Question after question after question for Edwards on Cheney lies:

[Gabi Hayes]

ten to start with, from:

Dennis J. Kucinich, Ranking Minority Member
Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations

Carolyn B. Maloney, Member
Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations

Bernie Sanders, Member
Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations

Dear Mr. Vice President:

??????While it has been widely reported that the President made a false assertion in his State of the Union address concerning unsubstantiated intelligence that Iraq purchased uranium from Niger, your own role in the dissemination of that disinformation has not been explained by you or the White House. Yet, you reportedly paid direct personal visits to CIA's Iraq analysts; your request for investigation of the Niger uranium claim resulted in an investigation by a former U.S. ambassador, and you made several high-profile public assertions about Iraq's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. We hope that you will take the opportunity to provide responses to the following ten questions.

I. Concerning "unusual" personal visits by the Vice President to CIA analysts.

According to The Washington Post, June 5, 2003, you made "multiple" "unusual" visits to CIA to meet directly with Iraq analysts. The Post reported: "Vice President Cheney and his most senior aide made multiple trips to the CIA over the past year to question analysts studying Iraq's weapons programs."

These visits were unprecedented. Normally, Vice Presidents, yourself included, receive regular briefings from CIA in your office and have a CIA officer on permanent detail. In other words, there is no reason for the Vice President to make personal visits to CIA analysts.

According to the Post, your unprecedented visits created "an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives."

Questions:

1) How many visits did you and your chief of staff make to CIA to meet directly with CIA analysts working on Iraq?
2) What was the purpose of each of these visits?
3) Did you or a member of your staff at any time direct or encourage CIA analysts to disseminate unreliable intelligence?
4) Did you or a member of your staff at any time request or demand rewriting of intelligence assessments concerning the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

II. Concerning a request by the Vice President to investigate intelligence of Niger uranium sale, revealing forgery one year ago.

This alleged sale of uranium to Iraq by Niger was critical to the administration's case that Iraq was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program. During the period of time you reportedly paid visits to CIA, you also requested that CIA investigate intelligence that purported to show Iraqi pursuit of uranium from Niger, and your office received a briefing on the investigation.

According to The New York Times of May 6, 2003, "more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. Ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger."

The ambassador "reported to the CIA and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged," according to the Times. Indeed, that former U.S. Ambassador, Joseph Wilson, wrote in The New York Times, July 6, 2003, "The vice president's office asked a serious question. We were asked to help formulate the answer. We did so, and we have every confidence that the answer we provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government."

Moreover, your chief of staff, Mr. Libby, told Time magazine this week that you did in fact express interest in the report to the CIA briefer. Our understanding is that Standard Operating Procedure is that if a principal asks about a report, he is given a specific answer.

Questions:

5) Who in the office of Vice President was informed of the contents of Ambassador Wilson's report?
6) What efforts were made by your office to disseminate the findings of Ambassador Wilson's investigation to the President, National Security Adviser, and Secretary of Defense?
7) Did your office regard Ambassador Wilson's conclusions as accurate or inaccurate?


III. Assertions by the Vice President and other high ranking members of the Administration claiming Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

The President's erroneous reference to the faked Niger uranium sale in his State of the Union address was only one example of a pattern of similar assertions by high ranking members of the administration, including yourself. The assertion was made repeatedly in the administration's campaign to win congressional approval of military action against Iraq.

For instance, you said to the 103d National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, "they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago... we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons... Should all his ambitions be realized... subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

In sworn testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, just weeks before the House of Representatives voted to authorize military action against Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified on September 18, 2002: "He ... is pursuing nuclear weapons. If he demonstrates the capability to deliver them to our shores, the world would be changed. Our people would be at great risk. Our willingness to be engaged in the world, our willingness to project power to stop aggression, our ability to forge coalitions for multilateral action, could all be under question. And many lives could be lost."

Questions:

8) Since your address to the VFW occurred nearly 7 months after Ambassador Wilson reported his findings to the CIA and State Department, what evidence did you have for the assertion that Iraq was continuing "to pursue the nuclear program" and that Saddam had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons"?
9) Since the Secretary of Defense testified to Congress that Iraq was "pursuing nuclear weapons" nearly 8 months after Ambassador Wilson's briefing to CIA and the State Department, what effort did you make to determine what evidence the Secretary of Defense had for his assertion to Congress?

Further refutation of the authenticity of the forged Niger documents came from IAEA Director General ElBaradei, when he reported to the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003: "These documents, which formed the basis for reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger, are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded... we have found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq." Yet on March 16 -- nine days afterwards -- you again repeated the unfounded assertion on national television (Meet the Press, Sunday, March 16, 2003). You said:

"We think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," and "We believe has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Question:

10) What was the basis for this assertion made by you on national television? We hope you will take the opportunity to answer these questions about your role in the dissemination of false information about Iraq's nuclear program to justify the war in Iraq. We look forward to a response.

open letter, so it's all here

now, check this site for PLENTY, plenty more lies upon which Edwards can call Cheney
http://www.crisispapers.org/topics/cheney.htm

[Gabi Hayes]

1. and what about John Nichols' book on Cheney?

haven't seen any menion of it here, or, of course, by the gasbaggers

it's the ONLY book written about Cheney since he's been in office, if at all

[Gabi Hayes]

2. here

When Cheney and a self-selected Praetorian Guard set up the new Republican administration that took charge of the White House after the 2000 election, the vice president could not be bothered to address real threats to the country because he remained obsessed with what turned out to be a ridiculously hyped Iraqi threat. As former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill noted, Cheney and his aides were in the first days of 2001 "already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country."

