Geez, Clinton and Harris praising him? I want to vomit.
From: Salon <salon-bounces@listserve.com>
On Behalf Of Chas Freeman via Salon
Sent: Wednesday, November 5, 2025 2:24 PM
To: salon@listserve.com
Subject: [Salon] View in browser Cheney: A Few Reminders of Why His Death is Good Riddance
Cheney:
A Few Reminders of Why His Death is Good Riddance
Trust the Democrats to Mourn Him.
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For a quick sampling of the evil Richard B. Cheney injected into the American political system, it is only necessary to review the fawning obsequies posted within hours of his death by Bill Clinton and Kamala Harris. Neither of them
had the slightest problem with eulogizing a man who dragged the country into a disastrous and illegal war that killed thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, shredded civil liberties, fostered torture, and did as much as anyone to
pave the way for Donald Trump’s assumption of authoritarian executive powers. A “saddened” Harris spoke of a “devoted public servant…who, with a strong sense of dedication, gave so much of his life to the country he loved.” Clinton hailed Cheney’s “dediacation
to our country and his unwavering sense of duty.”
Back in 1980, Jerry Ford’s counselor Robert Hartmann, got it right. In his White House memoir Palace Politics, the former newspaperman described Ford’s chief of staff thus: “A serious student of political power,” he “derived both
his employment and his enjoyment from it. Whenever his private ideology was exposed, he appearwed somewhat to the right of Ford, Rumsfeld, or, for that matter, Genghis Khan.” Cheney’s most distinguishing feature, wrote Hartmann, “were snake-cold eyes, like
a Cheyenne gambler’s.”
Once a Flunky
Cheney owed his initial rise to Donald Rumsfeld, whom he served in a variety of posts, including deputy White House chief of staff, until he succeeded his mentor as chief of staff. Discussing the two men’s early relationship with
former associates while researching my biography of Rumsfeld, the word that continually cropped up was “flunky.”
Transiting to Congress after the GOP lost the White House in 1976, he rose steadily through the ranks of the Republican House hierarchy. As the senior Republican on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation, he performed valiant
service in fending off overly inquisitice Democrats. In the process, he shed his subservient relationship with Rumsfeld, much to the latter’s displeasure. As I revealed in my biography, Rumsfeld, getting ready to run for President in 1988, called on Cheney
to resume his erstwhile subordinate status. Cheney refused, possibly because he was mulling making his own run. The two did not speak for years. In the event, George Bush the elder won, and hired Cheney as Defense Secretary, where he performed competently
enough. In the 1990s he moved to greener pastures as CEO of Haliburton, where he performed the only positive act of his career by dodging sanctions on Libya, helping to keep the Libyan oil economy afloat with necessary equipment. I myself recall being shown
a Tripoli warehouse full of crates, filled with sanctioned equipment and labelled “Halliburton,” while the manager explained to me that “the Americans went out the door, but they came back in through the window.” More importantly, Halliburton’s giant construction
subsidiary Brown & Root, built Muhammar Qaddafi’s Great Man Made River, the colossal scheme that brings water from deep under the Sahara to supply the country’s coastal cities, without which they would die.
Plotting a Secret Government
While profitably engaged in business, Cheney did not forsake government - the secret, permanent kind. He and other high ranking members of the national security establishment, including Rumsfeld, would periodically disappear from
their daytime occupations to take part in highly classified wargames, known as Project 908. Part of the Continuity of Government program devised to ready the governing apparatus for fighting and surviving a nuclear war, participants would be secreted in underground
command centers around the United States and play at nuclear war. Up until the 1990s, players would be selected on a bi-partisan basis, with Democrats and Republicans alike taking part. But in the Clinton years, that changed. Now, down in the secret bunkers
players were almost always exclusively Republican hawks. “It. was one way for these people to stay in touch. They’d meet, do the exercise, but also sit around and castigate the Clinton administration in the most extreme way,” a former Pentagon official with
direct knowledge of the phenomenon told me. “You could say this was a secret-government-in-waiting.”
In these years, Cheney nurtured a relationship with Texas governor George W. Bush, a connection that drew productive fruit when Bush asked him to review who he might select as his vice-presidential running mate, and he recommended
himself. The secret government would wait no longer.
An Effort to Blow Airliners Out of the Sky
At the side of a callow and insecure Bush, and selecting his old boss Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, though not without some doubts, Cheney was now set to be the most powerful vice-president in history. An early test came with the
earthquake of 9/11. Despite all those years of COG-planning, in which a potential terrorist attack had been a prime focus, Bin Laden’s well-planned assault took Cheney by complete surprise, despite copious intelligence warnings that it was in the works, the
warnings being ignored or cavalierly dismissed. On the actual day, all COG planning broke down. Senior officials found they could not communicate with one another. The commander of NORAD moved US nuclear forces to a higher stage of nuclear alert and closed
the blast doors at Cheyenne Mountain for the only time since the end of the Cold War. Putin, alarmed by these developments, wanted to call Bush to ask what was going on, but Bush was aloft on Air Force One, which was running out of gas and looking for a secure
place to land, and could not receive phone calls. Almost none of the senior officials in line to succeed the president followed their assigned procedures for evacuation to secure locations.
Cheney remained at the White House. His New York Times obituary speaks
glowingly of how he “took charge.” He “activated defense measures across the nation…From a White House bunker, he maintained continuous contact with the president and other officials and kept what many called a steady hand at the helm through the crisis.”
In reality, while Cheney did start issuing orders (though he was not in the legal chain of command) he was not in “continuous contact with the president” for reasons explained above. His most important, and potentially disastrous, initiative was to order the
air force to shoot down any civilian aircraft that might be a hijacked plane believing, incorrectly, that at least two had been blown out of the air in this way. His authorization for this came simply in the form of the words “you bet” from Bush on board Air
Force One. Fortunately, he failed to kill any civilians that day.
Spying on Lunch Dates
In the wake of the attacks, Cheney pushed successfully to shred constitutional projections, promoting wholesale spying on the American people, indefinite detention, and torture. (He dismissed the horrifickly cruel technique of water-boarding
as “a dunk in the water.”)
Surveillance was not confined to the public. He and his minions worked assiduously to monitor the activities of administration officials. For example, his office devised means to access everyone’s electronic calender so, as a former
White House official informed me, “they could see who was having lunch with who - that’s very useful knowledge.”
His Attempt to Start World War III
The Times records a decline in Cheney’s influence during Bush’s second term. If that were indeed so, it was only by degree. In that respect, his role in promoting the August, 2008 war between Georgia and Russia deserves more attention
than it has received. Recall that the then Georgian leader, Mikhail Saakashvili, the beneficiary of a U.S.-sponsored “color revolution” in 2004, was ecouraged by Cheney, or at least his minions, to send troops across the border into South Ossetia on the expectation
that the U.S. would intervene when the inevitable counter-attack came. Some in the administration, notably Secretary of State Condoleeza and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley perceived the lunacy of this scheme, but Cheney pressed the case for intervention
to a wavering Bush. Rice and Hadley were desperate to thwart Cheney’s influence. Accordingly, Fiona Hill, then a NSC staffer, was instructed by Hadley to go and station herself outside Cheney’s office and monitor his movements. Should he emerge and appear
to be headed to the Oval Office, she was to call Hadley immediately so that he and Rice could sprint to Bush’s side and make the case against World War III. The president’s back thus stiffened, Cheney was balked in his effort to launch another war.
In short, Cheney was a disaster for the U.S. and the world. His death should be hailed as a welcome relief, not the fawning tributes offered by Clinton and Harris.
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© 2025 Andrew Cockburn
Washington DC, USA
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