Ayoon Wa Azan (...It remains for them to be tried)

“Dick Cheney's accountability moment may finally be arriving. After years of pulling punches, Democrats in the Senate are throwing them at Cheney, following the revelation that the man who operated as something akin to a co-president during George Bush's first term ordered the CIA to withhold information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress.”

As such, the number two man in the Democratic majority Senator Dick Durbin called for an appropriate investigation that doesn’t jeopardize the national security, because "The executive branch of government cannot create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark”.

I said something to this effect yesterday, as I called for Dick Cheney to be tried. However, I have lifted the previous paragraph verbatim and translated it accurately from a report in The Nation magazine written by John Nicols and entitled “The Balance begins to tip against Cheney”. I shall continue today with selected commentary from the American media about the former Vice President. It must be understood that my stances against the latter are not just words by an Arab writer belonging to “the other side”, but something that agrees with the opinions of many Americans whether in power, in the media or even in human rights organizations.

For instance, Jeff Huber wrote an article entitled “Cheney’s Inferno” on an anti-war website, and in which he said: “We know that Cheney cooked the intelligence on Iraq through Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans. Journalist and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi asserts that Cheney was behind the forgery of the Nigergate "Habbush letter" document. Cheney authorized Scooter Libby to leak classified information to discredit Joe Wilson when Wilson refuted the claim that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger. Cheney also played a key role in revealing Valerie Plame’s (Wilson’s wife) undercover role in the CIA. Cheney’s secret White House Information Group, which included Condi Rice, Karl Rove, and others, sold the war to the American public through false propaganda echoed by access-poisoned journalists like Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times.”

Also, Cheney used the Iranian Directorate (in the Department of Defense) and the Office of Special Plans, which was used against Iraq, and dealt with the Likudniks while sharing intelligence with Israel, all in an attempt to expand the war to include Iran and Syria...

I want to pause here to say that the above was only a small part lifted from this interesting article. I will continue with two other names that were mentioned therein: Philip Grialdi and Scooter Libby.

Philip Giraldi wrote an article about the senior members of the previous administration and where they are now, and started his article with a comparison with the Second World War and the Nazis’ crimes and their subsequent prosecution, and said: “No matter how one tries to avoid making comparisons between 1939 and 2003, the American invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, precisely the type of conflict that the framework of accountability provided by Nuremberg was supposed to prevent in the years after 1946. High-level U.S. government officials knew that Iraq represented no threat to the United States, but they nevertheless described an imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein in the most graphic terms, replete with weapons of mass destruction, armed drones sailing across the Atlantic, terrorists being unleashed against the homeland, and mushroom clouds on the horizon. Meanwhile, the U.S. was waging a largely secret "long war" against terrorists employing torture and secret prisons. Is there much difference between what the U.S. government did when it went to war on a lie in 2003 and what Hitler’s government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was torture by the Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for the CIA?”

I will conclude my article with Libby (his first name is Lewis and his alias is Scooter). He was the subject of the recent article published in Time Magazine about the final days of Bush and Cheney in the administration. The article mentions how Cheney repeatedly pleaded the President to pardon Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, after the latter was convicting of obstructing an investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity, a covert CIA’s officer, to take revenge on her husband. Bush refused to pardon Libby because his aides told him that he had in fact lied, and the article argues that Cheney’s insistence on getting a pardon for Libby stems from the fact that Libby was tried instead of Cheney, and that he took the fall to protect his boss. The latter was so arrogant that he told Bush “we don’t want to leave anyone in the battlefield”, while he himself avoided military enlistment in the Vietnam War by marrying. He then sent young Americans to die in the war in Iraq and other countries.

I want to say to my dear readers that what I write about Cheney and the gang of war is only a drop in the ocean of what is being written about them in the United States and the entire West, with non-Arab pens and for non-Arab reasons. It remains for them to be tried.