Former Vice President Dick Cheney was recovering Saturday at a Virginia hospital after receiving a heart transplant, his office said.

Cheney was in the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, his office said.

Cheney, 71, who served as vice president in the George W. Bush administration, has had a long history of heart trouble and has been on the cardiac transplant list for more than 20 months.

Although the former Vice President and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift," aide Kara Ahern said in a written statement that was authenticated by several close associates of the former vice president.

A 32-year-old woman from Iraq who was found severely beaten next to a threatening note saying "go back to your country" died on Saturday.

Shaima Alawadi's 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in a pool of blood Wednesday morning in the dining room of the house in El Cajon, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said.

"(They) took my mother away from me ... took my best friend away from me. Why?" the victim's daughter Fatima Al Himidi told KUSI-TV. She added that her mother had been beaten on the head with a tire iron.

Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he met with Alawadi’s family members Saturday morning and was told the mother of five was taken off life support around 3 p.m.

"The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened," Mohebi said.

Mohebi said the family had been in the United States since the mid-1990s.

Al Himidi told KUSI-TV her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron, and that the note said "go back to your country, you terrorist."

Labels: Dick Cheney, hate crimes, Iraq casualties

Mitt Romney yesterday praised former Vice President Dick Cheney, saying he would seek a running mate who shared many traits of longtime, and often controversial, political figure.

At a town hall meeting in a retirement community in Arizona, Romney was asked whether he would name a Tea Party person as his vice presidential nominee. He didn’t answer directly, instead saying that his “overwhelming critera” was that they be ready to become president.

“I think it was last weekend I was watching C-SPAN, and I saw Vice President Dick Cheney and he was being asked questions about a whole host of issues -- following 9/11, the affairs in various countries in the world,” Romney said, according to MSNBC . “And I listened to him speak and said whether you agree or disagree with him, this is a man of wisdom and judgment, and he could have been president of the United States.”

“That’s the kind of persona I’d like to have – a person of wisdom and judgment,” he added.

Labels: And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, batshit crazies, Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he has not decided whether to seek a heart transplant for what he called his “end-stage heart failure” but said he will make that decision “at some point.”

[snip]

Regarding his heart, Mr. Cheney said that he might be able to live for years with the new device implanted in his chest.

“The technology’s gotten better and better and we’ve gotten more and more experience with people living with this technology,” he said. “So I’ll have to make a decision at some point whether or not I want to go for a transplant. But we haven’t addressed that yet.”

Labels: Dick Cheney, right-wing hatemongers

Oilfield services company Halliburton is in negotiations with the Nigerian government to keep its former CEO, Dick Cheney, out of prison, according to a news report.

Sources inside Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission told GlobalPost this week that a settlement keeping the charges against Cheney out of court could cost as much as $500 million.

Nigeria filed charges against Cheney this week in an investigation of alleged bribery estimated at $180 million. Prosecutors named both Halliburton and KBR in the charges, as well as three European oil and engineering companies -- Technip SA, EniSpa, and Saipem Construction.

The charges allege that engineering contractor KBR, until 2007 a subsidiary of Halliburton, was among companies that paid bribes to secure a $6 billion contract for a natural gas plant. KBR pleaded guilty to the same bribes in a US court in 2009, and agreed to pay a $382 million fine. The Nigerian charges appear to stem from the US case -- though, in that trial, Cheney was never directly charged.

It's not clear from the GlobalPost report if the $500 million figure refers to the amount Halliburton will have to pay, or whether that amount would cover all the companies that have been charged.

Further complicating the issue is that the negotiations appear to be an out-of-court settlement, because Nigerian law doesn't recognize plea bargaining.

The idea that an out-of-court settlement could be used in a criminal case angered anti-corruption activist Adetokunbo Mumuni, who told GlobalPost, "There cannot be an out of court settlement. In a purely criminal matter like this, the full letters of the law should apply. Whoever is involved should be taken through the entire process to determine their guilt or not."

The legal vagueness surrounding the reported negotiations will likely fuel accusations that Halliburton and the other accused companies are attempting to bribe their way out of a bribery prosecution.

Labels: corporate assholes, Dick Cheney, Halliburton

In the first official finding of responsibility for the blowout, which killed 11 workers and led to the largest offshore oil spill in American history, the commission staff determined that Halliburton had conducted three laboratory tests that indicated that the cement mixture did not meet industry standards.

The result of at least one of those tests was given on March 8 to BP, which failed to act upon it, the panel’s lead investigator, Fred H. Bartlit Jr., said in a letter delivered to the commissioners on Thursday.

Another Halliburton cement test, carried out about a week before the blowout of the well on April 20, also found the mixture to be unstable, yet those findings were never sent to BP, Mr. Bartlit found.

