Tag: Cheney

Dick Cheney Makes a Great Case for Prosecuting Torturers Like Himself

Seth Anderson0 comment

A Couple of Jokers
A Couple of Jokers…

Can someone please start a Kickstarter campaign to snatch up Dick Cheney and fly him to The Hague for a War Crimes trial? I know a lot of people that would donate money for that…

In a disturbing interview on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, former vice president Dick Cheney basically taunted ambitious lawyers at the Hague to come after him.

The host of the show, Chuck Todd, read horrific details from the Senate report on “enhanced interrogation” and asked Mr. Cheney if he thought they amounted to torture. Rectal feeding? Keeping a man in a coffin-sized box? Handcuffing another man’s wrists to an overhead bar for 22 hours per day, for two consecutive days?

No.

…

Mr. Cheney was bullishly nonsensical — refusing to acknowledge a difference between mass murder and torture. Worse, he was unrepentant.

Did any of the details from the report “plant any seed of doubt?” asked Mr. Todd. “Absolutely not,” Mr. Cheney answered.

What about the fact that “25 percent of the detainees” turned out to be innocent?

“I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective” answered Mr. Cheney

(click here to continue reading Dick Cheney Makes a Great Case for Prosecuting Torturers – NYTimes.com.)

I find it really hard to make jokes about how evil Dick Cheney is, but without jokes, he’s a sociopathic monster, and sadly a monster that the rest of the world assumes speaks for America.1 No remorse for torturing innocent people, sometimes to death, no remorse at all. Torture doesn’t provide actionable intelligence in the first place, but torturing people just the heck of it? 

As Digby writes:

This went all the way back to the 70s when Cheney was working in the Nixon and Ford White Houses and thought that the USA was becoming soft and the presidency was losing its juice. He was ready to fix that when he got the chance and he has no regrets. He does not care one bit that he’s considered by millions of people to be a war criminal and a sadist. He got what he wanted.

…

There are Godwinesque restrictions on certain things we can say about Dick Cheney in public. But I don’t think it’s too much to point out that having him on television saying what he said yesterday is the very definition of the banality of evil. Yesterday morning Dick Cheney, torturer, unrepentant war criminal was presented as just another government bureaucrat doing his job. He will be welcomed into the homes of the political elite like any other former VP, as will the man he went to great lengths to say approved it all: George W. Bush.  In fact, Jeb Bush is widely hailed as the best man to carry on the “Bush tradition” and cognoscenti of all political stripes are cheering on his candidacy.

Think about that: the political establishment believes that the brother of the president who ordered torture and invaded a country on false pretenses — and who has never shown the slightest daylight between his brother’s policies and decision and his own beliefs — is an excellent candidate for the presidency. It’s not even a question as far as I can tell.

(click here to continue reading Hullabaloo – How Cheney planned his move for decades.)

and an excerpt from a powerful post by Hunter of Daily Kos:

Let us suppose that every one of the assertions is true. Let us suppose that torture, by which we mean the simulated drownings, the broken bones, the medical injuries, the psychological torture, the death in a bitterly cold room—”worked.” It generated irreplaceable results. Valuable results. It was manifestly successful.

Then why are we not continuing it?

Why are we reserving it for suspected Muslim terrorists or collaborators or hangers-on or those named by another tortured suspect, and not, say, against arms smugglers? Against suspected drug importers? Against Swiss bankers who are suspected of laundering money gained in organized crime?

No, forget that—let us presume it to be not a weapon for fighting crime, but a weapon meant only for war. Does that mean that America shall henceforth be torturing wartime prisoners, if we feel they have information we require?

Set aside the relevant laws and treaties—does only America get to torture prisoners? Are we declaring that wartime torture of prisoners work, and therefore should be used, as international policy statement or as statement that America alone ought to benefit from the manifestly successful tool of torture? We are comfortable, then, with the notion that our own soldiers will be similarly interrogated by opposing forces or groups, and due to our understanding of the military significance of the irreplaceable results to be gleaned, we will acquiesce to the treatment, and will not seek to prosecute those that torture our own citizens?

