In detail as only those Canadian Frenchmen could assemble, here is a biography of Big Time Dick that played on Canadian national television last fall. (Thanks to Avedon for the link.)
A summary of interesting stories may be found there, and included here are some flavorful bits.
Jacob Plotkin was Cheney's Yale roommate.
"It's hard to flunk out of Yale. It's something that one really has to put effort into. Yale at that time tried to make sure everybody who entered graduated.
Where others might spend some time on the weekend studying, Dick was either talking, drinking or playing cards with his football buddies."
The pass times of a draft-dodging Padwan. But that was before Lord Cheney was even an Apprentice to Master Rumsfeld. To give Balance to the story, go into the Murk of the fallen Sith, Darth Nixon. PBS, before it got Balanced, had a nice table telling the story this CBC link passes over in a few words of outline.
Cheney dodges out of the Nixon Empire before Darth Hoover's disgruntled apprentice can Deep Throat the Sith Lord Nixon. Still, he somehow continues to dodge the draft until a summons to service by the Ford administration.
Once there, the winsome waif of the military-industrial complex wins his heart. Alas, he can not bestow the full blessings of his power over the Force upon it yet. That will have to wait until his mentor and master Darth Rumsfeld can plant him into the Reagan- Bu$hCo operation.
There, the blessings of the Dark Side unfold for him. Back to the CBC outline:
...1990 AUGUST 2: Iraq invades Kuwait.
AUGUST: Cheney flies to Saudi Arabia to convince King Fahd to allow US troops into his country.
SEPTEMBER: The Pentagon says that 250,000 Iraqi troops with 1500 tanks are massed on the Saudi border. The photos are never made public.
Soviet satellite imagery taken that day shows no troops near the border...
1991
Journalist Jean Heller learns about the Soviet satellite imagery and presents them to Dick Cheney's office at the Pentagon. They ignore the story.
JANUARY: Operation Desert Storm begins.
In the wake of Desert Storm, Cheney hires Halliburton to put out 320 well-head fires and engage Halliburton subsidiary Brown and Root to rebuild courthouses, schools, utilities, police stations, and computer systems in Kuwait.
JUNE 10: Cheney and the troops who fought in Desert Storm are honored with a ticker tape parade up Broadway in New York.
JULY 3: Secretary Cheney is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H.W. Bush for his work on the Gulf War.
1992
Cheney pays Halliburton, Brown and Root $8.9 million for two studies on how to downsize the military.
AUGUST: Halliburton is selected by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do all the work needed to support the military for five years. This is the same plan it had itself drawn up...
1993
Cheney sets up Political Action Committee and ponders run for presidency. The CEO of Halliburton contributes to his PAC. Halliburton will later be awarded contracts after the invasion of Iraq.
1994
On a fishing trip with Halliburton CEO Thomas H. Cruikshank, and other captains of industry in New Brunswick, Cheney is asked if he would be willing to become Halliburton’s CEO.
1995
MARCH: President Clinton signs an order prohibiting "new investments [in Iran] by U.S. persons, including commitment of funds or other assets."
U.S. companies are prohibited from performing services "that would benefit the Iranian oil industry." Companies face fines of up to $500,000 and individuals may receive 10 years in jail for breaking the embargo.
MAY 6: President Clinton imposes a near total U.S. economic embargo on Iran.
OCTOBER: Cheney becomes CEO and Chairman of Halliburton.
During his five year stint at Halliburton, the company wins $2.3 billion in federal contracts, almost double the total of the previous five years, and another $1.5 billion in taxpayer-insured loans.
Halliburton is fined almost 4 million for selling products to Libya that could be used to trigger a nuclear program.
1996
Cheney, acting as head of Halliburton, says in a video for auditing company Arthur Andersen, "I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating, over and above just sort of the normal by-the-books auditing arrangement, They've got the traditional role to fill as our auditors...They do that extraordinarily well.” Arthur Andersen will collapse in the fallout of the Enron scandal five years later...
Although, once again, it pays to own judges on the Supreme Court.
But I digress. Back to highlights from the biography of our Sith Lord, where things move quickly:
2000
FEBRUARY: Halliburton opens an office in Tehran while Cheney is still CEO. At the same time, Halliburton ends its presence in Iraq.
SPRING: George Bush asks Cheney to help him find a vice-presidential running mate.
