"I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted," said Cheney in a statement provided to The Hill. "The important thing is whether or not the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years."
Panetta, a veteran politician who served as Bill Clinton's chief of staff, had criticized Cheney for "gallows politics" and said the former vice president hoped the country were subject to another terrorist attack.
"I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue," Panetta told The New Yorker's Jane Mayer. "It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics."
http://rawstory.com/...
Cheney's comments were excerpted from a slightly longer article in The Hill:
http://thehill.com/...
I admit it. I've got an enormous chip on my shoulder regarding Dick Cheney, especially after his foul remarks to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont on the very floor of the U.S. Senate, supposedly over Leahy's criticism of Halliburton war profiteering:
http://www.cnn.com/...
Then, there is the interesting matter of anthrax mail in November of 2001:
The anthrax story returned to the front pages last week, when it was revealed that another leading Democratic senator was mailed a letter containing the deadly bacteria. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was the second prominent Democrat to be targeted, following Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. But so far, no Washington officials or media commentators seem willing to publicly ask the question that is quietly nagging many people on Capitol Hill: Were Democrats specifically targeted for anthrax attacks? And given growing evidence that they were, why is no one talking about it?
On Tuesday traces of anthrax were also found in the Senate offices of Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. But the Associated Press reported that officials suspect the anthrax got into Dodd and Kennedy's offices through contact with either the Leahy or Daschle letters. To date, there's no evidence that either Dodd or Kennedy was directly targeted.
http://archive.salon.com/...
In the huge panic that ensued nationwide after these interesting envelopes dumped their toxic powders, there was no reliable and rational news coverage on the ongoing (or, perhaps, non-ongoing) investigation of the anthrax mailings. The government's actions seemed to be more in the mode of a hurried up coverup of events and silence.
Nothing seemed to happen in this investigatory realm until suddenly in the summer of 2008, when it was conveniently decided that a lone microbiologist, Bruce Ivins, was most likely the perpetrator of these anthrax attacks and -- when Ivins, in a most convenient way, committed suicide, it seems -- the case seemed to be satisfactorily closed.
But why were the Senators Leahy and Daschle the specific targets of the anthrax mailings?
My favorite theory has to do with:
"After the September 11th 2001 Terrorist attacks, the Bush administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress, that would have, if already had not, set up a police state. And we know for a fact that the PATRIOT Act had already been drafted and was sitting on Ashcroft's desk as of September 10th.
Senators Daschle and Leahy were holding it up because they realised what this would lead to, indeed the first draft of the Patriot Act, they would have suspended the writ of habeas corpus. And all of a sudden out of nowhere come these anthrax attacks. And at the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either with respect to September 11th or the anthrax attacks, but then the New York Times revealed that the technology behind the letter to Senator Daschle. A trillion spores per gram, special electro-static treatment.
This is super-weapons grade Anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly proclaimed programs, and we had one before Nixon, had never developed before. So it was obvious to me that this was from a US Government lab, there is no where else you could have gotten that.
http://www.informationclearinghouse....
I must confess to an even more enormous chip on my shoulder regarding the Bush/Cheney Patriot Act which was passed, with overwhelming Democratic support, by a very panicked U.S. Congress. I am also very fond of the old and venerable legal concept of Habeas Corpus, which has been around, as recorded on parchment, for something like 800 years, although it was a concept held in the hearts of free men for at least a century.
But, alas, everything in regard to finding the truth in all this muck has been closed down and muzzled in the thickest dust coverlets and the dust has reached a depth of at least two inches or more.
Save for the recent publication of a book: Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail, by Bob Coen and Eric Nadler, bro of New York congressman Jerrold Nadler.
It is a very scary and troubling book which roams through government-sponsored anthrax attacks in old Rhodesia, the mysterious deaths of a number of microbiologists (one was actually blown off a bridge...) and, alas, only two mentions of my favorite demon, Dick Cheney.
But, what an intriguing mention on page 98 of a memo by then White House aid to President Gerold Ford's chief of staff warning that a lawsuit regarding the mysterious death of Frank Olson, who had been involved in "many of the clandestine tests -- including the aresolization of anthrax...), page 94.
Cheney's memo to Ford chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, warned that the Olson lawsuit:
risked disclosing "highly-classified national security information."
There are a number of anthrax timelines (I cite only three):
CNN's, which ends in 2001:
http://archives.cnn.com/...
Emptywheel:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/...
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...