Or are we, indeed, the declared exception to this rule? We may torture to the point of broken bones, blood clots, mental incapacitation or—oops—the occasional death, but only us, due to our manifest and unique need to do so?

That is where I am stumped, and where, over a decade of debate, we continue to make no progress whatsoever in the conversation. Sen. John McCain can ask the question or I can ask the question; it makes no difference. Whether it be the past vice president or any of the various pundits of the punditry litter, the declaration that our torture of prisoners has been manifestly successful is always where the debate abruptly trails off, like the author has suddenly remembered they have somewhere else to be. There is never an answer on why we have used international law to put torturers to death for past interrogations considered similarly manifestly successful by their nations’ advocates, and no opinion given on whether we shall be withdrawing from those treaties in the future or merely ignoring them if we feel it would be manifestly successful to do so. There is no citation as to what ought to be done against those that treat our soldiers similarly in the future. We are simply told that we will torture, perhaps under euphemism if the wordsmiths object to the older word, because it generates “results.” Full stop. The rest is just left hanging in the wind like a noose from a tree.

(click here to continue reading Of all the torture defenses, ‘because it works’ is the most troubling.)

Footnotes:
  1. He doesn’t, for the record [↩]

China Reaps Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom

Seth Anderson0 comment

A Couple of Jokers
A Couple of Jokers

Oh, dandy. Aren’t you  glad that Bush Cheney and that merry band of war criminals decided to piss away trillions of dollars and uncounted lives in the sands of Iraq in order to free Iraqi oil from Saddam Hussein?

Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world’s top oil producers, and China is now its biggest customer.

China already buys nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, nearly 1.5 million barrels a day, and is angling for an even bigger share, bidding for a stake now owned by Exxon Mobil in one of Iraq’s largest oil fields.

“The Chinese are the biggest beneficiary of this post-Saddam oil boom in Iraq,” said Denise Natali, a Middle East expert at the National Defense University in Washington. “They need energy, and they want to get into the market.”

…

“We lost out,” said Michael Makovsky, a former Defense Department official in the Bush administration who worked on Iraq oil policy. “The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint they are benefiting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply.”

 

(click here to continue reading China Reaps Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom – NYTimes.com.)

Six Thousand Thirteen Too Many
Six Thousand Thirteen Too Many

Especially when it turns out Exxon Mobil and their ilk expected to be able to reap their usual massive profits…

Notably, what the Chinese are not doing is complaining. Unlike the executives of Western oil giants like Exxon Mobil, the Chinese happily accept the strict terms of Iraq’s oil contracts, which yield only minimal profits. China is more interested in energy to fuel its economy than profits to enrich its oil giants.

Chinese companies do not have to answer to shareholders, pay dividends or even generate profits. They are tools of Beijing’s foreign policy of securing a supply of energy for its increasingly prosperous and energy hungry population. “We don’t have any problems with them,” said Abdul Mahdi al-Meedi, an Iraqi Oil Ministry official who handles contracts with foreign oil companies. “They are very cooperative. There’s a big difference, the Chinese companies are state companies, while Exxon or BP or Shell are different.”

China is now making aggressive moves to expand its role, as Iraq is increasingly at odds with oil companies that have cut separate deals with Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region.

Or as Jeff Danziger’s comic puts it:

jeff Danziger 130604

Republished at Hubris Isn’t the Half of It

eggplant0 comment

Stop Bitching Start a Revolution

My photo was used to illustrate this post

As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air.  The Donahue Show was deemed likely to be insufficiently war-boosting and was thus removed 10 years ago next week, and 10 days after the largest antiwar (or anything else) demonstrations in the history of the world, as a preemptive strike against the voices of honest peaceful people. From there, MSNBC proceeded to support the war with mild critiques around the edges, and to white-out the idea of impeachment or accountability.