Although Mr. Bartlit does not specifically identify the cement failure as the sole or even primary cause of the blowout, he makes clear in his letter that if the cement had done its job and kept the highly pressured oil and gas out of the well bore, there would not have been an accident.

“We have known for some time that the cement used to secure the production casing and isolate the hydrocarbon zone at the bottom of the Macondo well must have failed in some manner,” he said in his letter to the seven members of the presidential commission. “The cement should have prevented hydrocarbons from entering the well.”

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, corporatism, Dick Cheney, greed, Halliburton

But as the troops move out, the oil companies are moving in. According to a July report from the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, oil production in Iraq is currently about 2.4 million barrels per day. The goal, by 2017 is to produce 12 million barrels per day. That’s quite a leap, especially since average production levels have held steady for more than two years. It’s going to a take a lot of investment to expand production by 10 million barrels per day.

How much? That’s anybody’s guess. For example, in January, ExxonMobil signed an agreement to redevelop and expand an oil field in southern Iraq. A company spokeswoman says that “total field capital expenditure will depend on full project scope,” which is currently being examined.

There’s a pile of oil money pouring into Iraq right now. Since last year, the Iraqi government has awarded 11 development deals to various consortia. BP and China National Petroleum Corp. are developing the enormous Rumaila field, which has a total proven reserves of about 18 billion barrels. Other companies winning awards include Royal Dutch Shell (working with ExxonMobil on one project and Malaysia’s Petronas on another), France’s Total SpA, Angola’s Sonangol, Italy’s Eni SpA, Russia’s Lukoil and China National Offshore Oil Corp. The signature bonuses to be paid by the consortia are anywhere from $100 million to $500 million.

More investment is on the way. Iraq’s oil ministry is planning to build four new refineries that will nearly double the country’s refining capacity. Oil services firms like Weatherford International and Schlumberger are expanding their operations in the country. Earlier this month Halliburton won a deal to drill 15 wells in the Basra province in southern Iraq, though the financial terms have not been disclosed.

If development goes as planned, rebuilding Iraq’s oil sector could be a highly profitable investment for these companies over the long-term. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Iraq has the third largest proven oil reserves in the world (after Saudia Arabia and Canada). In 2008, oil exports accounted for nearly 90% of the country’s revenues.

Labels: america R.I.P., Bush family, Dick Cheney, FUBAR, Greedy Republican Bastards, Iraq War

An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history, drilling experts said Thursday.

The process is supposed to prevent oil and natural gas from escaping by filling gaps between the outside of the well pipe and the inside of the hole bored into the ocean floor. Cement, pumped down the well from the drilling rig, is also used to plug wells after they have been abandoned or when drilling has finished but production hasn't begun.

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, workers had finished pumping cement to fill the space between the pipe and the sides of the hole and had begun temporarily plugging the well with cement; it isn't known whether they had completed the plugging process before the blast.

Regulators have previously identified problems in the cementing process as a leading cause of well blowouts, in which oil and natural gas surge out of a well with explosive force. When cement develops cracks or doesn't set properly, oil and gas can escape, ultimately flowing out of control. The gas is highly combustible and prone to ignite, as it appears to have done aboard the Deepwater Horizon, which was leased by BP PLC, the British oil giant.

Concerns about the cementing process—and about whether rigs have enough safeguards to prevent blowouts—raise questions about whether the industry can safely drill in deep water and whether regulators are up to the task of monitoring them.

The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface.

Federal officials declined to comment on their investigation, and Halliburton didn't respond to questions from The Wall Street Journal.

According to Transocean Ltd., the operator of the drilling rig, Halliburton had finished cementing the 18,000-foot well shortly before the explosion. Houston-based Halliburton is the largest company in the global cementing business, which accounted for $1.7 billion, or about 11%, of the company's revenue in 2009, according to consultant Spears & Associates.

The failed blowout valve? It was manufactured by Cameron International. One look at Cameron's board should tell you all you need to know. They're all Bush/Cheney contractor cronies, here and around the world.

Labels: corporatism, deregulation, Dick Cheney, greed, Halliburton, oil

Labels: Dick Cheney, Rachel Maddow, torture

The reason I've been outspoken is because there were some things being said, especially after we left office, about prosecuting CIA personnel that had carried out our counterterrorism policy or disbarring lawyers in the Justice Department who had -- had helped us put those policies together, and I was deeply offended by that, and I thought it was important that some senior person in the administration stand up and defend those people who'd done what we asked them to do.

