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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (58415)	2/16/2006 2:36:01 PM
From: zonkie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361700

When Brit Hume interviewed cheney he didn't bother to ask cheney why so many people including the whitehouse had tried to portray Whittington as the person at fault but he did ask some really hard hitting questions like "how well did you know Mr Whittington: and "did you get the bird".

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (58415)	2/16/2006 3:49:34 PM
From: SiouxPal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361700

The Looser the Cannon, the Wilder the Salvo by Elizabeth Sullivan Apart from the vice president's Texas quail-shoot ing incident is the curious affair of the call to the president. There was no call. That was what was so curious. You'd think that after filling a major Republican donor full of birdshot Saturday, Vice President Dick Cheney would pick up a telephone to tell President George W. Bush what he'd just done. Instead, he had one of his Secret Service agents or aides - no one is saying exactly who - call the White House about the mishap. That person omitted the essential detail that it was Cheney on the business end of the shotgun, yet that was the version Chief of Staff Andy Card first relayed to President Bush at about 7:30 p.m. The president didn't find out the full story for another half hour - finally getting it from Karl Rove, who heard it from one of Cheney's millionaire hunting-party hosts. Even odder, the veep decided to bypass Rove, the White House's practiced strategist of spin, to fashion his own public-relations disaster on the fly. Seizing presidential prerogatives in wartime suits Cheney, but it isn't enough. He also has to show his disdain for the Constitution's checks and balances through countless means, big and small. If that means not cluing in his boss about a potential political embarrassment like peppering a big shot with birdshot and then ducking the media, that's the way it will be. If that means operating his own intelligence-gathering and dirty-tricks operation independent of the Oval Office to counter the ill wind of criticism over Iraq WMD, that's also as Cheney wants it. Deferring to the president is so vexatiously messy and slow. So on a number of key occasions, Cheney has taken matters into his own hands. The first and possibly most telling was on Sept. 11, 2001. Cheney was at the White House. The president was 850 miles away in a Sarasota, Fla., elementary school classroom. The vice president advised Bush to remain airborne aboard Air Force One as the capital braced for possible further attacks and Cheney was rushed into a bunker. With communications erratic from there on, the president was effectively out of the loop of immediate decision-making. Cheney was not. Sometime between 10:10 and 10:15 a.m., according to the 9/11 commission report, the vice president was told that a presumably hijacked airplane was inbound toward Washington, D.C. "In about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing," his chief aide Scooter Libby later recalled to Newsweek magazine, Cheney authorized the U.S. military to engage and shoot down the plane if necessary. Cheney later told 9/11 investigators that he didn't issue this order to bag a civilian aircraft on his own, but previously got authorization from the president. No phone logs or other notes exist to support this version, although it can't be ruled out. Yet aboard Air Force One, it was not until after a 10:18 a.m. phone conversation with Cheney that Bush told his press secretary Ari Fleischer that he'd authorized aircraft to be shot down. The sequence strongly suggests Cheney issued the shootdown order before consulting Bush, not after. There were subsequent moments. Bush let Cheney take the lead on the drumbeat for war in Iraq, for which Cheney amassed a kitchen cabinet of CIA sources. He even got his own intelligence briefings independent of the president. Yet Cheney has never been required to reveal the full range of intelligence he reviewed that caused him to tell a veterans convention in August 2002, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." He has never, so far as is publicly known, been required to testify under oath on what he told Libby as critics zeroed in on the administration's shaky WMD intelligence. A January letter from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to Libby's lawyers quotes Libby purportedly telling a grand jury investigating administration leaks that his "superiors" authorized him to leak information to reporters from the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate. One insider is even blunter. "What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made," retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, ex-chief of staff to Colin Powell, alleged last October in a speech to the New America Foundation. A vice president dedicated to the notion that wartime demands trump constitutional checks and balances - even the overriding check that places in the president the role of commander in chief - is a direct danger to the foundation stones of this nation. Is Cheney such a man just because he neglected to make one important telephone call to the White House? The evidence is suggestive. Published on Thursday, February 16, 2006, by Cleveland Plain Dealer (Ohio)