But now MSNBC has seen its way clear to airing a documentary about the fraudulent case it assisted in, a documentary titled Hubris. This short film (which aired between 9 and 10 p.m. ET Monday night, but with roughly half of those minutes occupied by commercials) pointed out the role of the New York Times in defrauding the public, but not MSNBC’s role.

click here to view: Hubris Isn’t the Half of It

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War Criminals without Conscience

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Damn it, these assholes need to serve time for the war criminals they are. Bush, Cheney Rumsfeld and all their minions of doom, ensuring that several generations of Iraqis and Afghanis and Muslims hate the US, and by proxy, all Americans.

Haymarket Riot Memorial

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

… Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

[Click to continue reading George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent’ – Times Online ]

These Bushites have no conscience, no remorse, they should stand trial at The Hague. All they cared about was winning elections, and raping and pillaging the world was just incidental damage to them.

Iraq War Triumphalism Ignores Dead Civilians

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Corn counters the Iraq-War-was-a-Success-Chest-Thumpers who recently have crawled out of the wreckage of the Bush (mal)Administration to blather on the Sunday talk show circuit. By what metric was this voluntary and unnecessary war a successes?

Memorials

But, of course, the ultimate outcome of the Iraq war — whatever the results of the latest election — remains unknown. And we can continue to debate whether Bush was justified in launching the war, whether he bamboozled the public about the threat Saddam Hussein supposedly posed, and whether Bush’s late surge did help nudge Iraq in a better (or less worse) direction. (It does take chutzpah to hail the Bush administration for the surge, after this crew spent years screwing up in Iraq.) Yet what is galling is the frequent absence from these discussions of a central fact: tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Iraqis are dead because of the war, and millions have been displaced, driven out of their homes and out of their country. …

In the United States, debates about the war often cover the obvious costs: U.S. military casualties (4,380), taxpayer money ($711 billion), and opportunities missed (Afghanistan). What often goes unmentioned is the high cost that was imposed upon the Iraqi people. Have you seen George W. Bush or Dick Cheney ever directly talk about the thousands who died and the millions who had to flee?

There’s no precise number of the Iraqi civilians who lost their lives due to the war. In August 2008, a Congressional Research Service report surveyed the various estimates. It noted that a World Health Organization study covering the first three years of the war had placed the civilian death toll at 151,999. A Brookings Institution study put the number at 113,616 for the first five years. Whatever the figure, it’s a lot — and this doesn’t include Iraqis who were physically or mentally injured and did not die. In per capita terms, the equivalent death figure for the United States would be over a million people. And war-related deaths are far from over in Iraq. Last month, the civilian death toll jumped to 211 people from 135 in January.

[Click to continue reading Iraq War Triumphalism Ignores a Key Matter: Dead Civilians — Politics Daily]

It isn’t too late to hold war crime trials in the Hague, is it?

Reading Around on September 1st through September 2nd

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected September 1st through September 2nd:

  • Will Chicago See a Hotel Strike? – Chicagoist – Chicago's hotel workers are clocking in today without a union contract, as negotiators from UNITE-HERE Local 1 and the Hotel Employers Labor Relations Association has yet to reach an agreement on a new pact. The previous contract expired at last night at midnight. “It’s been a fight to even just get to the table,” a spokeswoman for the hotel workers’ union told Crain's. “We’re not close, and I think we’re looking at the possibility of a major fight.”
  • Dithering: Jonny Greenwood: Sasha Frere-Jones : The New Yorker – "Q: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?

    JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me"
    I would add, they sound fine if they are recorded at a high enough sample rate.

  • Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch – And if it is indeed the case that the Washington Post is recycling the public views of ideologues, hacks, and torture-tourists like Marc Thiessen as inside scoops, then Finn, Warrick, and Tate granted anonymity to their sources because naming them would by itself discredit the story. There is a place for anonymous quotes in journalism, but this is not it.

Washington Post Loves Em Some Cheney

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Washington Post Loves Em Some Cheney, and will go to no small lengths to demonstrate their non-homosexual love with the Vice President of Torture Is US.

