Why is Obama sticking up for the Surly Penguin, the Prince of Darkness, the Undead Dick (Dick) "Dick" Dick Cheney?

Weismann's organization sued last year to obtain the notes from an interview that the FBI conducted with then-Vice President Dick Cheney. The interview was part of an investigation into leaks concerning undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame, and the Bush administration vigorously fought the release of the notes.

"The records contain descriptions of confidential deliberations among top White House officials which are protected by the deliberative process and presidential communications privileges," Bush's Justice Department argued in an Oct. 10, 2008, legal brief.

Obama's Justice Department held the same line Thursday.
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Thanks for the warning, DICK

Cheney warns of new attacks, curses purifying rays of the sun

Former Vice President Dick "Dick" (Dick) Dick Cheney warned that there is a "high probability" that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

I don't doubt the first part for a moment, but the second part sounds pretty assfaced coming from the guys who did such a swell job in 2001...
~

Spoken like the piece of shit, degenerate sadistic old man, war criminal that he IS

A TREMENDOUS @SSH@LE UNTIL THE VERY END...

Cheney says Guantanamo should stay open, waterboarding OK

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Guantanamo 'war on terror' detention center should remain open indefinitely, Vice President Richard Cheney told ABC News in an interview Monday, while also defending the harsh interrogation method known as waterboarding.

Cheney was asked when the detention camp at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba can be "responsibly" be shut down. "Well, I think that that would come with the end of the war on terror," he told ABC.

And when is that? "Well, nobody knows," Cheney said. "Nobody can specify that."

In previous wars the United States has "always exercised the right to capture the enemy and then hold them till the end of the conflict. That's what we did in World War II with, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands of German prisoners," Cheney said.

"The same basic principle ought to apply here in terms of our right to capture the enemy and hold them.

The other option, Cheney said, "is to turn them over to somebody else. A lot of them, nobody wants. I mean, there's a great resistance sometimes in the home countries to taking these people back into their own territory."

According to Cheney, some 30 detainees who were released from Guantanamo "ended up back on the battlefield again, and we've encountered them a second time around. But they've either been killed or captured in further conflicts with our forces."

Cheney also said he helped authorize interrogation methods used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an Al-Qaeda operative detained in Pakistan and sent to Guantanamo who has confessed to being a top planner of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to a forced interrogation method that simulates drowning known as waterboarding.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said.

"And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it," Cheney said.

ABC asked him if in hindsight he thought the tactics went too far. "I don't," Cheney said.

The Cheney interview is to air on ABC late Monday and early Tuesday, the network said, as it released an advanced transcript of the questions and answers~

improbable developments in plutocracy (cont'd)

News item: Auditors at an oversight agency of the Pentagon were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on a major defense contractor's work, hiding wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report from the Government Accountability Office.

coincidental things in my in-box this morning

News item: Democrats have long alleged that Vice President Dick Cheney played a key backstage role in thwarting U.S. efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but they have had little evidence. Until now.

A best seller in France, and already translated into Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Korean, Hervé Kempf's How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth now appears in its first English edition. Bringing to bear more than twenty years of experience as an environmental journalist, Kempf describes the invincibility that many of the world's wealthy feel in the face of global warming, and how their unchecked privilege is thwarting action on the single most vexing problem facing our world.

dudes... if you're not a puppet, why is Cheney's fist so far up your @ss he can wiggle your arms?

Iraqis bristle as U.S. opens world's largest embassy

BAGHDAD — For the average American who will never see it, the new US Embassy in Baghdad may be little more than the Big Dig of the Tigris.

Like the infamous Boston highway project, the embassy is a mammoth development that is overbudget, overdue, and casts a whiff of corruption.

For many Iraqis, though, the sand-and-ochre-colored compound peering out across the city from a reedy stretch of riverfront within the fortified Green Zone is an unsettling symbol both of what they have become in the five years since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and of what they have yet to achieve.

