Dick Cheney's Suicide Mission
3.7.01   Arianna Huffington OverThrowTheGov.com

In fact, in so many cases, such pursuits become just another addiction. And like any addiction, this one is rife with denial & self-delusion. The vice president began experiencing chest pains on Saturday. You'd think after suffering four heart attacks, the last 3 months ago, this might set off alarms. But not for Cheney, who not only kept to his arduous work schedule but his arduous social schedule as well, partying with Washington lawyer Roderick Hills on Saturday night and Alan Greenspan on Sunday. In the midst of all this, he told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: "I feel great." He exhibited the same bonhomie when leaving the hospital Tuesday morning, telling reporters he felt "good." when he just had a catheter tube inserted into his leg and run up to the heart to reopen the same clogged artery propped open by a metal stent in November. Like all addicts, he's not just lying to us, he's lying to himself. Cheney's doctors say there is a 40% likelihood that he'll have another episode like the one he just suffered. Nevertheless, Cheney has already resumed his super-charged work schedule. "There is an increasing amount of scientific evidence," Dr. Dean Ornish told me, "that stress plays a large role. All these bypasses and angioplasties only temporize the problem. It's important to address the underlying causes of the condition rather than literally and metaphorically bypassing them."
When asked if he thought his ailing No. 2 should cut back on his responsibilities, our compassionate president said no: "He's plenty strong and plenty capable of carrying the workload that he's been working in the past." Of course, to the Bush family, Cheney is just a political version of the help. Is the vice president on a suicide mission or just unable to overcome his type-A addiction to the adrenaline high of his lofty position? After his last heart attack, he was asked if he was worried about having another one. "I don't operate that way," he replied. Put the gun to your head and see if the next chamber is the one with the bullet.

People who love him the most, his wife, his daughters, his close friends, should have intervened by now. But they haven't and, clearly, the enablers he works with are not likely to. President Bush called this week's cardiac catheterization, which Cheney's cardiologist termed "urgent" and "significant," a "precautionary measure." To me "precautionary" suggests adding some extra fruit and vegetables to your diet, not having a balloon inflated inside your heart. Of course, this is not the first time the seriousness of the vice president's condition has been obscured in a cloud of euphemistic understatement & out-and-out lying. "Dick Cheney is healthy. He did not have a heart attack," Bush told reporters last November when Cheney was hospitalized after suffering a heart attack. Obfuscation goes on. On Monday, Cheney spokeswoman Mary Matalin assured us that the vice president had checked himself in to the hospital for "a non- emergency precautionary procedure" after experiencing "two brief, mild episodes of chest discomfort" over the weekend. By Tuesday that had doubled to four episodes of chest pain. This was the administration that was going to "restore honor and dignity to the White House" and put an end to linguistic hairsplitting. It's a question of subject" New Democrats lie about sex; aging Republicans lie about their cholesterol count. Illness is supposed to slow us down a step, take us back a pace and make us reevaluate our priorities. In a culture that, memorial service platitudes notwithstanding, always puts the urgent above the important, Cheney could send a powerful message about what ultimately matters. Vice presidents are supposed to attend other people's funerals.

Cheney 'doing great,' to work Monday
7.1.01   Reuters

WASHINGTON   VP Cheney was feeling well on Sunday and planned to return to work on Monday after having a device implanted in his chest over the weekend to guard against episodes of a rapid heartbeat, his spokeswoman said. "He's doing great and he's relaxing in his house and he's looking forward to going back to work tomorrow," spokeswoman Juleanna Glover Weiss said. Doctors placed a pager-sized device in the vice president's chest on Saturday after finding him susceptible to rapid heartbeats. The implantable cardioverter defibrillator weighs less than 3 ounces and functions as a pacemaker to speed the heart rate, and as a defibrillator to slow it down. About 150,000 Americans have one.
Cheney, 60, walked out of George Washington University Hospital a few hours after the surgery and said he was feeling well. He has had four heart attacks since 1978. It was the third major procedure to address his heart problems in the last eight months and came after a monitoring device two weeks ago discovered he was having brief episodes of a rapid heartbeat.

The procedure reignited questions about Cheney's ability to serve in the No. 2 job in the country. But the vice president said on Friday doctors told him there was no reason he could not continue to function normally as vice president. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on Sunday said he was not concerned about the possibility that Cheney's health could force him to leave the White House before completing his 4 year term. "Obviously this has been a matter that the vice president's had to contend with for many years," Daschle said on ABC's "This Week." "He's done it successfully, and I have every expectation he'll continue to do so."