Tag

Glenn Greenwald rolls his eyes in exasperation:

Who are the Post’s sources for this full-scale vindication of Dick Cheney’s defense of torture?  “Two sources who described the sessions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much information about detainee confinement remains classified”; “one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding”; “one former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said”; “One former agency official.” It’s unclear how much overlap there is in that orgy of pro-Cheney anonymity, but there is not a single on-the-record source to corroborate the Torture-Saved-Us-From-Mass-Death narrative, nor is there even a shred of information about the motives or views of these “officials.”

What makes the Post’s breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims — the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report — provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves.  Ironically, nobody has done a better job this week of demonstrating how true that is than the Post’s own Greg Sargent — who, in post after post this week1– dissected the IG Report to demonstrate that it provides no evidence for Cheney’s claims that torture helped obtain valuable intelligence.

That the released documents provide no support for Cheney’s claims was so patently clear that many news articles contained unusually definitive statements reporting that to be so. The New York Times reported that the documents Cheney claimed proved his case “do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness.” ABC News noted that “the visible portions of the heavily redacted reports do not indicate whether such information was obtained as a result of controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.” TPM’s Zachary Roth documented that “nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture,” while The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman detailed that, if anything, the documents prove “that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.” As Sargent reported, even Bush’s loyal Terrorism adviser, Frances Fargos Townsend, admitted that the IG Report provides no basis for what the Post today is ludicrously implying

[Click to continue reading The Washington Post’s Cheney-ite defense of torture – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com]

Mind you, this is not editorial Op-Ed, this is an (alleged) news story. Can Kaplan sell The Washington Post to Rupert Murdoch already, so we can all ignore it more easily?

Footnotes:
  1. such as: here here here here etc. [↩]

Cheney Is to Blame for the Next Attack

Seth Anderson0 comment

Frank Rich writes about everybody’s favorite Darth Vader figure, Diamond Dick Cheney

Patches of sky

The Beltway antics that greeted the great Cheney-Obama torture debate were an unsettling return to the post-9/11 dynamic that landed America in Iraq. Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.

Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.

The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch.

[Click to continue reading Frank Rich – Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack? – NYTimes.com]

and there is the Fourth Estate, both good and bad, though by volume, more bad journalism than good as is usually the case:

Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”

One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.

At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.

KBR Sleazy Until the End

Seth Anderson0 comment

KBR, the Halliburton company who specializes in cutting corners to increase profits, found an easy way to steal more taxpayer money: do a half-assed job and kiss-up to the Pentagon.

Navy Exchange

Far from suffering for its shoddy military contracting in Iraq, Congressional investigators have found that KBR Inc. was awarded $83 million in performance bonuses. Even worse, more than half came after Pentagon investigators linked faulty KBR wiring to the electrocution of four soldiers intent on relaxation. One soldier died taking a shower and another in a swimming pool.

How such settings became part of harm’s way for the military was the question put to an electrical engineer hired by the Army who reported finding that 90 percent of KBR’s wiring work in Iraq was not done safely. Some 70,000 buildings where troops lived and worked were not up to code, according to the engineer, who told a Congressional hearing of “some of the most hazardous, worst-quality work I have ever inspected.”

Officials of KBR, the offshoot of the Halliburton conglomerate once run so lucratively by former Vice President Dick Cheney, deny responsibility and say the work met the British code used in the war zone. Flat denial is an all-too-familiar refrain from this most favored and most questionable of military contractors. The electrical engineer found most wirers were not experienced in the British code and many were third-country nationals with no electrical training at all.

[Click to continue reading: Editorial – KBR Does It Again – NYTimes.com]

Take away their corporate charter, throw the executives in Supermax prison, KBR will clean up their act.

