John Nichols: 'Cheney Has Stepped Way Over the Line'

[marmar]

from the Nation:


BLOG | Posted 01/19/2007 @ 3:57pm
"Cheney Has Stepped Way Over the Line"


Even historians who are not particularly sympathetic to Jimmy Carter's presidency share the widely accepted view that Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, was one of the most engaged and effective occupants the nation's No. 2 job.

So it means something when Mondale says there are limits to what a Vice President can and should do. And it should mean a lot that Mondale is arguing forcefully that Dick Cheney has exceeded those limits with results that are as practically dangerous as they are politically troubling.

"I think that Cheney has stepped way over the line," Mondale, who during his tenure as Carter's Vice President served as a senior adviser to the President and a prominent spokesman for Administration policies, explained Friady in an aggressive critique of the current Vice President during the opening session of a three-day University of Georgia conference on Carter's presidency.

"I think Cheney's been at the center of cooking up farcical estimates of national risks, weapons of mass destruction and the 9/11 connection to Iraq," Mondale continued in his Friday morning address, which focused on one of the most serious complaints aboit Cheney's tenure in the Bush White House: the penchant of the Vice President and his aides to pressure federal agencies, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, to produce reports that reflect Cheney's biases rather than reality.

Prior to the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq, Cheney repeatedly visited the CIA headquarters and demanded that briefers confirm his personal theories about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and about supposed links between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

When veteran CIA briefers informed the Vice President that the facts could not be forced to conform with his political views, Cheney dismissed them and demanded that other analysts brief him.

Eventually, members of the House Intelligence Committee wrote a letter to the Vice President urging him to stop pressuring CIA specialists to warp their reports to match his political whims. By then, however, Cheney was relying on the more politically analysts in an "intelligence" operation that had been set up within Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense. .....(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=158914

[durtee librul]

1. Ok, so now the challenge

begins on how to rid ourselves of this canker sore on our collective asses....

But, I hold no hope that our wunnerful new congress will do anything at all...I have a few suggestions, but I am out of cookies and milk for Agent Mike.

[peacetalksforall]

2. I got to watch some of the events of the 30 year Carter Admin get together

that was carried on C-Span this weekend. Kudos to C-Span for covering it. I heard Mondale say that they promised the American people honesty and delivered it. I believe him. My admiration for Carter and Mondale goes up with each day. Look at what we've lost. We must return genuine honor and integrity to the White House.

HOORAY FOR MONDALE for speaking out!!!