"Vice Squad" - Cheney's secretive freak show staff terrify other officials

[Rose Siding]

Here's a chilling glimpse within the little shop of horrors that is running the world.

This whole American Prospect article is worth a read. The snips do not do it justice-

...{O}fficials who have opposed Cheney believe that President Bush has “views” only about basic principles, and that in making dozens of complex decisions he relies on pre-determined staff papers. Says one insider deeply involved in U.S. policy toward North Korea: “The president is given only the most basic notions about the Korea issue. They tell him, ‘Above South Korea is a country called North Korea. It is an evil regime.’ … So that translates into a presidential decision: Why enter into any agreement with an evil regime?”

...Cheney’s press secretaries -- he has run through seven of them --.... job is saying nothing, and saying it often. His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no -- nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president’s office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. “We just don’t give out that kind of information,” says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney’s “angels.” She won’t say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. “It’s just not something we talk about.”
....
Today Wurmser, Hannah, Liz Cheney, and her father are pushing hard for confrontations with both Iran and Syria. Liz Cheney, who exercises enormous power inside the State Department, has secured millions of dollars to support opposition elements in both countries, and she has met with Syria’s version of Ahmad Chalabi, a discredited businessman from Virginia named Farid al-Ghadry. Hannah sat in on the meeting with Ghadry, which was arranged through Meyrav Wurmser, a friend of the would-be Syrian leader. Hannah and Wurmser’s boss, the vice president, talks freely about the need for a military showdown with Iran to destroy its alleged nuclear program. The true measure of how powerful the vice president’s office remains today is whether the United States chooses to confront Iran and Syria or to seek diplomatic solutions. For the moment, at least, the war party led by Dick Cheney remains in ascendancy.

http://photos1.blogger.com.nyud.net:8090/blogger/1696/694/1600/hitchcock.psycho.jpg

[acmavm]

1. If we have to deal with Cheney and Cheneyette, we are so screwed.

Nothing good could ever come from those genes.

[Rose Siding]

2. No idea how he could EVER have floated a nepotism charge against Wilson

It boggles.

[KoKo]

5. Average Americans don't know the connection. Where is she getting

the "millions" to topple Syria and Iran? I assume it's not our tax dollars...so from where?

And why is this not mentioned as the Nepotism it is in the MSM? What qualifications could she possibly have? What role does Condi play in this? Or, was Condi just always the figurehead and the "dutiful" organ player at Camp David. An empty skirt....

[Rose Siding]

8. State was given $75 million for this purpose just recently-

in addition, I believe to a previous budget. We're paying heavily for this, though she may have developed other funding sources I suppose.

[July]

26. Her source of funds is our tax dollars, I believe. nt

[KoKo]

4. It's an excellent read...

thanks. I wonder if these people could all be prosecuted. Since when has a Vice President and his staff usurped the power of the President and Congress. Since when has Congress sat by and watched this?

Surely this is a Constitutional question. But, who is left who will do something about it?

I've just about given up hope. We read this...everyone knows something is terribly wrong...but aside from all the whistle blowers...nothing gets done to stop it.

[Southsideirish]

10. Yes, thank you!

[justgamma]

3. Who pays these people?

If it's the taxpayers, I think we have the right to know.

[Rose Siding]

6. It is, and we do. Note the difference in staffing practices -

snip>
....Unlike previous administrations, including Bill Clinton’s, Cheney’s office was loaded for partisan bear from day one. Leon Fuerth, who led Al Gore’s office of national security affairs for eight years, says that their far smaller operation was led by nonpolitical or military staffers who weren’t vetted for political loyalties or ideology.

“The people who worked for me were all seconded from federal agencies, every one of them. They were uniformed officers from all three branches, people from the Department of Commerce, from the CIA, but all of them were professionals and civil servants,” says Fuerth. “I was the only politically appointed person. My deputy was at first an Air Force colonel, and after he retired, an Army colonel.” He recalls that one appointee, settling into an office in Fuerth’s shop, hung a portrait of Ronald Reagan.

There probably aren’t any portraits of Bill Clinton or FDR on the walls of Cheney’s OVP, which sprawls throughout the executive office building across the street from the White House. Instead, the staff -- hand-picked by Libby -- was drawn from the ranks of far-right think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and WINEP, and from carefully screened Cheney loyalists in law firms around town -- all of whom hit the ground running.

[SlavesandBulldozers]

17. good god what a nightmare.

halls full of AEI staffers making decisions of global significance. Oh. My. God.

[struggle4progress]

9. I bet Dick's got organized crime figures on his staff. Otherwise ..

.. they wouldn't be hiding who they were ...

[Chiyo-chichi]

22. They are public servants. They work for us.

And we do have every right to know who works in the Office of the Vice President!

[Me.]

7. Wurmser & Hannah, Again?

Haven't they learned a thing? Time for FitzG. to nail these two.

[Swamp Rat]

11. Hope Springs Eternal!

:patriot:

[bleever]

12. Yes.

Yes, it does.

:patriot:

[Catrina]

13. Wurmser, if this is true, is another psychopath. He KNEW and WANTED

chaos in Iraq according to this!! With NO regard for the lives lost, either of the Iraqi people or of US troops!