JUNE 13: Cheney tells the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary “we’re kept out of there primarily by our own government, which has made a decision that U.S. firms should not be allowed to invest significantly in Iran and I think that’s a mistake.
JULY: Cheney says he never voted against releasing Mandela from jail. He says he was only voting against imposing sanctions, even though sanctions were never mentioned in the House vote.
JULY 25: Bush tells the press that he has chosen Cheney to be his running mate.
JULY 30: Cheney says he actually wanted Mandela out of prison"Well, certainly I would have loved to have Nelson Mandela released. I don't know anybody who was for keeping him in prison. Again, this was a resolution of the U.S. Congress, so it wasn't as though if we passed it, he was going to be let out of prison."
AUGUST 16: Cheney quits Halliburton to run as Bush’s vice-president. He exits Halliburton with a stock payoff worth $30 million.
Don't forget the $80 million in stock options he got then, too.
It's such a target rich environment. It's so easy to digress.
2000
OCTOBER 24: Halliburton announces layoffs and assets sales because of weakness in its construction and engineering businesses. Analysts reduce Halliburton’s earning forecast.
OCTOBER 25: Halliburton announces it is under a grand jury investigation for over-billing the government of California.
NOVEMBER: Cheney suffers his fourth heart-attack.
NOVEMBER 13: It is reported that Halliburton stock has lost between $3 and $4 billion of its total market value.
Dressers Industries asbestos problem and weak engineering portfolio is blamed. Democrats question if Cheney had insider information when he sold his stock two months earlier for $30 million.
During the election campaign Cheney tells ABC News. “I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal.”
However, during his time as CEO, Halliburton was selling millions of dollars to Iraq in supplies for its oil industry. The deals were done through old subsidiaries of Dresser Industries. It was done under the auspices of the corrupt UN Oil for Food Program.
Halliburton worked with Iran and Libya as well, using its own subsidiaries.
2001
JANUARY 19: Dick Cheney is sworn in as Vice President of the United States.
JANUARY 29: President Bush announces the formation of the National Energy Policy Development Group in Cheney’s office. He announces that Cheney will chair the group.
FEBRUARY 2: Wall Street Journal publishes expose on Halliburton’s Tehran office. ( read the article )
Abdulamir Mahdi writes a letter to Cheney complaining that he is in jail for violating the Iranian embargo while the Vice President, who did the same thing, is free.
MARCH 5: Cheney has balloon angioplasty performed at George Washington University Hospital after suffering chest pains.
APRIL 19: Representatives John Dingell and Henry Waxman, Ranking Members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, send a letter to the General Accounting Office, seeking to obtain information about National Energy Policy Development Group. They wanted to find out who had participated in the report.
MAY 16: Cheney presents to President Bush a report entitled National Energy Policy, which recommended the adoption of the national energy policy that had been developed by the NEPDG. (read the National Energy Policy )
JUNE 21: Cheney’s office sends 77 pages of miscellaneous documents supposedly as a responsive reply to GAO’s request for documents. The package of documents contain pages with dollar amounts but no indication of the nature of purpose of the expenditure. Also included was the executive director’s credit card receipt for a pizza. Requests by the GAO for additional information was denied.
AUGUST 2: Cheney sends a letter to the Senate and House of Representatives, stating “actions undertaken by an agent of the Congress, the Comptroller General, which exceeded his lawful authority and which, if given effect, would unconstitutionally interfere with the functioning of the executive branch.”
Cheney says the GAO’s demand for documents compromise “the confidentiality of communications among a President, a Vice-President, the President’s other senior advisors and others.”
Cheney also states that he had provided "documents responsive to the Comptroller General's inquiry concerning the costs associated with the (Energy task force's work.)" Cheney was apparently writing about the 77 pages.
SEPTEMBER 11: Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington. In the wake of the attacks, Dick Cheney reportedly is taken to Raven Rock, a top-secret military base. He orders U.S. military fighters to shoot down any civilian planes that may have been hijacked.
2002
JANUARY: Sierra Club sues Cheney, et al, to get documents related to the National Energy Development Group...
FEBRUARY: Ambassador Joe Wilson is told by the CIA that Cheney is interested in an allegation that Iraq had tried to purchase Yellow Cake uranium from Niger. Wilson goes to Niger to investigate and concludes the rumour is false.