Reading Around on March 13th through March 16th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links collected March 13th through March 16th:

  • The NYT should just give Cheney a byline – “Dick Cheney isn’t Vice President any more, but the New York Times is still treating his comments as so newsworthy they must be presented without rebuttal. The Times devotes 558 words to Cheney’s appearance on CNN yesterday – 501 of which are devoted to simply quoting or paraphrasing Cheney. The 57 words that weren’t devoted to amplifying Cheney’s arguments didn’t include even a word of rebuttal:”

  • 25 Things I Learned at MIT – TrueHoop By Henry Abbott – ESPN – Last Saturday I filled most of a notebook with thoughts from the MIT Sloan Sports Business Conference. It’s all good fodder for TrueHoop. Pieces have made their way onto TrueHoop. More to come.

    But it has been a busy week ever since (there is no rest when you’re determined to write about Trevor Ariza every ten minutes!) and I don’t want to let those thoughts slip through the cracks.

    Some notes:

Bookmarks for January 17th through January 19th

swanksalot0 comment

A few interesting links for January 17th through January 19th:

  • MARK BRYAN Dick Cheney – Ode to Dick Cheney: print available (click this link)
    Come you masters of war
    You that build all the guns
    You that build the death planes
    You that build the big bombs
    You that hide behind walls
    You that hide behind desks
    I just want you to know
    I can see through your masks

  • macosxhints.com – Adjust ‘locked’ volume levels when using optical audo – “When you use optical audio on your Mac, OS X locks the volume level to the highest setting, forcing you to adjust the volume level with your receiver. This “feature” is both annoying and unneeded. To get around this lock, you can simply install a free utility called Soundflower”

Cheney’s Office Thwarts Climate Rules

swanksalot0 comment

These bums need to be run out of office sooner than 2009, else our planet will be destroyed. Environmental policy should not be set by oil corporations.

Bush administration officials agreed that greenhouse gases could endanger the public and should be regulated under clean-air laws, but later reversed course amid opposition from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the oil industry, a congressional report said.

The report, by the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, offers a look at the breadth of Bush administration support for regulations before such plans abruptly stopped. The report draws heavily on an interview with a former Environmental Protection Agency official who had told Congress that Mr. Cheney’s office tried to censor federal testimony on the danger of global warming. It is also based on confidential interviews with EPA staff and documents subpoenaed from the EPA.

“This is the dysfunctions and motivations of the Bush administration laid bare,” Chairman Ed Markey (D., Mass.) said in a statement.

[From Cheney’s Office Accused Of Thwarting Climate Rules – WSJ.com]

[Non-subscribers use this link to read the entire article]

Cheney Sought to Deny Climate Change

Seth Anderson0 comment

Wouldn’t want to be caught doing anything that might help our planet, would we now, Mr. Cheney?

A disclosure Tuesday that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office sought to alter a federal official’s prepared testimony about the health consequences of global warming intensified an increasingly open conflict between the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House over how to respond to climate change.

The latest in a series of disclosures about internal disputes within the Bush administration came as President George W. Bush was in Japan with other leaders of the Group of Eight nations to forge an agreement on combating climate change. But back home, Mr. Bush’s critics contend that his aides are working to ensure that any actions his administration takes in response to climate change will have a limited impact.

The disclosure about Vice President Cheney’s role came from Jason Burnett, who until last month was the EPA’s associate deputy administrator

[From Cheney Sought to Alter Climate Discussion – WSJ.com]

snip

In his letter, Mr. Burnett notes that at the time of Dr. Gerberding’s testimony “there was extensive debate” over how the EPA should respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling. Mr. Burnett says the White House Council on Environmental Quality suggested to him that he could best serve the EPA “if I would convince CDC to delete particular sections of their testimony.”

In an interview, he declined to elaborate on the assertions in his letter, but said he left the EPA because “I thought I’d done as much constructive work as could be done under this administration” in response to the Supreme Court ruling.

Administration officials said in March that before declaring greenhouse gases endanger health or welfare, the government should first seek public comment. The EPA has yet to do so, however, largely because of a dispute between EPA officials and a White House office that reviews proposed regulations over how to frame the issue, people familiar with the matter said.

Dick Cheney is a truly horrible, corrupted man, though I guess we’ve known that since 1974.