The coming investigations are jagged windows into Richard B. Cheney's Shadow Government.

seafan

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Sun Jul-19-09 08:19 PM
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The coming investigations are jagged windows into Richard B. Cheney's Shadow Government.

Torture. Domestic surveillance. Assassination hit-squads.

The bitter, poison fruits of the seeds of our county's destruction and shame, have ripened over the last forty years.

Dick Cheney, left, began his long career in government as chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, an announcement made at this news conference on Nov. 7, 1975. Donald Rumsfeld, right, was named Secretary of Defence.

Richard B. Cheney slithered into Washington in 1969, to work as an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld, under Nixon. Cheney later became the White House Chief of Staff for Ford in 1975. After serving a stint in the US House and writing a report defending the Reagan Administration's actions in Iran Contra, he was eventually named as Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush in 1989. And during the Clinton years he slithered back into the shadows to run Halliburton. After naming himself to be George's W. Bush's running mate for the 2000 election, Richard B. Cheney was back in the driver's seat.

As Bruce Fein so aptly put it:

“This is a man,” says Bruce Fein, a constitutional lawyer and conservative civil libertarian, “who believes the executive branch of government is infallible, like the Pope.”

Pontiff of the Potomac?

.....

From blurring the Google images of his Vice Presidential home at the Naval Observatory, to his secretive Energy Policy Meetings in early 2001, this man believes that the Executive, backed with control of the military, is all powerful, all knowing, and is unchallenged in shunting aside all other branches of government and any constitutionally-bound oversight.

From "Fox on the run" at The Globe and Mail:

.....

Over his eight years running key parts of the White House, almost every mission Mr. Cheney undertook was designed to consolidate executive power, to keep the judgments of others at bay while enforcing a new set of political values under his personal control.

Even his opponents considered him a genius at playing the system to his advantage. Speaking with a certain wonderment at how the vice-president and his legal team tried to pull off their warrantless domestic-surveillance scheme – without a number of the supposed key players even knowing what was happening – Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith described the behind-the-scenes methods to one of Mr. Cheney's biographers: “They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in lanes, and then put the answers together to get what they wanted.”

But now all the lanes have broken down, and those carefully crafted answers have turned into a series of prying questions that the formerly all-powerful Mr. Cheney is poorly positioned to deal with.

At 68, the former chief executive officer of Halliburton Co. with a long history of heart problems would be happier fly-fishing in his native Wyoming, or hunting quail and pheasant with the filthy-rich friends who would never give him an argument.

Isolation among the like-minded has always suited him – he instinctively avoided the flesh-pressing side of political life; he turned down the Hurricane Katrina emergency-response job because, according to a Bush aide, he “doesn't do touchy-feely;” had his official vice-presidential residence blurred on Google maps; regarded the non-executive branches of the U.S. government as an irritant to his management style (once telling Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, “Go fuck yourself,” on the Senate floor); and was so consumed by his bunker mentality that he actually enjoyed hunkering down in undisclosed locations during his government's terror alerts.

Mr. Cheney is proud to be known as a hard-liner – one of those accusations against him that he took as a sign of principle. But then, much of his mentality goes back to the Cold War and its all-or-nothing view of national security.

At the political level at least, the never-ending American war on terror has proceeded very much like the decades-long hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union, where a vague but abiding fear was used to marginalize democratic rights and put the presidency on a constant wartime footing.

.....

How devious a plotter is Dick Cheney? When he secretly persuaded George Bush to sign an order creating the military commissions that stripped foreign terror suspects of legal rights, his too-gentle opponent and colleague Colin Powell got the news from CNN.

“What the hell just happened?” cried the befuddled secretary of state, according to The Washington Post.

At some level, Mr. Cheney actually seems to derive pleasure from craftiness. “Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” he asked himself in a rare moment of self-analysis, prompted by a USA Today reporter who wondered if he worried about being seen as a sinister force. “It's a nice way to operate, actually.”

Cheney performed his most devious acts in the shadows, and continues to do so. When, suddenly, he came under high scrutiny in the past several weeks, it is a deeply destabilizing force for him. Yanking that heavy curtain back, his radical nature is exposed. Now he can no longer control the outcome. And we should expect many more shocking and disturbing revelations about this man's deeds.

Because Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald W. Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush have not been held accountable for their actions, and William J. Clinton declined to investigate the mountain of evidence of crimes committed during these administrations, we are now witnesses to the worsening metastatic destruction, forty years later, committed by Richard B. Cheney, his cardboard chief executive and their lieutenants, against our nation and the world.

Cheney's Shadow Government endangers us all. He's merely lying in wait.

From Part One of America's Shadow Government

(Part Two at link just above)

.....

At least once a year during the 1980s, Cheney and Rumsfeld vanished on top-secret training missions, where each of the teams practiced evacuating and directing a counter nuclear strike against Russia.

This all changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it became clear that the assumptions that drove (Continuity of Government) COG planning during the Cold War no longer applied. There would be no warning against a terrorist attack. Thus, instead of relying on part-time bureaucrats and evacuation schematics, the Bush administration permanently appointed executive officials, stationed outside the capital, to run a shadow government.

The plans for the shadow government are more elaborate than many realize. Massive underground bunkers the size of small cities are sprinkled throughout the country for the government elite to escape to in the event of a national emergency. Mount Weather, near Bluemont, Va., is one of a number of such facilities. Built into the side of a mountain, this bunker contains, among other things, a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, an emergency power plant and a radio/television studio. There is also an Office of the Presidency at Mount Weather, which regularly receives top-secret national security information from all the federal departments and agencies. This facility was largely unknown to everyone, including Congress, until it came to light in the mid-1970s. Military personnel connected to the bunker have refused to reveal any information about it, even before congressional committees. In fact, Congress has no oversight, budgetary or otherwise, on Mount Weather, and the specifics of the facility remain top-secret.

What is the bottom line here? We are, for all intents and purposes, one terrorist attack away from having a full-fledged authoritarian state emerge from the shadows, at which time democratic government will be dissolved and the country will be ruled by an unelected bureaucracy. And because so much of this shadow government remains under wraps, there is much we don't know about it. Yet that does not diminish the threat it poses to democratic government.

The Shadow Government is still in place.

Cheney has said he expects to retire completely from public life after the January 20th inauguration. He hopes to return to Wyoming with his wife Lynne, although he said he would maintain a residence in the Washington, D.C. area. "I've got a lot of rivers to fish," he told reporters, "so I don't think anybody will feel sorry for me. They shouldn't."

The only thing we the people of a shamed and discredited nation will feel for you, Richard B. Cheney, is a deep and joyous relief when you are dragged screaming from our midst, and shoved into a cold, filthy cell for the rest of your reviled, godforsaken life.