FEBRUARY 22: David Walker, the Comptroller of the General Accounting Office, files a lawsuit in U.S. District Court to get access to records relating to the activities of the National Energy Development Group....
JUNE 22: A memo written by INC (Iraqi National Council) lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two "U.S. governmental recipients" for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. The letter shows Cheney's office was getting intelligence from a highly suspect source.
AUGUST 26: Cheney tells an audience of veterans "There’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and that he will use them] against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
Selling the nuclear threat became key to convincing Americans to support the war.
DECEMBER 9: U.S. District Court Judge John Bates dismisses the high profile lawsuit filed by David Walker, the Comptroller of the General Accounting Office, against Vice President Dick Cheney...
Alas, the article ends here. So much has happened since then, most happy for Darth Cheney, his minions at Halliburton and the American Enterprise Institute.
Of course, all that nonsense about there being only two Sith Lords, and that a Sith must kill his master is absolute silliness. Darth Rumsfeld hand fed Darth Cheney to make him the Beast he is today. And stepped aside to let the greater master of the Dark Side take his position leading Bu$hCo.
Again happily, most of the incipient criminal charges for war crimes may miss Darth Cheney, suggesting he is a Sith Lord indeed and Strong in the Force.
Tena at First Draft points to Matthew Rothschild's Alternet post for this.
General Sanchez, Attorney General Gonzales, Grand Moff Rumsfeld, and even Dear Leader himself may all face charges some day from the Hague. Not the real Power behind the machinations.
When Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee last year, he was asked whether he "ordered or approved the use of sleep deprivation, intimidation by guard dogs, excessive noise, and inducing fear as an interrogation method for a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison."
Sanchez, who was head of the Pentagon's Combined Joint Task Force-7 in Iraq, swore the answer was no. Under oath, he told the Senators he "never approved any of those measures to be used."
But a document the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) obtained from the Pentagon flat out contradicts Sanchez's testimony. It's a memorandum entitled "CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," dated September 14, 2003. In it, Sanchez approved several methods designed for "significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee." These included "sleep management"; "yelling, loud music, and light control: used to create fear, disorient detainee, and prolong capture shock"; and "presence of military working dogs: exploits Arab fear of dogs."
On March 30, the ACLU wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, urging him "to open an investigation into whether General Ricardo A. Sanchez committed perjury in his sworn testimony."
The problem is, Gonzales may himself have committed perjury in his Congressional testimony this January.
According to a March 6 article in The New York Times, Gonzales submitted written testimony that said: "The policy of the United States is not to transfer individuals to countries where we believe they likely will be tortured, whether those individuals are being transferred from inside or outside the United States." He added that he was "not aware of anyone in the executive branch authorizing any transfer of a detainee in violation of that policy."
"That's a clear, absolute lie," says Michael Ratner, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who is suing Administration officials for their involvement in the torture scandal. "The Administration has a policy of sending people to countries where there is a likelihood that they will be tortured."
The New York Times article backs up Ratner's claim. It says "a still-classified directive signed by President Bush within days of the September 11 attacks" gave the CIA broad authority to transfer suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogations. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International estimate that the United States has transferred between 100 and 150 detainees to countries notorious for torture.
So Gonzales may not be the best person to evaluate the allegation of perjury against Sanchez.
But going after Sanchez or Gonzales for perjury is the least of it. Sanchez may be personally culpable for war crimes and torture, according to Human Rights Watch. And Gonzales himself was one of the legal architects of the torture policies. As such, he may have been involved in "a conspiracy to immunize U.S. agents from criminal liability for torture and war crimes under U.S. law," according to Amnesty International's recent report: "Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power."
As White House Counsel, Gonzales advised President Bush to not apply Geneva Convention protections to detainees captured in Afghanistan, in part because this "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act," Gonzales wrote in his January 25, 2002, memo to the President...
The Bush Administration's legal troubles don't end with Sanchez or Gonzales. They go right to the top: to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush himself. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA say there is "prima facie" evidence against Rumsfeld for war crimes and torture. And Amnesty International USA says there is also "prima facie" evidence against Bush for war crimes and torture...
But not Lord Cheney.
It gets better.
The next Preznitial $election is in 2008, and already Bu$hCo is grooming awkward and stubborn young Jeb for the Job.
Of course, he will need the hand of experience to guide him in the Ways of the Force.
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