"PANIC"-Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: Chapter 1

[kpete]

Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: Chapter 1
by Eric Umansky - July 16, 2008 10:18 am EDT

PANIC

America should go “not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She
might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler
of her own spirit.”
—John Quincy Adams, An Address . . . Celebrating the
Anniversary of Independence, at the City of Washington
on the Fourth of July 1821

........................

In the view of some detractors,such as Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, “Cheney was traumatized by 9/11. The poor guy became paranoid.”

...................

(snippets from chapter 1)

The lesson for Bush and Cheney was that terrorists had struck at
the United States because they saw the country as soft. Bush worried
that the nation was too “materialistic, hedonistic,” and that Bin Laden
“didn’t feel threatened” by it. Confronted with a new enemy and their
own intelligence failure, he and Cheney turned to some familiar conservative
nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of the
Republican Party since the Watergate era. There was too much international
law, too many civil liberties, too many constraints on the
President’s war powers, too many rights for defendants, and too many
rules against lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness
and too much meddling by Congress and the press.

Cheney in particular had been chafing against the post-Watergate
curbs that had been imposed on the president’s powers since the mid-
1970s, when he had served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. As Vice
President, Cheney had already begun to strengthen the power of the
presidency by aggressively asserting executive privilege, most notably
on his secrecy-enshrouded energy task force. He’d told Bush, who
later repeated the line, that if nothing else they must leave the office
stronger than they found it. Now Cheney saw the terrorist threat in
such catastrophic terms that his end, saving America from possible
extinction, justified virtually any means. As Wilkerson, Powell’s former
Chief of Staff who went on to teach National Security Affairs
at George Washington University, put it, “He had a single-minded
objective in black and white, that American security was paramount
to everything else. He thought that perfect security was achievable. I
can’t fault the man for wanting to keep America safe. But he was willing
to corrupt the whole country to save it.”

..............

But to understand the Bush Administration’s self-destructive response
to September 11, one has to look particularly to Cheney, the
doomsday expert and unapologetic advocate of expanding presidential
power. Appearing on Meet the Press on the first Sunday after the attacks,
Cheney gave a memorable description of how the administration
viewed the continuing threat and how it planned to respond.

“We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will,” Cheney explained in his characteristically quiet and reassuring voice. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion,using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies-if we are going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in. And, uh, so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives.”


the rest of chapter 1:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/docs/dark_side_chap1.pdf

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. I wonder if Cheney does, or ever has...

Masturbated while reading a James Bond novel? Or Richard Marcinko, for that matter?

[BrklynLiberal]

2. That implies that Cheney had no foreknowledge....

I think Cheney was nuts long before 9/11. I believe his role model was the general in "Dr. Stangelove".

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. It's like this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1550366.stm


A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week's attacks.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.

Russian soldiers in Tajikistan
Russian troops were on standby
Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin.

Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar.


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/afgh-n20.shtml
The official American myth is that “everything changed” on the day four airliners were hijacked and nearly 5,000 people murdered. The US military intervention in Afghanistan, by this account, was hastily improvised in less than a month. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a television interview November 18, actually claimed that only three weeks went into planning the military onslaught.

This is only one of countless lies emanating from the Pentagon and White House about the war against Afghanistan. The truth is that the US intervention was planned in detail and carefully prepared long before the terrorist attacks provided the pretext for setting it in motion. If history had skipped over September 11, and the events of that day had never happened, it is very likely that the United States would have gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the same schedule.

[seemslikeadream]

3. use any means

[iamtechus]

4. Wrong wrong wrong

Follow the money.