On the issue of Iraq, Cheney has allowed his tendency toward apocalyptic fantasies to go unchecked. When the vice president was peddling the "case" for invasion, he made far more remarkable claims than did Bush. Charging that Saddam had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney warned a 2002 Veterans of Foreign Wars convention that, "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten American friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

Whew! Scary stuff!

Even scarier, however, is the fact that, as Cheney's claims were proven wrong, the vice president continued to repeat them -- long after Bush had backed off, and long after there was any political advantage to be gained.

This, of course, is where assessing Cheney gets difficult. It is no longer clear where Cheney is deliberately deceiving the American people and where he has deliberately deceived himself. It is easy to call Cheney a "liar," -- and there is no question that the vice president has been caught more than once twisting the truth. But Dick Cheney's biggest lies are almost certainly the ones he tells himself. As such, he will never back away from his charge that changing administrations would be a "wrong choice."
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0909-08.htm

John Nichols article

[Gabi Hayes]

3. Nichols' book

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565848403/commondreams-20/ref%3Dnosim/002-4438499-5060040

Amazon review:

A Vice President, by definition, will always receive less scrutiny than the fellow at the top of the ticket. Fortunately for Dick Cheney, that lower profile works out quite nicely since, according to author John Nichols, it affords him greater ease in secretly running the government. Nichols chronicles Cheney's many different incarnations: unsuccessful student flunking out of Yale twice, young political operative, Ford administration chief of staff, Wyoming congressman, Secretary of Defense, Halliburton CEO, and finally Vice President. What all these steps have in common, argues Nichols, is a nearly insatiable hunger for power satisfied by Cheney's knack for insinuating himself, Zelig-like, into important places in order to advance.

The most compelling sections of Dick: The Man Who Is President deal with Cheney's heading of George W. Bush's vice-presidential search committee and declaring himself the best man for the job, a process Nichols claims was a complete sham from the start.

Once in office, Cheney gained historically unprecedented access and power, Nichols claims, simply because no one could stop him. Though Cheney has a deeply conservative voting record and is credited with leading the "neoconservative" school of thought that guided the foreign policy of Bush's administration, Nichols points out that Cheney was known as a moderate in his time with Ford but with Ford's defeat and the rise of Ronald Reagan, shifting hard to the right was simply a more expedient path to power. Dick is more an examination of motives and methods than a strict biography. As such it doesn't move linearly through time, instead jumping around to demonstrate how past events inform current situations.

And though Dick Cheney probably wouldn't appreciate Nichols' relentlessly critical approach, it's interesting to see a bright light shone on a man who does so much work in secret undisclosed locations. --John Moe

[Gabi Hayes]

5. better yet, get it from Buzzflash

http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/04/09/pre04043.html#more

why no interest in this, particularly since Tuesday is coming up, well, day after tomorrow

I can't WAIT!

don't they HAVE to do interpersonal exchanges in this format, BTW, since they're going to be sitting at a table together?

I can't wait til Cheney calls him a trial lawyer

he should call Cheney a trial LIAR, as he's always trying out new LIES, to see which ones stick

[Gabi Hayes]

4. what a scumbucket liar.....and the dems keep letting this one go, for

the most part:

"As George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney has carefully and successfully portrayed himself as a hawkish foreign-policy expert. Based exclusively on his recent public statements, one might believe Cheney has an unrivaled record supporting massive spending on defense, intelligence, and counterterrorism. That image has been augmented by the vice president’s attacks on Senator John Kerry for supposedly working to cut defense and block intelligence reform, for misunderstanding terrorism, and for taking inconsistent positions on Iraq.

But a look more deeply at Cheney’s career shows our current vice president either suffers from amnesia, self-hatred, or a little bit of both. It was Congressman Cheney, after all -- not Senator Kerry -- who contradicted his own party during the height of the Cold War and called for President Ronald Reagan to “take a whack” at defense spending. It was Defense Secretary Cheney -- not Senator Kerry -- who in 1992 blocked critical intelligence reforms and bragged to Congress about gutting defense spending. In fact, the vice president’s previous actions are remarkably consistent with behavior he now excoriates. His blustery rhetoric is designed not only to distort Kerry’s record but to hide his own." (See also Donna Marsh O'Connor's "To Cheney, on the Anniversary of My Daughter's Murder"). (9/13)

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8481

[Gabi Hayes]

6. who to choose from...take your pick