Fearmongering Beyond the Bunker

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"A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!' " --Lincoln


AS unpopular as the departing administration was at its end, the legacy addresses from Bush and Cheney were predictably repulsive in their vain attempts to raise and right their shipwreck of state from it's long submersion in political slime. We've let them drone on, for a time, with their fairytale revisionism and their celebrations of success, secure in the prospects of change from the new Democratic presidency.

No one expected the administration who had allowed over 4000 of our nation's defenders to perish for their stubborn refusal to abandon their war of opportunity to openly admit to their deliberate negligence - their autocratic prosecution of an open-ended occupation based on a charade of 'spreading democracy' and buttressed by a Potemkin regime propped-up by the sacrifices and violence of our nation's soldiers.

No one expected Bush and Cheney to abandon their swaggering delusions that they were somehow heroic in their flailing of our military forces against the predictable resistance their own opportunistic militarism. It was galling to hear their congratulatory benedictions to their petty reign, set against the emerging transition and seating of the repudiating instrument of the public's scorn . . . but we tolerated them.

Now it is time for these miserable stewards of the public trust to find their respective hidey-holes and burrow-in against the coming wave of legal and public prosecutions for their crimes and abuses in office. I suspect, though, that this bunch will operate as if they're still under the contrived cone of immunity the previous Congress' inaction allowed them to employ as a defense against public outrage at their tyranny.

Indeed, the former vice president thought it was appropriate Tuesday to brag on the anti-democratic, anti-constitutional cave-ins his administration made to a once-petty band of thugs; like intrusive and arresting provisions in the Patriot Act and electronic domestic snooping which he promotes as a defense against future attacks on the nation.

In an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the 'high probability' of another attack - another 'mushroom-cloud' alarm - IF we undo his administration's opportunistic surrenders to individuals (like the 9-11 suspects) who would disrupt our democracy with acts of violence.

“If it hadn’t been for what we did—with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth—then we would have been attacked again,” Cheney said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.,” he said.

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”

There are important things that the two former autocrats should be made to realize, from the public and from the new administration: It is the Bush/Cheney presidency which is saddled with the failure to heed and take action on their own intelligence reports to ward off the devastating attacks on our nation.

It is the Bush/Cheney presidency which is saddled with their deliberate lying and autocratic exercise of our military forces to overthrow a sovereign regime and install a new one behind the sacrifices of life and livelihood of our nation's defenders.

It is the Bush/Cheney presidency which is saddled with the diversion of attention and resources from the 'hunt' for the terror suspects - to Iraq - and the resulting seven-year safe-haven the fugitives have used to fan the flames of further violent resistance by the example of their freedom from justice and exploiting resistance to our own reflexive military deployments.

It is the Bush/Cheney presidency which is saddled with the increasing numbers, across the board, of individuals abroad bent on violent resistance to the U.S., our interests, and our allies. In Afghanistan alone, violence in 2008 rose to the highest levels since the initial invasion. The U.N. is reporting a 40% rise in civilian deaths there, a numbing percentage of those inflicted by our own occupying forces.

It is the Bush/Cheney presidency which is saddled with their own intelligence reports concluding that the Iraq conflict had become a "cause celebre" for Muslim jihadists. Likewise, in Afghanistan, a new NATO assessment, obtained by CNN, reportedly show that "some of the main reasons for the increase in violence is more U.S. troops on the ground and an increase in operational Afghan forces hitting insurgent targets around the country . . ."

What Cheney is celebrating and defending is their flimsy, flailing domestic response to the escalating effects of his administration's reckless, destabilizing, enduring military deployments abroad. There is little evidence that any of their anti-democratic, anti-constitutional constructions actually prevented any attack on our nation. Yet, it has become tragically clear that Bush/Cheney's military posture and their self-righteous directing of 'shock and awe' across sovereign borders has had the effect of fostering more individuals resorted to violent expressions of the self-determination and sovereignty the administration postured to promote and defend.

In reversing several tenants of the Bush/Cheney constructions - like the effort to close Guantanamo and torture/detention policy changes - the Obama administration has already begun to receive expressions of approval and support from influential figures in the Middle East, Asia, and from around the world. While it would be ridiculously naive to expect the same disarming response from all fugitives, Jihadists, or any other committed combatants, there is a very real prospect of lessening the animosity abroad toward the U.S. by making clear our intention to back away from Bush's imperialistic military expansionism across their borders.

The disengagement of our military from Bush's nation-building follies may not be met with an outpouring of flowers and candy at our retiring backs, but it will allow the authorities we expect to manage the region (outside of our docent influence) to operate without any threatening tinge of corruption from associations with our aggravating forces.

The tragic reality that Bush/Cheney's military constructions in Iraq and Afghanistan were poisonous, destabilizing failures. Their anti-democratic, anti-constitutional grabs for power and authority were counterproductive appeasements to the terrorists' violence. That reality will not be transformed by revisionism, lies . . . nor, by cynical, treasonous warnings of further catastrophic attacks if we dare to dismantle them.

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1. The terrorists are coming, warns missile defense lover Cheney

from HuffPo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-rossi/the-terrorists-are-coming_b_163931.html

"When Dick Cheney bellows about terrorist attacks in the US, it can only mean one thing: his beloved missile defense is under the gun . . ."

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2. Cheney's Twisted Logic

from The Plank at TNR: http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/02/04/cheney-s-twisted-logic.aspx

One more thing about that Cheney interview. He says:

“If you release the hard-core Al Qaeda terrorists that are held at Guantanamo, I think they go back into the business of trying to kill more Americans and mount further mass-casualty attacks,” he said. “If you turn ’em loose and they go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that?”

This has fast become a favorite GOP talking point--the theory that we should detain hundreds of people for eternity to guard against the risk that a handful might recidivate. But here's the thing. If you want to adopt Cheney's logic, then that leaves the Bush administration exposed as well. That's because, before Obama sought to close Gitmo, the Bush administration had been releasing some of its detainees. And some of them have indeed gone back to being terrorists. Just today, in the NYT, comes this report from Saudi Arabia:

Eleven Saudis who were released from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and then passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists are now believed to have fled the country and joined terrorist groups abroad, Saudi officials said Tuesday.

So, by Cheney's own logic, if one of those eleven, heaven forbid, participates in a mass-casualty attack on the U.S., then it's Cheney who's responsible for that.

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