Written by Bill Hare   

Dick Cheney’s arrogance during his current round of television interviews to hawk his self-righteous and pompous political autobiography is befitting of someone with a track record of pushing the military-industrial complex plutocracy while trampling human rights and liberties.

A cogent point was made last week by John Nichols, who wrote the definitive unauthorized political biography of Cheney. Nichols noted that when Cheney appointed himself to be George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000 after heading a vice-presidential selection committee, stock in Halliburton, the multinational corporation he headed, stood at $10 per share.

So what happened eight years later after Cheney unfailingly assisted Halliburton’s interests? Nichols revealed that Cheney tripled his investment as Halliburton shares jumped to $30.

Before Jimmy Carter moved into the White House he placed all of his investment assets into a blind trust. What Cheney did during two terms of Bush’s administration would at one time have been called a blatant conflict of interest. He need not worry at present with custodians of justice of the Federalist Society stripe of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who helped the Bush brothers steal their way into the White House in 2000.

In fact, a handy Ronald Reagan federal judicial appointee helped Cheney after Congressman Henry Waxman sought to subpoena minutes of meetings that the then vice-president held with corporate elite executives from the company he continued to serve in elective office, Halliburton, along with such major forces as Monsanto, Bechtel and others.

Cheney deemed this information privileged, and indeed it was, just not in the way that he claimed for legal purposes. The idea was to devise an operative framework for dividing the profits before the New World Order invaded Iraq in violation of international law. Cheney prevailed in federal court. Waxman and the best interests of the citizenry through disclosure were thwarted.

The attack was such a blatant violation of international law that it was launched before the United Nations had its say. It trampled both the letter and spirit of what Robert Jackson and his American team achieved in the interest of international political order at the Nuremberg Trials following World War Two. In usurping treaty commitments codified by corresponding U.S. law, such an attack was also unconstitutional.

Never mind also that Cheney was a member of the Donald Rumsfeld team that made brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein a valued member of its group. An exchange occurred whereby the U.S. obtained oil for weapons, including scientific assistance to make poison gas. Saddam then used this new acquisition to commit genocide on the Kurds in Iraq’s northern provinces.

Cheney never expressed any concern about the brutal slaughter of Kurds through technology that he and his colleagues were instrumental in providing. All the same Cheney, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others began moralizing as members of the Project for the New American Century. They began lobbying for an invasion against Iraq when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

It was far from surprising when subsequently, upon stealing the way for the son of one of the principal chieftains of the New World Order to achieve commander in chief status, for a full court press to be launched to invade Iraq before Saddam Hussein could unleash “weapons of mass destruction” and a “white mushroom cloud” on the United States. Just when the special UN weapons inspection team headed by Sweden’s Hans Blix was preparing to issue a report indicating inability to verify the existence of weapons of mass destruction, a peremptory strike was launched on Baghdad.

Facts were not allowed to get in the way of plutocratic international design. Fodder was created for the masses by smearing the Swedish and French peoples since their leaders dared to urge caution and stress investigation before unleashing Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” arsenal. Hence Sweden was demeaned as a society of “wimps” and France that of “quiche eaters,” the food that “real men” do not eat while “freedom fries” were invented to remove the word French.

Cheney stayed in his bunker and helped generate this kind of propaganda in concert with Karl Rove. Two devotees of Richard Nixon’s assaults on Vietnam and Cambodia in the name of “preserving freedom”, they were both missing in action on the issue of participating in what they viewed as a necessary war.

Cheney relished telling interviewers that his book would “cause heads to explode” within the Washington power structure. That is Cheney all over. Assume a truly aggressive stance and then retreat to his bunker to see how everything comes out.

There is one thing that Cheney has not discussed in his numerous interview appearances. There is no mention of the number of deaths in the Iraq War that he and his New World Order consorts concocted to enrich profits of the plutocracy’s chosen few.

There were no regrets on any phase of the Iraq War. There were no regrets either concerning waterboarding or rendition. A broad smile emerged on Cheney’s face as he discussed waterboarding.

The one thing that would remove the arrogance from Cheney and replace it with abiding terror would be sending him to a dank cell in The Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity.