David Corn at Mother Jones has done it again! He's found a 2009 video of a speech Rand Paul delivered to students at Western Kentucky University, in which he accuses Dick Cheney of war profiteering:
On April 7, 2009, as Paul was on the cusp of announcing his senatorial bid, he spoke to student Republicans at Western Kentucky University. Recalling President Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex, he noted, "we need to be fearful of companies that get so big that they can actually be directing policy." And the company he had in mind was Cheney's former home: "When the Iraq war started, Halliburton got a billion-dollar no-bid contract. Some of the stuff has been so shoddy and so sloppy that our soldiers are over there dying in the shower from electrocution. I mean, it shouldn't be sloppy work, it shouldn't be bad procurement process. But it really shouldn't be that these people are so powerful that they direct even policy."
Paul then indicated to the students that he believed that Cheney had used 9/11 as an excuse to launch the Iraq war to serve Halliburton's interests:
There's a great YouTube of Dick Cheney in 1995 defending [President] Bush Number One [and the decision not to invade Baghdad in the first Gulf war], and he goes on for about five minutes. He's being interviewed, I think, by the American Enterprise Institute, and and he says it would be a disaster, it would be vastly expensive, it'd be civil war, we would have no exit strategy. He goes on and on for five minutes. Dick Cheney saying it would be a bad idea. And that's why the first Bush didn’t go into Baghdad. Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he's back in government and it's a good idea to go into Iraq.
http://www.motherjones.com/...
This is coming out now because just last week, Cheney took a shot at Paul, indirectly accusing him of "isolationism". Whatever the reason, though, it's encouraging to see Cheney's possible war crimes dribbling back into the news. Just yesterday, Nancy Pelosi said on CNN that Cheney "set the tone" for torture during the Dumbya Administration:
http://news.yahoo.com/...
This David Corn discovery might be even sweeter, as the accusation against Cheney comes from Paul, a fellow Goposaur. Let's hope it leads to justice. At the very least, it's fun to watch a truly horrible person accuse someone even worse of treason.