.
New York Times
For Cheney, Political Toll May Follow Libby Verdict
Published: March 7, 2007
WASHINGTON, March 6 — In legal terms, the jury has spoken in the Libby case. In political terms, Dick Cheney is still awaiting a judgment.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Vice President Dick Cheney with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman yesterday after the verdict in the Libby trial.
Related
For weeks, Washington watched, mesmerized, as the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr. cast Vice President Cheney, his former boss, in the role of puppeteer, pulling the strings in a covert public relations campaign to defend the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq and discredit a critic.
“There is a cloud over the vice president,” the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, told the jury in summing up the case last month.
Mr. Cheney was not charged in the case, cooperated with the investigation and expressed a willingness to testify if called, though he never was. Yet he was a central figure throughout, fighting back against suggestions that he and President Bush had taken the country to war on the basis of flawed intelligence, showing himself to be keenly sensitive to how he was portrayed in the news media and backing Mr. Libby to the end.
With Tuesday’s verdict on Mr. Libby — guilty on four of five counts, including perjury and obstruction of justice — Mr. Cheney’s critics, and even some of his supporters, said the vice president had been diminished.
“The trial has been death by 1,000 cuts for Cheney,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. “It’s hurt him inside the administration. It’s hurt him with the Congress, and it’s hurt his stature around the world because it has shown a lot of the inner workings of the White House. It peeled the bark right off the way they operate.”
The legal question in the case was whether Mr. Libby lied to investigators and prosecutors looking into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson, whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times accusing the White House of distorting pre-war intelligence. Mr. Cheney scrawled notes on a copy of the article, asking “did his wife send him on a junket?”
Now, Mr. Cheney faces a civil suit from Mr. Wilson.
The political question was whether Mr. Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff, was “the fall guy” for his boss, in the words of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. Though the defense introduced a note from Mr. Cheney worrying that Mr. Libby was being sacrificed to protect other White House officials, some say the vice president bears responsibility for the fate of his former aide, known as Scooter.
“It was clear that what Scooter was doing in the Wilson case was at Dick’s behest,” said Kenneth L. Adelman, a former Reagan administration official who has been close with both men but has broken with Mr. Cheney over the Iraq war. “That was clear. It was clear from Dick’s notes on the Op-Ed piece that he wanted to go get Wilson. And Scooter’s not that type. He’s not a vindictive person.”
Mr. Cheney is arguably the most powerful vice president in American history, and perhaps the most secretive. The trial painted a portrait of a man immersed in the kind of political pushback that is common to all White Houses, yet often presumed to be the province of low-level political operatives, not the vice president of the United States.
Prosecutors played a tape of Mr. Libby testifying to a grand jury that Mr. Cheney had asked Mr. Bush to declassify an intelligence report selectively so he, Mr. Libby, could leak it to sympathetic reporters. Mr. Cheney’s hand-written scribbles were introduced into evidence at the trial, including the one that hinted Mr. Cheney believed that his own staffer, Mr. Libby, was being sacrificed.
“’Not going to protect one staffer + sacrifice the guy who was asked to stick his neck in the meat-grinder because of the incompetence of others,” the note read.
Mr. Cheney’s defenders insisted the vice president was not out to smear Mr. Wilson or even clear his own name, but simply to defend a policy he fiercely believed in.
“There wasn’t some Cheney strategy or Wilson strategy,” said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney’s former political director. “There was only one strategy: to convey the nature of the intelligence and the nature of the threat.”
Ms. Matalin said Mr. Cheney remained as influential as ever where it counts — with Mr. Bush.
Still, liberal critics of the administration had a field day with the trial. They are hoping the Democrats who now control Congress will use the case to investigate Mr. Cheney’s role further. Mr. Schumer, who was among the first to call for a special prosecutor in the case, suggested in an interview that they might.
“I think there is a view in the public that Libby was the fall guy,” Mr. Schumer said, “and I do think we will look at how the case shows the misuse of intelligence both before and after the war in Iraq.”
Such issues are already of intense interest to scholars, who say the Libby case will invariably shape Mr. Cheney’s legacy.
Historians typically pay scant attention to vice presidents, unless they become president. Mr. Cheney, though, is an exception. The historian Robert Dallek, who has written about presidents including Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, predicts scholars will “be racing for vice-presidential records in a way that we’ve never seen before” to answer questions raised by the Libby trial.
“It will deepen the impressions of someone who was a tremendous manipulator and was very defensive about mistakes,” Mr. Dallek said, “and I think it will greatly deepen the impression of a political operator who knew the ins and outs of Washington hardball politics. He’s going to be, I think, the most interesting vice president in history to study.”
On a personal level, friends of the vice president say the trial has been deeply painful for him. Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney were all but inseparable — Ms. Matalin has called the former aide “Cheney’s Cheney” — and often started their days by riding to work together. Mr. Libby accompanied the vice president almost everywhere he went, and Mr. Cheney made clear his high professional and personal regard for his aide, even playing host to a book party for him in 2002 at his official residence. Alan K. Simpson, a Republican former senator from Mr. Cheney’s home state, Wyoming, said he saw Mr. Cheney over Christmas and asked how he was doing. He took the answer as a kind of oblique reference to the Libby case.
“He said, ‘I’m fine, I’m O.K., I have people I trust around me — it’s the same old stuff, Al,’ ” Mr. Simpson recalled.
Another friend of Mr. Cheney’s, Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman, said the verdict had “got to be heartbreaking for the vice president.” But Mr. Weber said he wished Mr. Cheney would explain himself.
“I don’t think he has to do a long apologia,” Mr. Weber said, “but I think he should say something, just to pierce the boil a little bit.”
Instead, Mr. Cheney maintained his silence Tuesday. As the verdicts were being read, he went to the Capitol for the Republicans’ regular weekly policy luncheon. Later, he issued a two-paragraph statement saying only that he was disappointed with the verdict, “saddened for Scooter and his family” and would have no further comment while an appeal is pending.
With a career in politics that goes back to the Nixon White House, Mr. Cheney is no stranger to Washington scandal and how to weather it. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he went hunting with the vice president late last year and did not sense that the trial was bothering him.
“He’s got a thick hide,” Mr. Graham said, “and he needs it.”
Peace & Love,
Val
AVALON FARMBLOG
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
