Obama v. Cheney: Dueling speeches

At least that's the way a speech about national security by the President of the United States and a retread of the speeches the former vice-president has recently made whenever he faced a camera or a microphone have been treated by the corporate-owned media. They do love a controversy even if they have to create it themselves. It seems as if Cheney has spent too much time in bunkers since 9/11 and he thinks it's still 2003 and he's missed that most of his strategy was rejected during the second Bush term. I think there is a loop in his head and whenever he sees a TV camera it just clicks on. I have been thinking, if you wanted to get someone to spill what they know, you could subject them to the canned Cheney (father or daughter) speech. They would spill the beans as fast as they could. But seriously, Cheney keeps repeating several mantras: (1) If you disagree with him, you are endangering our security; (2) We do not torture. In order to sustain this lie, torture has been renamed "enhanced interrogation techniques;" (3) We kept you safe ever since 9/11, with the use of these "enhanced interrogation techniques." Let's look at these claims. We prevented an attack on the U.S. since 9/11. Well,it's true, there hasn't been such an attack. But did it have anything to do with Cheney and his torturers. What Cheney and his Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did to prevent a second attack was to send thousands of our young men and women to be killed and maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq. With all that cannon fodder close at hand why would Al-Queda need to attack us here? Juan Cole, in his wonderful new book, Engaging the Muslim World quotes Bin Laden from a 1996 interview:

I can't fight the Americans on the American mainland. It is too far. But if I succeed in bringing the Americans where I can find them, where I can fight them on my own terms, on my turf, this will be the greatest success.

And as you know Bush and the Neocons accommodated him. Many people who know what actually happened claim that much of the waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used to get a few key people to say that there was a connection between Sadam Hussein and Al-Queda in order to justify their planned invasion of Iraq. In other words, people were waterboarded many times in order to promote Cheney and his Neo-Con buddies Iraq fantasy. It's important to remember that the primary method of governing during the Bush, Cheney, Rove years was to scare people in order to better manipulate them. Cheney continues to follow the same strategy: "scare the hell out of them and you can better control them."

Every thing that was done between 9/11 and the end of Bush's first term was done for two reasons: to get control of Iraqi oil in order to enrich their Anglo-American oil buddies profits and to situate Bush as Commander-in-Chief to enhance his election chances. Both tactics seemed to prove successful.