Cheney Reaction

Now that the ritually required farewells have concluded, maybe it’s time to recall some less comforting truths about former Vice President Dick Cheney. He may have been, as we were recently told, a loving father and husband, but he was also the principal author of a war, based on lies, that killed hundreds of thousands.

Six of one…

You might want to look up the names of the three officers in the nonproliferation offices of their respective intelligence agencies in the US, Britain and Australia: Greg Thielmann, Brian Jones, and Andrew Willkie. Each of them went public, at some risk to their jobs and/or lives, to say, before the Iraq War, that the intelligence Cheney brandished to support a US invasion was, to put it mildly, faulty. You might not know the names of these gentlemen, because US media, including npr, never mentioned them (though UK and Australian media did).

Some of the faulty intel Cheney promoted came through a German source known as “Curveball”, known by German and UK intelligence agencies to be a fraudster, who much later admitted his lying to The Guardian newspaper. More “false intelligence” was fed by the Iraqi National Congress run by Ahmed Chalabi, who aspired to replace Saddam Hussein.

“Weapons of mass destruction” turned out to be fallacious. But the deaths and destruction in Iraq were all too real. What really happened is that Iraq, Iran’s chief regional rival, was drastically weakened (they had previously fought a decade-long war to a draw).

Cheney’s legacy was a gift to Iran.