Cheney Urged Bush To Bomb Syria In 2007

I wonder if Americans will buy and read this book??

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/us/politics/25cheney.html


august 24, 2011
Cheney Says He Urged Bush to Bomb Syria in ’07
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney says in a new memoir that he urged President George W. Bush to bomb a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor site in June 2007. But, he wrote, Mr. Bush opted for a diplomatic approach after other advisers — still stinging over “the bad intelligence we had received about Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” — expressed misgivings.

“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”

Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Cheney’s book — which is often pugnacious in tone and in which he expresses little regret about many of the most controversial decisions of the Bush administration — casts him as something of an outlier among top advisers who increasingly took what he saw as a misguided course on national security issues. While he praises Mr. Bush as “an outstanding leader,” Mr. Cheney, who made guarding the secrecy of internal deliberations a hallmark of his time in office, divulges a number of conflicts with others in the inner circle.

He wrote that George J. Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, resigned in 2004 just “when the going got tough,” a decision he calls “unfair to the president.” He wrote that he believes that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tried to undermine President Bush by privately expressing doubts about the Iraq war, and he confirms that he pushed to have Mr. Powell removed from the cabinet after the 2004 election. “It was as though he thought the proper way to express his views was by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government,” Mr. Cheney writes. His resignation “was for the best.”

He faults former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for naïveté in the efforts to forge a nuclear weapons agreement with North Korea, and Mr. Cheney reports that he fought with White House advisers over softening the president’s speeches on Iraq.

Mr. Cheney acknowledged that the administration underestimated the challenges in Iraq, but he said the real blame for the violence was with the terrorists.

He also defends the Bush administration’s decision to inflict what he called “tough interrogations” — like the suffocation technique known as waterboarding — on captured terrorism suspects, saying it extracted information that saved lives. He rejects portrayals of such techniques as “torture.”

In discussing the much-disputed “16 words” about Iraq’s supposed hunt for uranium in Niger that were included in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address to help justify the eventual invasion, Mr. Cheney said that unlike other aides, he saw no need to apologize for making that claim. He writes that Ms. Rice eventually came around to his view.

“She came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk and tearfully admitted I had been right,” he wrote.

The book opens with an account of Mr. Cheney’s experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government’s response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush — who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns — played a peripheral role. But Mr. Cheney wrote that he did not want to make any formal statement to the nation that day.

“My past government experience,” he wrote, “had prepared me to manage the crisis during those first few hours on 9/11, but I knew that if I went out and spoke to the press, it would undermine the president, and that would be bad for him and for the country.

“We were at war. Our commander in chief needed to be seen as in charge, strong, and resolute — as George W. Bush was.”

Mr. Cheney appears to relish much of the criticism heaped on him by liberals, but reveals that he had offered to resign several times as President Bush prepared for his re-election in 2004 because he was afraid of becoming a burden on the Republican ticket. After a few days, however, Mr. Cheney said that Mr. Bush said he wanted him to stay.

But in the Bush administration’s second term, Mr. Cheney’s influence waned. When Mr. Bush decided to replace Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense after the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Cheney said he was not given a chance to object.

Mr. Cheney praised Barack Obama’s support, as a senator from Illinois, for passing a bank bailout bill at the height of the financial crisis, shortly before the 2008 election. But he criticizes Mr. Obama’s decision to withdraw the 33,000 additional troops he sent to Afghanistan in 2009 by September 2012, and writes that he has been “happy to note” that Mr. Obama has failed to close the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as he had pledged.

Mr. Cheney’s long struggle with heart disease is a recurring theme in the book. He discloses that he wrote a letter of resignation, dated March 28, 2001, and told an aide to give it to Mr. Bush if he ever had a heart attack or stroke that left him incapacitated.

And in the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.

 

Hmmmmm. Well, not that many. Though I would expect this to wind up on the best seller lists.

Anything in that bit you quoted that you thought was scandalous?

That's actually kinda interesting, I never thought about superlength dreams while comatose. Kinda of an inception thing going on here.

 

I am surprised Cheney wanted to bomb Syria.. You'd think we had enough in Iraq and Afghanistan..

Doesn't that sound extremely reckless to you?