Later, in a series of papers and a book, Wurmser argued that toppling Saddam was likely to lead directly to civil war and the breakup of Iraq, but he supported the policy anyway: “The residual unity of is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq will “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse.

“The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.” Later, with former cia director James Woolsey and others, Wurmser proposed restoring the Jordan-based Hashemite monarchy in Iraq. While Wurmser’s OVP allies may share his neoconservative fantasies of the willy-nilly reorganization of the Middle East, few experts do. “I’ve known him for years, and I consider him to be a naive simpleton,” says a former U.S. ambassador. Adds Wilkerson, “A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, as I did with Feith. You wouldn’t open their wallet and find a card, but I often wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much that they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Israel’s interest than our own.”

How did this happen and continue for so long? They WANTED what's happening in Iraq now to happen, because they want to split it in three parts. They want to reconstruct the entire ME. This is insanity! I know Ledeen wanted chaos, he has written about it.

I am speechless. They TOLD people their plans, and no one stopped them! No wonder the Generals are in revolt. They are sworn to protect their Constitution 'against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. The enemy is within!

[ChairmanAgnostic]

23. I just finished the Confession of an Econ Hit Man. You nailed it.

They wanted Iraq to happen, and they wanted it to fail. How else can they manage to transfer hundreds of billions to Brown, Haliburton, Bechtel, etc? The iraqi invasion is a complete success - for the cronies of Cheney. For the military suppliers. For their owners and financiers of the GOP.
As for Iraq itself, who cares? our military dead? collateral damage. Our loss of global power and respect? Temporary.

[Rose Siding]

24. Was Wilkerson this candid in his book?

He did write a book, didn't he?

[Me.]

25. This Is So True

What we have in play here is Cheney's shadow government, including all the miscreants who arranged the war in Iraq and who are behind the Plame/AIPAC/Niger forgeries situations. They need to be stopped, or they will have the world at war for now and forever. Wurmser and his evil wife have had their eye on Syria for a long time, with that being the lead to Iran.

[msgadget]

14. How the hell are they going to get him to leave if he doesn't want to?

Rice was so powerless against them the president took over 'dealing' with them. Now I know what that really meant, he stayed out of their way.


<clip>

"The staff that the vice president sent out made sure that those didn’t key anything up that wasn’t what the vice president wanted,” says Wilkerson. “Their style was simply to sit and listen, and take notes. And if things looked like they were going to go speedily to a decision that they knew that the vice president wasn’t going to like, generally they would, at the end of the meeting, in great bureaucratic style, they’d say: ‘We totally disagree. Meeting’s over.’” At that point, policymakers from the nsc, the State Department, the Defense Department, and elsewhere would have to go back to the drawing board. And if a policy option that Cheney opposed somehow got written up as a decision memorandum and sent to the Oval Office, he showed up to kill it. “The vice president’s second or third bite at the apple was when he’d walk in to see the president,” says Wilkerson. “And things would get reversed, because of the vice president’s meeting in the Oval Office with no one else there.”

...

Wilkerson portrays the vice president’s office as the source of a zealous, almost messianic approach to foreign affairs. “There were several remarkable things about the vice president’s staff,” he says. “One was how empowered they were, and one was how in sync they were. In fact, we used to say about both and the vice president’s office that they were going to win nine out of ten battles, because they are ruthless, because they have a strategy, and because they never, ever deviate from that strategy … They make a decision, and they make it in secret, and they make in a different way than the rest of the bureaucracy makes it, and then suddenly foist it on the government -- and the rest of the government is all confused.”

[OneBlueSky]

15. excellent! . . . and highly informative . . . recommended! . . . n/t

.

[enough]

16. Hair-raising.

Is there ANYTHING constitutional about this?

[paparush]

18. This bunch of apes will not walk out of office in January '09...regardless

of the outcome of the *cough* election *cough*

They will have to be driven into the streets like dogs before the mob.

[0007]

19. Mary Matalin and her role has always puzzled me.

She worked about close to Cheney and slept every night with James.

[KoKo]

20. Is Matalin the reason Gore didn't use Carville and Begala in his 2000

Campaign? Is there something he might know about that relationship?

Mary Matalin is part of the most corrupt Administration in our time ..yet
her husband is respected by the Democratic Community and can appear on the Cables and most of us here love what he says because it sounds so good.

[0007]

27. I don't know. But I have no respect for James Carville anymore.

It seem to be the same thing all the time. I've given up on them as I have on CNN.

[The Backlash Cometh]

21. Republicans voted in a light-weight!

Empty suit who thought dropping bombs would round out his resume.

To think that this little man had any balls at all to question other people's purple hearts.

[mike_c]

28. this is an awesome article....

Thank you!

[progressoid]

29. Good God, what a read.

[Canuckistanian]

30. Astounding

It's like a whole parallel government within the OVP. Except the OVP actually has the power.

And he manages to do it unilaterally wih next to zero popular support (or public knowledge for that matter)

[moggie12]

31. Yikes!

Scary! How did the US get to be a bad novel?

[Supersedeas]

32. more lessons in responsive receptive democracy

[Vinca]

33. Gee, I feel so much better knowing Liz Cheney's in charge.

And it's comforting to know King George might be able to place North Korea on a map. OMG . . . we are so screwed.