Cheney returns to work with pacemaker
7.2.01   AP

WASHINGTON   VP Dick Cheney is returning to work with a new heart pacemaker in his chest, promoting the energy strategy he assembled for the administration and attending his usual series of White House meetings. After meeting with President Bush on Monday morning, Cheney was fielding energy questions from reporters in at least three radio interviews and sitting down with staff members to discuss a range of policy issues, said spokeswoman Juleanna Glover Weiss. "It's a typical day,'' she said. Cheney planned no public appearances, and was not headed to Capitol Hill, she said. Cheney is a key contact between the administration and lawmakers, but Congress is in recess this week.
A dual-purpose pacemaker was implanted in Cheney's chest in an hourlong procedure Saturday at George Washington University Hospital. He was home a few hours later. It works like any other pacemaker by assuring that his heart does not beat too slowly. When it detects the beat slowing below a certain level, it sends a mild electric charge to pace the beat at a minimum level. More dramatically, if the heart suddenly surges to a dangerous, high- speed beat, the defibrillator kicks in. It sends an electrical jolt to the lower chamber of the heart and causes it to slow down. Sometimes this will cause the heart to slow too much, and that is when the pacemaker turns on and adjusts the rhythm.

That jolt could be jarring for Cheney, said Dr. Douglas Zipes, president of the American College of Cardiology and an authority on irregular heart rhythms who has consulted with the vice president's doctors. "That is something he will feel, and patients describe it anywhere from a giant hiccup to a mule kick in the chest,'' Zipes said on "Fox News Sunday.'' "With an electric shock, it contracts all of the muscles, not just the heart but the chest muscles, too,'' Zipes said. "Yes, it's recognizable.'' Cheney's personal cardiologist has said there was less than a 10 percent chance that the defibrillator will be needed to calm Cheney's heart. Asked how the device will affect Cheney's daily life, Zipes said, "Probably not at all.''
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said he had no doubts about Cheney's ability to serve in his job. "Obviously this has been a matter that the vice president's had to contend with for many years,'' Daschle said on ABC's "This Week.'' "He's done it successfully, and I have every expectation he'll continue to do so.'' House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., told CBS' "Face the Nation'' that Cheney has been "very, very vigorous in carrying out his office, and I expect him to continue to do so.''

Cheney's turning point
5.4.01   Greg Pierce WashTimes

It is said that behind every successful man, there´s a woman. And that is apparently the case with VP Richard B. Cheney, married to Lynne Cheney, a successful person in her own right.. Cheney´s debt to his wife is expressed in his own words in 5.7.01 issue of the New Yorker. After flunking out of Yale after 4 semesters, young Cheney returned to Wyoming, where he worked on & off for 6 years as an electrical worker. "When I should have been graduating from Yale, one of the world´s finer universities, with a first-rate education, all paid for by the university, I found myself in Rock Springs working, building power lines, having been in a couple of scrapes with the law," Cheney told writer Nicholas Lemann (Letter from Washington The Quiet Man "How Dick Cheney rose to power").   "Arrested twice within a year for driving under the influence, once in Cheyenne, once in Rock Springs … I was headed down a bad road, if I continued on that course." Lynne, whom he had dated since high school, "made it clear she wasn´t interested in marrying a lineman for the county. That was really when I went back to school in Laramie. I buckled down and applied myself. Decided it was time to make something of myself."

Bush style gives WHouse corporate feel
3.11.01   Richard L. Berke NYTimes

WASHINGTON   … include the time he devotes to his job : far less than Clinton; the authority given to his vice president : Dick Cheney acts as chief operating officer; the interplay among staff members : they must follow a dress code and rules on cordiality; and the use of pollsters : they have been kept out of the Oval Office. … "This is the only bureaucracy in Washington that can change to fit the personality of the president," said Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff, who served in the White House under Pres. Reagan & Bush pere, "This president is the first ever to have an MBA."
The recent release of Bush's budget blueprint underscores a telling difference between Bush and Clinton. By Card's estimation, Bush devoted "in the neighborhood of 5 hours" to meetings to discuss his budget proposal. By contrast, Gene Sperling, who for years was a top economic adviser to Clinton, said the former president spent at least 25 hours in official meetings assembling the budget in his first weeks in office, and 50 hours more in more casual settings. Bush left it to Cheney to preside over a small group of aides to actually draft the proposal. "There has been a sea change," said Kenneth Duberstein, who was a chief of staff for Reagan. "This is the first time in American history we've had a president and a prime minister."
  [ Where Wm Casey was the corpse's hand of WWII on R.Reagan, Cheney is Vietnam haunting GWBush. ]

… An important reason for what has been widely regarded as a smooth takeover of the govt is that Bush has surrounded himself with veterans such as Cheney & Card. Staff members are also older than those of past administrations, which is another reason for the more subdued White House.…"It's going back to a Cabinet govt," said former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. …

H.   'Tis well: (2.2.517)
I'll have thee speak out the rest soon. Good my lord,
will you see the players well bestowed?
Do you hear, let them be well used;
They are the abstract & brief chronicles of the time:
After your death you were better have
a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

Polonius  
My lord, I will use them according to their dessert.

