FAR BIGGER THAN CHENEY'S BIGGEST LIE!

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it..."
- Joseph Goebbels -

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."
- Adolf Hitler -


Dick Cheney must have studied his history of tyrants well. For he has been a massive liar who used the massive lie as a political tool for many years and continues that practice to this day. He is apparently delusional as well, or wishes we all were, so that we would accept all he says as gospel truth. Cheney is also a very paranoid man who is now apparently worrying that his misdeeds from 2001-3009 will forever tarnish his legacy or land him in prison. He has, of late, been behaving like a terrified animal running from a pursuing predator. For he has been out publicly lambasting President Obama's end-to-torture policy on a daily basis for weeks now. A day doesn't pass where he fails to make an appearance on a news show, or make a public speech defending the war in Iraq or the Bush administration's use of torture. He has even had his wife and daughter out on the attack to back up his absurd and discredited claim that torture of suspected terrorists was legal and yielded useful information which saved American lives, is beneficial, and should be continued or the country will be in grave peril. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: the guy is also insane.

The gargantuan lies we have been fed over the past 7 or 8 years by Cheney, his boss, George W. Bush, and his collaborator, Donald Rumsfeld, are so plentiful and so heinous it is difficult to limit them to only the few you will see here. Rest assured, there are thousands more.

The lie that Saddam Hussein had direct contact and was working with Al Qaeda on the 9/11 attacks has been proven totally false, but Cheney was repeating it even as recently as this past January. We know now, of course, that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Wolfowitz, and a number of other far-right ideologues had all formed and been members of the crazy conservative "think tank" called "Project for a New American Century" since the mid 1990s. This group advocated, among other things, a pre-emptive military strike against and occupation of Iraq, Syria, and Iran. I find it highly suspicious that, as late as August 6, 2001, the Bush administration had been warned specifically about an Osama Bin Laden plot to use American planes in a terrorist attack on American soil, but Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all ignored it. I also find it highly suspicious that the outgoing Clinton administration had provided warnings about Al Qaeda which were also ignored. But what I find most suspicious is how, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Bush suspended all airline flights throughout the country, save for those by the FBI to round up Bin Laden's visiting Saudi relatives within our borders to fly them safely back home. It is clear in hindsight that 9/11 was used successfully to fulfill the dream of mounting an invasion of Iraq. To further "justify" this action, Cheney and the boys fed us the lie about Saddam Hussein having nuclear weapons (WMD in Cheney/Bush spin-speak). Along with it came the hefty benefits of having our hands directly on Iraqi oil, plus being able to award billions and billions of federal dollars in non-bid military contracts to Cheney's former company, Halliburton, and its subsidiary, KBR.

Even Cheney's beloved "war on terror" seems to have been a big lie. The original stated aim was to capture Bin Laden and destroy his Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan. But once we had our hands on the coveted jewel of Iraq, this was pushed way back on the back burner. Meanwhile, our ports and borders remained wide open with lax border patrol enforcement. Surely, if Al Qaeda was the highly organized, well financed organization with numerous cells operating worldwide that Cheney and Bush told us it was,we would certainly have made a strong effort beginning on 9/12 to tighten up security on our borders and ports! Yet this was never done. Our southern border, in particular, was allowed to leak like a sieve ever after. Had we REALLY been serious about homeland security, this would not have occurred. My theory is that Bush and Cheney, union haters both and friends of big business, didn't wish to impede the flow of very cheap illegal immigrant labor coming in. That way, wages would be kept in check and unions all but destroyed. Not only that, but the administration's lax border policy surely seems to indicate they had little real concern that Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group would enter this country! And that exposes another big Cheney myth and lie, that their pro-active approach to terrorism prevented another attack on our soil. Pro-active? Hardly. Not only were Cheney and Bush directly responsible for 9/11, being asleep at the wheel as they were, but they did virtually NOTHING to shore up port or border security ever afterward. Other than start an illegal war overseas, they were not pro-active against terror in the least.

Perhaps the biggest and most aggravating lie of all concerns torture. First, the claim was made by Bush and Cheney that we do not torture, when in fact, we already had done so. Then came the devious attempt by Justice Department underlings John Yoo and Jay Bybee to rewrite the definition of torture to make it exclude torturous techniques we were using. Bush and Cheney again denied our use of torture. Then the claim was made that our "enhanced interrogation" techniques (aka TORTURE) yielded tremendously useful information. That, too, was a lie. Those directly involved in the actual interrogations of the three tortured terrorists have stated that all useful information had been gathered by traditional, legal interrogation methods practiced first by the FBI. Once the CIA took over interrogation, and torture began, the prisoners stopped yielding information. If torture had been so effective, why was one prisoner waterboarded 183 times in one month, and another more than 80 times in a month? Surely, had torture been as effective as Cheney claims, there would have been no need to repeat the process that often. Not only that, but had torture been so effective and so necessary for our security, when then was it discontinued in 2005 or 2006? Why hadn't it been used right up until Inauguration Day? The evidence strongly suggests that torture DIDN'T produce the results Cheney and Rumsfeld were really after, namely, a confession that Saddam Hussein really did have ties to Al Qaeda.

No amount of continued lying or alibying on Cheney's part will absolve him from the fact that his administration began an illegal war and broke domestic and international law with its practices of rendition and torture. He and his cronies must be made to stand trial and pay the penalties for such crimes. For the actions his administration took were rash, foolhardy, corrupt, immoral, and in direct contradiction of all other methods which had been used throughout our entire history. Rather than defeat Islamic terrorism, they actually provided it with a powerful recruitment tool. This did not make us safer. It has instead make a terrorist retaliation in the future all but a certainty. So Cheney can continue to practice Goebbels' and Hitler's theories on telling lies, but it won't do him any good. Unlike in the days of Hitler, we now have 24/7/366 satellite news and the internet. The truth from numerous sources now available will correctly portray his dark, deceitful, and murderous legacy. And the mounting evidence against him is a truth far bigger than even Cheney's biggest lie!