Labels: Bush Administration crimes, Dick Cheney, torture, war crimes

The press loves the boogeyman story because it makes them feel like crusaders for freedom and allows them to make common cause with macho right wingers. It's far more exciting than dull stories about losers who don't have jobs --- you can see the exhilaration coming off of them in waves. They love it.

Case in point, Chris Matthews, who is ready to force everyone to be cavity searched in the ticket line:

Matthews: You know what when we get on an airplane, we give up all kinds of checks we don't do by just walking down the street. I think we give up a certain amount of rights just getting on an airplane and I think you've got to recognize that your safety is tied up with everyone else on that plane's safety and anybody else that gets hit on that plane. You don't own the right to be on that plane because you're getting on an airplane so you do have to yield some civil rights...And by the way, Cliff, you know it and I know it, they're going to get smarter and smarter and sooner or later they're going to get all kinds of people to do their dirty work for them. They're the enemy. They're going to use any means they can to get us. They're out to kill us. Let's be as smart as they are because they are already smart.

Run fer yer lives!

Apparently, Matthews thinks that there is some Koranic law that requires all attacks against America to take place on an airplane. If some terrorist with imagination succeeds in a mall or on a bridge will we have to submit to profiliong and screening there too? Sounds like it.(And if he thinks these would-be terrorists like Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab are super criminals, no wonder he's petrified.)

Labels: Chris Matthews, Dick Cheney, fearmongering, hack journalism, wingnuttia

Standing in front of the Supreme Court this morning, a group of Republican lawmakers railed against the court system run out of the building behind them. A sign affixed to the plexiglas podium each spoke at in turn spelled out the reason for their concern. "Protect our homeland," it read. "Keep terrorists out of America."

The justice system laid out in the Constitution, they said, is just too weak to protect American citizens from wiley terror suspects. From "activist judges" to courtroom sketch artists, the group reeled off a list of reasons the Obama administration decision to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. for trial could quite possibly end in, as Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) suggested, a nuclear attack on the United States.

[snip]

King suggested that "activist" judges could be inclined to release terror suspects over some liberal legal principle or another. "A judge can rationalize most anything," he said. "If you're a living, breathing -- how should I say it? -- 'evolving' constitutionalist than you can write anything you want to justify your own rationale."

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) was troubled by what might happen when waterboarding and the American right to a fair trial met in a U.S. courtroom. She worried what might happen if terror suspects argued they'd been given "cruel and unusual" punishment at Gitmo.

"This is what scares me because they're in a U.S. court now and the rights are different," she said. "What will they say [about their detention] and what could happen and could they be out among the people again? It's very frightening."

How frightening? Mushroom cloud frightening, according to Franks. He said that a federal trial would give the suspects "a megaphone to speak to the planet," which he said "only hastens the danger" of, literally, a nuclear terrorist attack.

When a reporter pointed out that federal trials aren't televised, perhaps making the "megaphone" a little less likely, Republicans said there were other ways for terror suspects to peddle their propoganda from a U.S. courtroom -- for example, sketch artists.

Labels: chickenshit weasel Republicans, Dick Cheney, rant

MCLEAN, Va. — On the eve of the unveiling of the nation’s new Afghanistan policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed President Barack Obama for projecting “weakness” to adversaries and warned that more workaday Afghans will side with the Taliban if they think the United States is heading for the exits.

In a 90-minute interview at his suburban Washington house, Cheney said the president’s “agonizing” about Afghanistan strategy “has consequences for your forces in the field.”

“I begin to get nervous when I see the commander in chief making decisions apparently for what I would describe as small ‘p’ political reasons, where he’s trying to balance off different competing groups in society,” Cheney said.

“Every time he delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what they’ve been asked to do?”

Labels: assholes, Bush Administration crimes, Dick Cheney, STFU

Labels: Dick Cheney

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property.

The Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable” searches and seizures without probable cause. And the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits the military from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose.

“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States,” the memorandum said.

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests.

Labels: Dick Cheney, fascism

Labels: Dick Cheney, Khalid Shekh Mohammed

CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration's approach to terrorism almost suggests "he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point."

Panetta told The New Yorker for an article in its June 22 issue that Cheney "smells some blood in the water" on the issue of national security.

Cheney has said in several interviews that he thinks Obama is making the U.S. less safe. He has been critical of Obama for ordering the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, halting enhanced interrogations of suspected terrorists and reversing other Bush administration initiatives he says helped to prevent attacks on the U.S.

Last month the former vice president offered a withering critique of Obama's policies and a defense of the Bush administration on the same day that Obama made a major speech about national security.

Panetta said of Cheney's remarks: "It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

Labels: Dick Cheney, treason

Labels: Dick Cheney, liars, You can't make this shit up

Former Vice President Dick Cheney confused the president of the United States with the world's most-wanted terrorist in a speech on Monday.