H.   God's bodykins, man, much better:
use every man after his dessert,
& who should 'scape whipping?
Use them after your own honour & dignity:
the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

WASHINGTON   The oilfield services company Dick Cheney headed before he became U.S. vice president had far more extensive financial dealings with Iraq than Cheney has acknowledged, The Washington Post reported on Saturday. Citing U.N. records and oil industry executives, the newspaper said two subsidiaries of Halliburton Co. had contracts to sell $73 million dollars in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and CEO of the Dallas-based company. The newspaper said, according to U.N. records, the subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold material to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000. Cheney resigned as chairman of Halliburton in August.
Halliburton's dealings with Iraq were first reported last year. But the Post said U.N. records it recently obtained show the business was more extensive than originally reported or acknowledged by the vice president. Cheney's spokeswoman, Juleanna Glover Weiss, said the two companies were joint ventures operated by Dresser at the time it was taken over by Halliburton, and Halliburton sold the units "as soon as it was legally feasible." "The vice president never wanted any companies under his control to do business with Iraq, even if that business was allowed under the oil-for-food program," Weiss told Reuters.

"Halliburton divested itself as soon as it was legally feasible," she said, adding that the contracts themselves were "perfectly legal and within the law." Mary Matalin, Cheney's counselor, was quoted by the Post as saying that if he "was ever in a conversation or meeting where there was a question of pursuing a project with someone in Iraq, he said, 'No.' " "In a joint venture, he would not have reviewed all their existing contracts," Matalin said. "The nature of those joint ventures was that they had a separate governing structure, so he had no control over them." During the presidential campaign, Cheney said he had imposed a "firm policy" at Halliburton against trading with Iraq. The Post said Cheney has offered contradictory accounts of how much he knew about Halliburton's dealings with Iraq.
Former executives at the Halliburton subsidiaries told the Post they had never heard objections, from Cheney or any other company official, to trading with Baghdad. "Halliburton & Ingersoll-Rand, as far as I know, had no official policy about that, other than we would be in compliance with applicable U.S. & international laws," former Ingersoll executive Cleive Dumas was quoted as saying. Dumas oversaw Ingersoll Dresser Pump's business in the Middle East, including Iraq. Such trade did not violate U.S. law as long as it occurred within the 1996 U.N.-supervised program that permits Iraq to export oil to pay for food, medicine and humanitarian goods. In 1998, the oil-for-food program was expanded to allow Baghdad to import spare parts for its oil facilities. Cheney has pushed for a review of U.S. policy toward countries such as Iraq, Iran and Libya, arguing that unilateral sanctions penalize American companies.

Tricky Dick
8.21.00   Doug Ireland The Nation

When Dubya picked Dick Cheney as his running mate, the little screen was awash in flatulent flatteries from the chattering classes: "a grown-up," "presidential," "all steak and no sizzle" were some of the most-repeated encomiums sprayed in Cheney's direction. But after Gore surrogates fanned out across the blabshows armed with talking points about Cheney's reactionary voting record in Congress: against Head Start, school lunches, the liberation from prison of Nelson Mandela, the toxic waste cleanup Superfund and the like, Jay Leno cracked to his late-night audience that Bush/Cheney was "the Wizard of Oz ticket: One has no brain, the other has no heart."
When that equal-opportunity war criminal Colin Powell ." (the man who helped cover up the My Lai massacre) delivered his prime-time benediction of Cheney to the Philadelphia Republicans, among those chuckling at the enormous hypocrisy of Powell's effusive blessing was Leon Sigal, a former member of the New York Times editorial board. Sigal's forthcoming book, Hang Separately: Cooperative Security Between U.S. & Russia, 1985-1994, details how Cheney, as Defense Secretary, remained a hard-line cold warrior even after the fall of the Berlin wall and fought Powell's proposed cuts in military spending & U.S. troops abroad. "Cheney was very skeptical of Gorbachev and kept up his cold war attitude long after Powell and [President] Bush had changed," Sigal told me. "Powell thought nukes were useless. In 1990, Powell wanted to pull all the nukes off surface ships and out of Europe and Korea, but Cheney opposed it. Bush was about to do it in August of '90 when Kuwait was invaded. A year later, Powell pushed the proposal again, and Cheney again opposed it." The pullback was finally announced in September 1991. Cheney's ostrichlike refusal to admit that the world had changed meant "keeping the defense budget higher than the substantial cuts Powell wanted," says Sigal, "and keeping conventional forces in Europe at a higher level. … Cheney was very conservative in the sense he didn't want to move; Powell says this in his memoirs. President Bush, in the book he wrote with Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed, also says Cheney resisted deeper cuts."

