Back on the Cheney Gang

Dick Cheney attacking Obama for not creating more war is an awfully unnecessary charade.

At least George Will had the clarity of vision to say yesterday on George Stephanopoulos that he wished Cheney and Bush had dithered more before invading Iraq where there were no weapons of mass destruction.

But it wasn’t about WMD or terrorist connections anyway, it was about destroying Iraq so KBR could profit from taxpayer paid military logistical support and Halliburton could profit from taxpayer paid contracts to rebuild the oil plants and infrastructure.

The angle of war profiteering seems never to surface in any mainstream media analysis of Cheney’s statements, or his motives for making those statements. His daughters are only surrogates in this tactic.

It seems to me all the Cheneys want is war, war, war and the multi-billion dollar profits that go with it, and they will stop at nothing to get it. Cheney’s war profiteering connection to Halliburton and its subsidiaries, including KBR, must be examined by the media daily, making Cheney answer to questions about his true motives.

According to the Cheney/Halliburton chronology that appears in Halliburton Watch, KBR was under investigation by the SEC for its accounting practices way back in 1998 while Cheney headed Halliburton. KBR paid $7.5 million in fines and was allowed to continue, promising it would no longer commit or cause future securities violations. How they were allowed to participate in Iraq in ways that killed soldiers and raped contractors must be due to Cheney.

A quick read through shows how Halliburton made money through contracts with Iran and Libya, which violated a US ban on trading with nations which sponsored state terrorism.

This should fall under Michelle Bachmann’s call on “Hardball” a year ago for an “in-depth exposé” of un-American members of Congress and other parts of the government. To send American men and women to their death just for billions in profit is criminal and un-American.

Fox does exposés on ACORN, but do they have the balls to expose Cheney and the war profiteering of Halliburton, KBR and other defense contractors in determining military policies?

For that matter would MSNBC be allowed to run with that story given that their owner, General Electric, is also a major defense contractor? Doubtful.

CNN? Ha! They confuse passivity with fairness.

Cheney doesn’t care about America. If he did, he would not have steered Iran Contra House Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton away from the drug aspect of that anti-American scandal from those patriotic posers, Reagan, North, Bush, Poindexter, et al.

I remember a couple of years ago when security for American ports was being outsourced to a company from the United Arab Emirates, Dubai Ports World, and Americans went ape shit until the government prevented that from happening and gave it secretly to another company based in the Middle East.

Perhaps if Americans fully realized how Halliburton and its subsidiaries were compromising US military lives through their corruption—nah, it would never work unless Americans felt the fear somehow that Halliburton, through greed, was allowing Middle Eastern countries and possibly terrorists compromising our security by exploiting and bribing Halliburton CEOs in the UAE.

Well…??

With Halliburton moving to the UAE to allegedly avoid answering to US government investigations, maybe someone needs to explain this to the American people in the context that Cheney wants war in Afghanistan so his dear Halliburton and their subsidiaries can profit secretly through a maze of back door connections.

Halliburton, KBR and the other subsidiaries have proven they have no morals or scruples or love of country, and Cheney, as their former CEO and Chairman, is doing as ex-vice president what he was doing as Chairman and CEO—manipulating America for war profits.

Maybe one day, because of Cheney and Halliburton, calling someone a capitalist will have the same insultative (new word) meaning as calling someone a socialist. What Halliburton does is not capitalism, its “crapitalism” or “corrupitalism”.

Okay, now I’m becoming too, too clever—or annoying. But not like Cheney.

Somebody get Spain on the phone. Tell them to hurry up and put Cheney on trial for war crimes before he starts another war in his New American world domination Century.

The Baron and the Terror-Industrial-Cheney Complex

As I write this, I am watching the audio commentary of Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown on the DVD, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”, the 1989 Gilliam film, a wonderfully surreal film that uses its surrealism to hide a very serious message.

If any of you watched Countdown tonight and last night then you may be way ahead of me.

I bought Munchausen on Tuesday and was watching it while writing the Liz Cheney post that appeared on Wednesday, the day Gilliam asked Olbermann the question about the Colin Powell comment about the terror-industrial complex in the September 2007 GQ Magazine article.

The actual “terror-industrial complex” quote is in the last three sentences of Powell’s answer to the question, “So do you think we’re getting too hunkered down and scared?” on page 2.

“But come on, this is not a threat to our survival! The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn't do it to ourselves, and we shouldn't use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.”

As you all know (the only reason for this paragraph is this advert for “Why We Fight”), the terror-industrial complex line is an update of Eisenhower’s military industrial complex line.

So now we have another nail to put into the political coffin of the Cheneys. Fear for political purposes is exactly what the Cheneys are doing, in addition to trying to revive the phony national security issue from 2004 which almost gave Bush/Cheney/Cheney the vote, but it didn’t so they had to resort to dirty tricks in Ohio.

Cheney’s connection to Halliburton should be proof enough as to what his and her motives are. Politics is so filled with phony issues to leverage power. The problem is the mainstream media will not accuse or question the Cheneys about using fear for political gain or about their obvious motives for claiming Obama will not keep us safe from terrorists.

After all, the real purpose of Keep Halliburton Rich—I mean, Keep America Safe, is not to scare us terroristically but to scare Obama politically and remind him to make sure the war profiteers’ gluttony and greed are continually satiated with tax dollars that could be used to give us all free health care—fully paid by our tax dollars for our entire lifetimes rather than be given to the terror-industrial complex.

As many of you know, Eisenhower’s complete line was going to be “military-industrial-congressional complex” but he decided to omit the congressional reference at the last minute, or thereabouts.

The pertinent part of Eisenhower’s quote is:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Here we are nearly 50 years later with Obama doing nothing on his campaign promise to end no-bid Federal contracts over $25,000 and breaking his campaign promise about tougher rules against revolving door lobbying in his administration.

Maybe Liz and Dick are doing Obama a favor, making his job easier in helping the system of war mongering maintain the pace it achieved during the last eight years.

Cheney (take your pick) is the Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson in Munchausen—killing the truth (as personified by Munchausen) and lying by telling the story to the city of the enemy Turk being just outside the gates to maintain control.

As Gilliam puts it in the commentary at the end of the film when Munchausen forces them to open the gates to reveal no threat, “And we open the door, and has it all been a dream, has it all been an illusion? Were we ever under threat? Are there terrorists in the world, we ask ourselves, or is it just an illusion to maintain power?”

Obviously we have terrorists in our world, but how much of what Cheney is doing simply to use fear to feed the terror-industrial complex? We may never know.