Speaking at the National Press Club, Cheney answered a question as to why his administration had not caught Osama bin Laden. But in a faux pas certain to end up on cable news networks and late-night talk shows, Cheney transposed bin Laden's name with that of the current president.

"I believe he's still out there someplace," Cheney said of bin Laden. "I'm sure the current administration will continue to search for him. He's an important figure, obviously. We would have loved to have captured on our watch. We didn't. I'm sure the Obama people feel the same way.

"The important thing is that I don't think he can have much impact in terms of managing an organization, because that link between Obama [sic] and the people under him is pretty fragile. I don't think he has the capacity to do as much harm as he did at one point, but we ought to still continue to chase him."

Labels: assholes, Dick Cheney, Republican id-driven two-year-olds

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."

I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

On Sept. 6, 2002, Landay and Strobel reported that there was no known new intelligence indicating that “the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs.” It was two days later that The Times ran its now notorious front-page account of Saddam Hussein’s “quest for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.” In the months that followed, as the Bush White House kept beating the drum for Saddam’s imminent mushroom clouds to little challenge from most news organizations, Landay and Strobel reported on the “lack of hard evidence” of Iraqi weapons and the infighting among intelligence agencies. Their scoops were largely ignored by the big papers and networks as America hurtled toward fiasco.

Another reporter who was ahead of the pack in unmasking Bush-Cheney propaganda is the author Ron Suskind. In his 2006 book on the American intelligence matrix, “The One Percent Doctrine,” Suskind wrote about a fully operational and potentially catastrophic post-9/11 Qaeda assault on America that actually was aborted in the Bush years: a hydrogen cyanide attack planned for the New York City subways. It was halted 45 days before zero hour — but not because we stopped it. Al-Zawahri had called it off.

When Bush and Cheney learned of the cancellation later on from conventional intelligence, they were baffled as to why. The answer: Al-Zawahri had decided that a rush-hour New York subway attack was not enough of an encore to top 9/11. Al Qaeda’s “special event” strategy, Suskind wrote, requires the creation of “an upward arc of rising and terrible expectation” that is “multiplied by time passing.” The event that fits that bill after 9/11 must involve some kind of nuclear weapon.

“What are the lessons of this period?” Suskind asked when we spoke last week. “If you draw the wrong lessons, you end up embracing the wrong answers.” They are certainly not the lessons cited by Cheney. Waterboarding hasn’t and isn’t going to save us from anything. The ticking time-bomb debate rekindled by Cheney’s speech may be entertaining on “24” or cable-news food fights, but is a detour from the actual perils before the country. “What we’re dealing with is a patient foe who thinks in decades while we tend to think more in news cycles,” Suskind said. “We have to try to wrestle this fear-based debate into something resembling a reality-based discussion.”

The reality is that while the Bush administration was bogged down in Iraq and being played by Pervez Musharraf, the likelihood of Qaeda gaining access to nuclear weapons in a Taliban-saturated Pakistan was increasing by the day. We know that in the month before 9/11, bin Laden and al-Zawahri met with the Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood. That was the real link between 9/11 and nuclear terror that the Bush administration let metastasize while it squandered American resources on a fictional link between 9/11 and a “nuclear” Saddam.

And where are we now? On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, David Sanger reported in The Times that military and nuclear experts agree that if “a real-life crisis” breaks out in Pakistan “it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan’s weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists.”

Pakistan is the time bomb. But with a push from Cheney, abetted by too many Democrats and too many compliant journalists, we have been distracted into drawing the wrong lessons, embracing the wrong answers. We are even wasting time worrying that detainees might escape from tomb-sized concrete cells in Colorado.

What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.

Labels: 9/11, Dick Cheney, incompetence, LIHOP, war crimes

Which reality do you inhabit, Obama World or Cheney World? If it's the latter, remember that storm clouds are always gathering. Don't forget your umbrella.

[snip]

In Obama World, choices are artifacts of reasoning and thus are only as valid as the logic underlying them. Security and freedom, for example, do not have to be seen as an either-or proposition. The nation never came to a fork in the road with one path labeled "torture" and the other labeled "disaster." In Cheney World, choices are binary and absolute. There's no wiggle room, no gray area, no time for second thoughts and no debate about how our options are framed. It's my way or the highway, citizen.

In Obama World, objective fact matters. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is significant. The absence of any link between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks is relevant. In Cheney World, facts are based more on conviction than evidence. If it's possible to imagine "nuclear-armed terrorists," as Cheney did in his speech the other day, then they "exist" at least as a concept -- and this conceptual existence justifies torture, among other abuses.

Labels: Barack Obama, Dick Cheney