 

Hmm, Afghanistan was totally legit, they hosted Al-Qaeda (does 9/11 ring a bell?), refused to extradite them and the campaign was sanctioned by the UN, no less. As far as Syria is concerned, they did have a nuclear plant built by North Koreans. Kudos to Israel for taking it out.

 

Do you still think AQ did 9-11?

I'll grant it was Muslims but not AQ.

 

Does it sound so to you? I'm guessing you don't support Obama's decision to engage in the military attacks in Libya?

 

Obama didn't make any snap decisions.. He waited until asked by NATO and the Arab League..

Our function was to provide air cover for the civilian forces.

We are not involved in nation building in Libya..

 

Actually Afghanistan did offer to extradite Bin Laden, an offer that Bush rejected:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

Apart from that do you also think that Cuba would be entitled to bomb the USA because of their refusal to extradite Luis Posada Carriles?

Why should Israel have the right to take out other countries nuclear plants, especially seeing that it is pretty certain that it has loads of nuclear weapons itself and that it has not even signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation?

As for Cheney: he is easily one of the most evil and conscienceless people this planet presently hosts. I hope nobody will throw money at him by buying this book of his.

 

sounds like obama and cheney take marching orders form the same folks.

 

Any Jihad state should be thorougly bombed to dust.

 

why don't we "bomb to dust" the entities that provide funding, intelligence and cover for the "jihad states" ?

 

Because you'd screw-up, just like America always screws-up.

 

then there is no sense fighting the surrogate enemy is there ?

 

It helps if you get it right. History, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have taught your 'leaders' anything. America continues to screw-up.

 

that's because our leaders are controlled by the same group of amoral bankers that control your leaders.

 

Can't disagree with that.

 

and both of our governments are intent on giving them more power

 

They did offer to hand over OBL if there was proof he did 9-11. There never has been any proof.

You and I share the same opinion of Cheney.

 

They did. That's been pretty well established.

They offered to extradite him if we had evidence of him being behind 9-11. Which we didn't actually have then.

What we did know at that time was:

-Al-Queda was behind the attack
-Al-Queda had terrorist training camps set up in Afganistan
-OBL was supposedly their leader and therefore probably was behind 9-11, which it seems he was, but that didn't surface for a while. In any case we'd have still invaded Afganistan to get the AQ camps even if we knew OBL was in some other country at the time.

I do think the Taliban could have avoided war by giving us a Pakistanish deal where we send in the drones and speacial ops to gat AQ forces alongside Taliban forces. We were going to take down AQ, and the Taliban had a choice of what side they wanted to be on. They chose Al-Queda.

I notice Borat used the word "them" not "him" so I think he's on the same page here.I

 

There is still no evidence that OBL did 9-11.

 

There is evidence.

Increasingly there are people willing to deny every peace of reality, because everything is a conspiracy by Jews or Aliens.

Possibly jewish aliens, I'm not so up on the conspiracy groups.

In any case, while you could always say you don't believe any given peice of evidence, the fact you don't seem to even know about any evidence in the first place would indicate you've wrapped yourself up in a coccon of denial.

In any case, as the leader of AQ we'd have still gone after him even if he hadn't known about 9/11 before it happened, and even if we'd already captured him we'd have still invaded Afganistan to go after the rest of AQ.

 

The 9-11 conspiracy was certainly carried out by Muslims but the leadership was Egyptian... and it was a small closely guarded plot.

OBL may have been happy about the event, but I doubt he knew in advance..

 

There may be evidence, but no evidence has ever been presented to the public. Thus - while not being prone to any conspiracy theories whether they concern 'the Jews', 'Aliens' or 'the man on the moon' - if anybody asks me who was behind 9/11, I'd have to say "I don't know". But if you have access to some CIA-files etc. that the rest of us don't have feel free to share them with us. I'd be delighted.

 

One thing there is evidence for is that the terror cell that carried out the 9/11 attacks was previously located in Hamburg, Germany. If my government had given the US permission to carry out drone attacks over Hamburg (no matter how many innocent victims that may cost), I and most other Germans would have been mightily angry. It would have been unthinkable. So why should I expect Afghani or Pakistani citizens to react any differently?

 

Mohhamed Atta hated the Westernization of old Cairo and hated that Egyptians preferred to attend the American University of Cairo rather than Cairo university..

He was incensed about Western tourists impacting culture.

He raged that the international community didn't help the Palestinians, Chechns and Bosnians.