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Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, posted a summary of Dick Cheney's many crimes on alternet this weekend. McGovern does a remarkable job pointing out that Cheney is guilty of a lot more than lying to Congress about torture (as if torturing prisoners were not enough reason to send him to jail).
Cheney is actually guilty of lying to Congress and the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq. It was never about a threat to the US, but the desire for "regime change", a base in the oil-rich Middle East, and gee, maybe billions of dollars for military contractors like Haliburton.
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Unlike the mainstream press, McGovern's group is focusing on Cheney's lies about Iraq.
Cheney's key role in purveying lies to get our representatives in Congress to approve a war that qualifies for what the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal called the "supreme international crime" -- a war of aggression.
We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity were on to Cheney very early. Six years ago today, we took the unusual step of sending a formal recommendation to President Bush that he "ask for Cheney's immediate resignation."
Today Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity are continuing to push for the prosecution of Cheney for lying not just about torture, but about the need for invading Iraq in the first place. In other words, Cheney KNEW full well that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq because the CIA was telling him there were none. Cheney suppressed that intelligence to concoct a story that no one who knew anything about Iraq believed and then sold it to Congress with a side of BS.
Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, whom Saddam had put in charge of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as well as missile development, told the United States when he defected in mid-1995 that all (that's right, all) such weapons had been destroyed at his order by the summer of 1991.
In mid-2002, the Iraqi foreign minister, whom CIA operatives had recruited and persuaded to remain in place, was telling us the same thing.
When they briefed the president and his senior advisers on this, CIA operations officers were astonished to learn firsthand that this intelligence was unwelcome.
These officers, who had used every trick in the book to "turn" the foreign minister and get him working for us, were told that further reporting from this source was not needed: "This isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change," they were told.
Obviously Congress should never have believed Cheney, but they did and the result has been well over a million deaths because of the war in Iraq (not to mention generations of disease due to Depleted Uranium weapons and the obvious psychological problems created by state violence).
The current political regime and the mainstream media cannot continue to ignore the fact that there was a lot more than a few lies to supposedly increase national security by getting information from prisoners. In fact, there were lies to justify the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq. What we need is a new Nuremberg Trial with Cheney (and Bush and Rumsfeld) held accountable for crimes against humanity.