"It is a symbol of occupation for the Iraqi people, that is all," says Anouar, a Baghdad graduate student who thought it was risk enough to give her first name. 'We see the size of this embassy and we think we will be part of the American plan for our country and our region for many, many years."

The 104-acre, 21-building enclave - the largest US Embassy in the world, similar in size to Vatican City in Rome - is often described as a "castle" by Iraqis, but more in the sense of the forbidden and dominating than of the alluring and liberating.

supporting the troops (Cheney-style) (cont'd)

That Other Military Draft

Thousands of Navy and Air Force personnel are now serving non-traditional roles in Iraq -- posts they never signed up for. Steven, who asked I not use his last name in print, said he's to receive six weeks of weapons training at a California Army base before being flown over to Iraq for a year-long deployment.

when did 'torture' become 'harsh interrogation techniques' and when... well, you know...

Cheney, others OK'd harsh interrogations

WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

laws? we don't need no stinkin' laws (cont'd)

Post-9/11 Memo Indicates View Around Constitution
For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration argued that the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil did not apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.

That view was expressed in a secret Justice Department legal memo dated Oct. 23, 2001. The administration stressed yesterday that it now disavows that view.

a YOOOOOOOOGE asshole... or... da YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGEST asshole? (cont'd)

News item: Noting the burden placed on military families, the vice president said the biggest burden is carried by President George W. Bush, who made the decision to commit US troops to war, and reminded the public that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan volunteered for duty.

Dick: future weatherman?

On Monday, Vice-President Dick Cheney came to Baghdad and talked about "the phenomenal improvement in security". That day more than 60 Iraqis were killed in bomb attacks.

News item: "America after the invasion of Iraq is no longer the superpower it was before."

literally, there is nothing to see here

Pentagon cancels release of controversial Iraq report

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Wednesday canceled plans for broad public release of a study that found no pre-Iraq war link between late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the al Qaida terrorist network.

Blackwater: doing very well for a small business

And here comes annudder whiney Democrat to phokk it all up...

News item: In letters to the Internal Revenue Service, the Small Business Administration and the Labor Department, Waxman (D-Calif.) questioned Blackwater's classification of its workers as "independent contractors" rather than employees. That designation, which the government has questioned in the past, has allowed the company to obtain $144 million in contracts set aside for small businesses and to avoid paying as much as $50 million in withholding taxes under State Department contracts, he said.

maybe if we hadn't lost interest right when we had da tarrists surrounded and decided to go bomb da s#i+ outta somebody else... oh never mind

News item: The number of civilians inadvertently killed by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan doubled in 2007 from the previous year as coalition forces dropped about a million pounds of bombs on the country, military analysts said.

Rezzzidunce Bush has done wonders for the Nation's military (cont'd)

News item: The percentage of new recruits entering the Army with a high school diploma dropped to a new low in 2007, according to a study released yesterday, and Army officials confirmed that they have lowered their standards to meet high recruiting goals in the middle of two ongoing wars.

The study by the National Priorities Project concluded that slightly more than 70 percent of new recruits joining the active-duty Army last year had a high school diploma, nearly 20 percentage points lower than the Army's goal of at least 90 percent.

The National Priorities Project, a Massachusetts-based research group that examines the impact of federal budget policies and has been outspoken against the Iraq war, said the number of high school graduates among new recruits fell from 83.5 percent in 2005 to 70.7 percent last year.

"The trend is clear," said Anita Dancs, the project's research director, who based the report on Defense Department data released via the Freedom of Information Act. "They're missing their benchmarks, and I think it's strongly linked to the impact [of] the Iraq war."

The study also found that the number of "high quality" recruits -- those with both a high school diploma and a score in the upper half on the military's qualification test -- has dropped more than 15 percent from 2004 to 2007. After linking the recruiting data to Zip codes and median incomes, it found that low- and middle-income families are supplying far more Army recruits than families with incomes greater than $60,000 a year...

Hey Kids: Merry Phokking Christmas!

Bush vetoes children's health insurance bill for second time

could this be the corner we've been looking for?

Cheney: Iraq to be self-governing by 2009