Bring Out The Gimp

Dick Cheney doesn't get out much these days. Remember Dick? He's the Generalissimo's VP, but he hasn't done a TV interview for about 6 months. Now that a bit of mud is beginning to stick, Bush told the boys to unlock the closet door, wheel him out and give him a cue card to read. The results were predictable...

Virtually parroting comments made simultaneously by Colin Powell on the other side of the planet, Cheney declared "major success, major progress" in Iraq, claimed most of the country is "stable and quiet" and - like Powell - asserted that Americans are viewed as "liberators" there.

Now, listen up guys. We're emphasizing the word "liberators" so that people stop calling us "occupiers". Of course, the Iraq's were "liberated" a few months ago - the ones who survived, anyway - so just avoid any questions about why we are still there and when we are planning to leave...

Despite Powell's attempt to engage former allies at the UN, Cheney argued that there is no reason to "think that the (administration's Iraq) strategy is flawed or needs to be changed."

That's when things started to get comical. Obviously, it must have been pretty dark in that closet...

Cheney said the administration did not underestimate the financial cost, the resistance or the troop strength needed to pacify Iraq.

Mis-quoting pre-war testimony from General Eric K. Shinseki to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Cheney said "I still remain convinced that the judgment that we will need, quote, 'several hundred thousand for several years,' is not valid." (In fact, Shinseki never mentioned "several years" in his testimony.)

Cheney argued that the administration did not understate the cost of the war in Iraq because they never put a figure on it. Oh? What about figures from then-White House Budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels, who said war would cost $50 billion to $60 billion and that a figure in the range of $100 billion to $200 billion was too high?

Cheney got a little flustered: "Well, that might have been, but I don't know what his basis was for making that judgment."

It was time for the old smoke and mirrors routine, and Cheney knew it. He claimed that one of the 9/11 hijackers was an Iraqi who returned to Iraq and MAY have been given safe haven by Saddam. He also renewed speculation that Mohamed Atta, who led the Sept. 11 attacks, MAY have met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Baghdad 5 months before the attacks (never mind that an FBI investigation already concluded that Atta was in Florida and Czech officers who first made the allegations have since withdrawn it).

"We've never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it," Cheney said. "We just don't know."

Go, Dick, go! That will make the boss happy!

Cheney said that prewar allegations about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction would be vindicated. He spectacularly claimed that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Wham! Thwakk! Ka-pow!

"The Iraqi government or the Iraqi intelligence service had a relationship with al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s." (Bin Laden probably had 8 meetings with Iraqi officers in the early 1990's, long before September 11, 2001.)

What about Saudi Arabia, Dick? Cheney sucked his teeth back in.

"I don't want to speculate," he said, adding that Sept. 11 is "over with now, it's done, it's history and we can put it behind us."

What about the big issue, the WMDs?

Cheney said he believes chemical weapons are "buried inside [Hussein's] civilian infrastructure." He praised the "very good man" man now leading the search for WMDs in Iraq, David Kay, "a former leader of UNSCOM." (Kay worked with the IAEA under UNSCOM but was never its leader).

Cheney talked about "500 tons of uranium" as proof that Hussein had "reconstituted" his nuclear weapons program. (The material was low-grade uranium, the waste product of a nuclear reactor unusable for weapons production without sophisticated processing that Iraq could not do).

Then Cheney brought out some old and smelly "intelligence", resurrecting the highly discredited claim (by Bush himself) that a couple of trucks in the desert represented "mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing a capacity for an attack."

Wait, there's more! Cheney also claimed that a new British investigation "revalidated the British claim that Saddam was, in fact, trying to acquire uranium in Africa -- what was in the State of the Union speech." In fact, the British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee only concluded that such a claim was "reasonable" - not validated or proven. The unsubstantiated claim probably originated from a single Nigerian embassory worker in Italy who saw a chance to make some money from information-hungry CIA agents.

OK, Dick. Back in the cupboard... Boys! Come and clean up this mess, will you?