Just not President Bush. This is something you got to appreciate. I do as I've been reading up on Cheney and Bush lately. I find it kind of uncanny as today's torture report was nothing to do with why I was reading up on them. However, I'm currently on my third straight book on Bush-Cheney.
Why the sudden interest? Actually for the same reason that Bush actually did a lot of reading himself in the last 3 years of his Presidency. After all the bluster of his first years he had grown much more introspective with the failure to find WMD, the whole episode of Hurricane Katrina which once and for all tarnished whatever standing with the public his Administration had left and his total failure to push through Social Security reform. He had boasted after winning reelection in 2004 of having political capital to spend.
By the beginning of 2006 with his plummeting popularity he realized he had no such capital left. We always here from the conservatives how unpopular President Obama is, and while the low 40s is not something to brag about Bush ended up in the high 20s-Nixon territory.
That's what made Bush introspective. He realized that the American people largely had rejected him and his policies. His hope became that maybe future generations would feel differently. Not surprisingly, the President that gave him a lot of hope was Harry Truman who like Bush and Nixon also left office with an approval rating in the high 20s.
I too while I always hated Bush and his Administration at the time wondered how it looks with a little historical perspective. The need to get him out of the White House now gone, it might be possible to look at it a little more dispassionately.
What I find interesting in the current book I'm reading-Thank God for Amazon Kindle!- the author , Peter Baker, argues that Bush was certainly not just Cheney's puppet and that it wasn't so simple as saying that Cheney not Bush was in charge.
https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B00CK8CJVS
He starts with probably the best example for that thesis-when Bush decided to spurn Cheney's request for a pardon of Scooter Libby. There's no question that Cheney was always careful to defer to Bush outwardly, both publicly and privately-no one would ever call him a fool.
However, there's little question from Baker's narrative, that in his first 4 years at least, Bush deferred a great deal to Cheney's expertise on foreign policy, especially after 9/11-till this day what happened with Flight 93 that crashed in that Pennsylvania field hasn't been totally agreed on.
On Anderson Cooper tonight it was talked about how unprecedented our torture program was. We did things after 9/11 that we didn't do to the Viet Cong. No doubt this can be understood in large part because after all the VC never came close to attacking us on our own soil. Still, there is also little question that nowhere are Cheney's fingerprints more evident than on the torture program. It's certainly debatable that had Bush not chosen him as his VP it might not have happened.
Yes, I know enough about economics to realize that there is risk in playing some counterfactuals-in the first few years of Bush-Cheney I had thought of how things might have been different with a Gore Presidency. The trouble is that this counterfactual game can go too far. Still, I just don't think that there is any question that there is something let's just say special-ie, very different, if not deviant about Dick Cheney, the man.
"The Bush administration relied on some of Zybaydah's claims in justifying the invasion of Iraq. U.S. officials stated that the allegations that Iraq and al-Qaeda were linked in the training of people on chemical weapons came from Zubaydah.[135][136][137] The officials noted there was no independent verification of his claims.[135][136]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Zubaydah
What I disagreed with on that Anderson Cooper show was when the CIA was alone blamed. The White House also knew. First of all the CIA is not an independent entity of the Administration. Secondly, it's clear that while the President didn't know till 2006, the Vice President knew all along as he was the one telling the CIA to do all this.
For more on Cheney see here. He's all over the place today defending his baby.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/dick-cheney-cia-torture-report
Why the sudden interest? Actually for the same reason that Bush actually did a lot of reading himself in the last 3 years of his Presidency. After all the bluster of his first years he had grown much more introspective with the failure to find WMD, the whole episode of Hurricane Katrina which once and for all tarnished whatever standing with the public his Administration had left and his total failure to push through Social Security reform. He had boasted after winning reelection in 2004 of having political capital to spend.
By the beginning of 2006 with his plummeting popularity he realized he had no such capital left. We always here from the conservatives how unpopular President Obama is, and while the low 40s is not something to brag about Bush ended up in the high 20s-Nixon territory.
That's what made Bush introspective. He realized that the American people largely had rejected him and his policies. His hope became that maybe future generations would feel differently. Not surprisingly, the President that gave him a lot of hope was Harry Truman who like Bush and Nixon also left office with an approval rating in the high 20s.
I too while I always hated Bush and his Administration at the time wondered how it looks with a little historical perspective. The need to get him out of the White House now gone, it might be possible to look at it a little more dispassionately.
What I find interesting in the current book I'm reading-Thank God for Amazon Kindle!- the author , Peter Baker, argues that Bush was certainly not just Cheney's puppet and that it wasn't so simple as saying that Cheney not Bush was in charge.
https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B00CK8CJVS
He starts with probably the best example for that thesis-when Bush decided to spurn Cheney's request for a pardon of Scooter Libby. There's no question that Cheney was always careful to defer to Bush outwardly, both publicly and privately-no one would ever call him a fool.
However, there's little question from Baker's narrative, that in his first 4 years at least, Bush deferred a great deal to Cheney's expertise on foreign policy, especially after 9/11-till this day what happened with Flight 93 that crashed in that Pennsylvania field hasn't been totally agreed on.
On Anderson Cooper tonight it was talked about how unprecedented our torture program was. We did things after 9/11 that we didn't do to the Viet Cong. No doubt this can be understood in large part because after all the VC never came close to attacking us on our own soil. Still, there is also little question that nowhere are Cheney's fingerprints more evident than on the torture program. It's certainly debatable that had Bush not chosen him as his VP it might not have happened.
Yes, I know enough about economics to realize that there is risk in playing some counterfactuals-in the first few years of Bush-Cheney I had thought of how things might have been different with a Gore Presidency. The trouble is that this counterfactual game can go too far. Still, I just don't think that there is any question that there is something let's just say special-ie, very different, if not deviant about Dick Cheney, the man.
"The Bush administration relied on some of Zybaydah's claims in justifying the invasion of Iraq. U.S. officials stated that the allegations that Iraq and al-Qaeda were linked in the training of people on chemical weapons came from Zubaydah.[135][136][137] The officials noted there was no independent verification of his claims.[135][136]"
"The U.S. Government included statements made by Zubaydah in regards to al Qaeda’s ability to obtain a dirty bomb to show a link between Iraq and al Qaeda.[138] According to a Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2004, Zubaydah said "he had heard that an important al Qaeda associate, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi intelligence."[139] But the year before in June 2003, Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were reported as saying there was no link between Saddam Hussein andal Qaeda.[140][141]"
"In the Senate Armed Services Committee 2008 report on the abuses of detainees, the Bush administration was described as having applied pressure to interrogators to find a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda prior to the Iraq War.[142] Major Paul Burney, a psychiatrist with the United States Army, said to the committee, "while we were [at Guantanamo] a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful."[142][143] He said that higher-ups were "frustrated" and applied "more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."[142][143][144]"
"Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell has said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Zubaydah
What I disagreed with on that Anderson Cooper show was when the CIA was alone blamed. The White House also knew. First of all the CIA is not an independent entity of the Administration. Secondly, it's clear that while the President didn't know till 2006, the Vice President knew all along as he was the one telling the CIA to do all this.
For more on Cheney see here. He's all over the place today defending his baby.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/dick-cheney-cia-torture-report
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