Day: April 23, 2009

A Justice Dept. report released earlier this week revealed that terror suspect Khalid Sheik Muhammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, the month that Bush invaded Iraq — and that another suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times seven months earlier, in August 2002.

The motive for the intense regimen applied to Khalid Sheik Muhammed was revealed yesterday in a report (PDF) from the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. According the Levin report, Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the torture of Muhammed in an attempt to extract confirmation from him that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001:

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime…

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

…”There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Despite the intense torture regimen, Muhammed refused to admit that Saddam was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In 2002, when Dick Cheney was putting together plans for another round of tax cuts for the wealthy, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill tried to dissuade him, noting that in less than a year the administration had already turned the $400 billion Clinton surplus into a $158 billion deficit.

Cheney’s reply would become infamous. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to O’Neill’s account of the exchange.

The second round of tax breaks sailed through the GOP Congress, of course. And while the cuts did increase the wealth of the super-rich, once again they failed to “trickle down” on the middle class.

Five years later, in January 2007, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz predicted with uncanny accuracy that Bush’s economic policies had placed the country on a road to ruin:

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

The economy did collapse, of course — in late 2008, just months before Cheney and George Bush left office. Writing in January 2009, Joseph Lazzaro, editor of Bloggingstocks.com, laid the blame at the Bush administration’s feet, citing tax policies that favored the rich, along with Bush’s failure to build on Pres. Clinton’s earned income tax credit program for lower income workers; low job growth (Bush created fewer jobs than any president since Herbert Hoover); the refusal of Bush and Cheney, who had ties to the oil industry, to develop an energy policy; and, of course, not least because of the massive budget deficits:

At the end of President Clinton’s presidency, the federal government was running a yearly budget surplus, and the national debt was about $6 trillion. At the end of President Bush’s presidency, the federal government will run a record budget deficit of more than $1 trillion this year, fiscal 2009, and the national debt has grown to $10.6 trillion.

In short, Bush’s tax cut massively benefited upper income citizens at the expense of both squandering the budget surplus achieved during the Clinton presidency and jeopardizing the nation’s financial health.

Now, in his latest semi-regular appearance on Fox News, Cheney says he’s worried about the economy, particularly — get this — deficit spending:

CHENEY: [In] the course here of trying to fix the downturn in the economy, that admittedly a lot of people are concerned about, we need to address — although we have had downturns before — I worry that we’re seeing a situation or this administration not only committing us the huge deficits for the future, but is also redefining that relationship between government, on the one hand, and the private sector on the other.

And I think we have to be very, very cautious. I think we’ve gone beyond what reasonably we could expect by way of intrusion into the private sector.

Of course, what went unsaid in this bit of chicanery is that it was the policies of Cheney’s administration that put the country into its current dire predicament.

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