Category Archives: Bye-Bye Cheney

Experts Point Out (Yet Another) Cheney Fib Regarding Connection Between Iraq and 9-11


Cheney link of Iraq, 9/11 challenged

By Anne E. Kornblut and Bryan Bender for the Boston Globe.

Vice President Dick Cheney, anxious to defend the White House foreign policy amid ongoing violence in Iraq, stunned intelligence analysts and even members of his own administration this week by failing to dismiss a widely discredited claim: that Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Evidence of a connection, if any exists, has never been made public. Details that Cheney cited to make the case that the Iraqi dictator had ties to Al Qaeda have been dismissed by the CIA as having no basis, according to analysts and officials. Even before the war in Iraq, most Bush officials did not explicitly state that Iraq had a part in the attack on the United States two years ago.
But Cheney left that possibility wide open in a nationally televised interview two days ago, claiming that the administration is learning “more and more” about connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks. The statement surprised some analysts and officials who have reviewed intelligence reports from Iraq…
Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said that Cheney’s “willingness to use speculation and conjecture as facts in public presentations is appalling. It’s astounding.”
In particular, current intelligence officials reiterated yesterday that a reported Prague visit in April 2001 between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi agent had been discounted by the CIA, which sent former agency Director James R. Woolsey to investigate the claim. Woolsey did not find any evidence to confirm the report, officials said, and President Bush did not include it in the case for war in his State of the Union address last January.
But Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” cited the report of the meeting as possible evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link and said it was neither confirmed nor discredited, saying: “We’ve never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don’t know.”…
But there is no evidence proving the Iraqi regime knew about or took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush officials said.
Former senator Max Cleland, who is a member of the national commission investigating the attacks, said yesterday that classified documents he has reviewed on the subject weaken, rather than strengthen, administration assertions that Hussein’s regime may have been allied with Al Qaeda.
“The vice president trying to justify some connection is ludicrous,” he said.
Nonetheless, Cheney, in the “Meet the Press” interview Sunday, insisted that the United States is learning more about the links between Al Qaeda and Hussein.
“We learn more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s,” Cheney said, “that it involved training, for example, on [biological and chemical weapons], that Al Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems.”…
But intelligence specialists told the Globe last August that they have never confirmed that the training took place, or identified where it could have taken place. “The general public just doesn’t have any independent way of weighing what is said,” Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism specialist, said. “If you repeat it enough times . . . then people become convinced it’s the truth.”

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Dick Cheney Fib Challenged By Dems

Monday night, I posted a clip from Meet the Press where Dick Cheney stated that he no longer has any financial ties to Halliburton. Guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed that wasn’t exactly true.
Now Senators Daschle and Lautenberg are demanding hearings investigating the no-bid contracts. They also did me the favor of producing the exact numbers I asked for.

Oil services firm paid Cheney as VP

In Reuters.

“The vice president needs to explain how he reconciles the claim that he has ‘no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind’ with the hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred salary payments he receives from Halliburton,” Daschle said in a statement.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Cheney, who was Halliburton’s CEO from 1995 to 2000, said he had severed all ties with the Houston-based company.
“I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had now for over three years,” he said.
Cathie Martin, a Cheney spokeswoman, confirmed that the vice president has been receiving the deferred compensation payments from Halliburton, but she disputed that his statements on “Meet the Press” had been misleading.
Cheney had already earned the salary that was now being paid, Martin said, adding that once he became a nominee for vice president, he purchased an insurance policy to guarantee that the deferred salary would be paid to him whether or not Halliburton survived as a company.
“So he has no financial interest in the company,” she said.
But Lautenberg said Cheney’s financial disclosure filings with the Office of Government Ethics listed $205,298 in deferred salary payments made to him by Halliburton in 2001, and another $162,393 in 2002. The filings indicated that he was scheduled to receive more payments this year and in 2004 and 2005.
“In 2001 and 2002, Vice President Cheney was paid almost as much in salary from Halliburton as he made as vice president,” Lautenberg said.
The vice president’s salary is $198,600 annually.

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Dick Cheney On Meet the Press – Subject: The Forged Nigerian WMD Evidence

This clip is a Dick Cheney classic.
According to Cheney, he doesn’t know anything about anything. He doesn’t know who Ambassador Joseph Wilson is. He doesn’t know who the CIA is. He must not know what a newspaper is either.
This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press
, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)
Russert: “Were you briefed on his (Joseph Wilson’s) findings of February-March of 2002?”
Cheney: “No. I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson…Joe Wilson? I don’t know who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back…I don’t know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him…I have no idea who hired him.”
Tim Russert: “The CIA did.”
Cheney: “Yeah but who are ‘the CIA?’ I don’t know.”
Cheney On The Forged Nigerian WMD Evidence (Small – 8 MB)







Dick Cheney On Meet the Press – Subject: The Halliburton Contracts

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press
, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)
Cheney: “I don’t know any of the details of the contract because I deliberately stay away from any of that information.”
Cheney also said that he has “no idea” why there was no bidding process, and to “go ask the Core of Engineers.” He also said that he “has no financial interest of any kind” with the company and hasn’t “for over three years.”
(Can someone please find me a link to the fact that he still receives deferred income from Halliburton every year? I know I’ve seen that several times in different publications. It’s bound to be somewhere else besides in a Daily Show clip. — Thanks! UPDATE! 9/16/03 — Well, that didn’t take long (see snippet below from Chris Floyd in Counterpunch.)
Update: 9/17/03 – New story in Reuters with all the details.

Cheney On The Halliburton Contracts
(Small – 6 MB)




From Counterpunch, March 2003:

Old news, you say? Irrelevant to the current crisis? Surely, now that Cheney has been translated to glory as the nation’s second-highest public servant, he is beyond any taint of grubby material concerns? Au contraire, as those ever-dastardly French like to say. At this very moment, while the smoke is still rising from the rubble of Baghdad, while the bodies of the unburied dead are still rotting in the desert wastes, Dick Cheney is receiving one million dollars a year in so-called “deferred compensation” from Halliburton. That’s a million smackers from a private company that profits directly from the mass slaughter in Iraq, going into the pockets of the “public servant” who is, as the sycophantic media never tires of telling us, the power behind George W.’s throne – and a prime architect of the war.

(Thanks, Jim.)

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Dick Cheney On Meet the Press – Subject: The Congressional Budget Office’s Claims That Our Forces Are Already Overextended

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press
, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)
Cheney On The Congressional Budget Office’s Claims That Our Forces Are Already Overextended (Small – 7 MB)



Dick Cheney On Meet the Press – Subject: The Plan For Iraq (Or Lack Of One)

This is from the September 14, 2003 program of
Meet The Press
, hosted by Tim Russert.
(Link goes to a complete very incomplete transcript.)

Cheney On The Plan For Iraq (Or Lack Of One)
(Small – 7 MB)
Tim Russert: “What is our plan for Iraq? How long with the 140,000 American Soldiers be there? How many international troops will join them? And how much is this gonna cost?”
Cheney: “Well, some of those questions are unknowable at present. They will depend on developments — depend on how fast it takes us to achieve our objectives.”