To take just one example, on pg 452 of his memoirs, Powell describes his battle against the "foolish" attempt to produce an improved nuclear artillery shell. "I was becoming more and more convinced that tactical nuclear weapons had no place on a battlefield," Powell writes. "At a time when we were dismantling huge intermediate-range nuclear missiles, why should we be putting money into refining small tactical nukes of questionable value? My argument ran into a stone wall. … Hard-line Pentagon civilian policymakers opposed me, including Dick Cheney."
The national press has been telling us what a "great manager" Cheney was at DoD. But for whom? Cheney showed a particular indulgence for military-industrial-complex contractors headed by political cronies. Under his predecessor, Reagan Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, the Pentagon had developed an advance procurement system, stretching forward two decades, with no-bid contracts awarded for a raft of weapons and intelligence systems. On leaving govt, Carlucci joined the Carlyle Group, a prime military contractor, bringing with him knowledge of which firms would get those contracts. Carlyle then began buying them up, and made a bundle when the Pentagon bucks began flowing their way, later selling many of them at a huge profit.

Says a high-ranking military officer (now retired) who has an intimate knowledge of those deals but would only speak with a guarantee of anonymity, "These contracts were let with no normal safeguards or protections to insure that the government got what it paid for," on Cheney's watch. "We have been paying through the nose for a long time for those contracts," for everything from arms-control-treaty hardware and software systems to the J- STARS system, which monitors on-the-ground movement of vehicles and personnel and was extensively used in Desert Storm & Kosovo.
Cheney, he says, could have reviewed or canceled these contracts at any time but refused to do so. "Why," he asks, "are we letting contracts for multiyear procurement framed in a way that all the risk is being taken by the government and not by the people who got these wonderful contracts? Even if we had to pay a contractual penalty on some of them, don't you think it would have made sense to at least review them? It would take some real forensic accounting to figure out how much more these deals cost the taxpayers than they should have. And this was not just Carlyle exclusively, the joy was spread around. It's a damned odd way of doing business." Undoubtedly, one reason Cheney was so indulgent of folks like Carlucci who cashed in on their govt service (Jas. Baker & Dick Darman are now also on Carlyle payroll) is that he planned to do the same thing himself. When Cheney became CEO of Halliburton in 1995, the energy conglomerate did only a third of its business abroad. Building on the relationships he knitted at Defense, particularly during the Gulf War, Cheney has aggressively expanded Halliburton's foreign operations to more than 70 percent of its $14.9 billion annual business, boosting the company's stock value more than 100 percent. Cheney nearly tripled Halliburton's spending on federal lobbying (not counting the millions it has ladled out to a host of conservative business and trade associations). No surprise, then, that with Cheney in charge Halliburton has doubled its government contracts, to $2.3 billion. The company's latest annual report lists its Brown & Root Services Division's "two largest customers" as the US Defense Department and the British Defense Ministry. Halliburton has also raked in $1.5 billion in US govt loans from the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, up from $100 million in such loans before Cheney took over. That's a lot of "compassion" for these phony fiscal conservatives, and it explains why the Center for Public Integrity has branded Cheney's company a "corporate-welfare hog."

Cheney has made several fortunes from his helmsmanship at Halliburton: According to Reuters, he was paid nearly $2 million in compensation in 1999 (down from $4.4 million the previous year) and given stock options worth from $7.4 million to $18.8 million (depending on the stock's future performance). This is on top of the $45.5 million in stock that Cheney owns as the company's largest shareholder, plus another $12.5 million in exercisable stock options. Given this accumulated lucre, Cheney's recent wailings about the financial hardship he would endure as a mere Vice President should leave few of us weeping. Cheney has not been chary about doing business with some of the world's most despotic oligarchies and corrupt dictatorships. Poppy helped him gin up clients: When Bush père went to Riyadh in March 1996 to receive a medal from Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, Cheney went along for the ride, and was included by the elder Bush in his meetings with the Saudi Defense Minister "to discuss issues of common interest," as a Saudi Embassy press release delicately put it.
These tyrants include not only the Saudis and the gaudy Gulf emirs (one of Halliburton's 5 intl offices is in Dubai) but also the sanguineous regimes in Syria, Turkmenistan, Burma and Algeria. With one notable exception, Larry Kaplan's dissection of Halliburton's dirty dealings with Heydar Aliyev's brutal Azerbaijani dictatorship in the August 8 New Republic, the press has largely ignored the Cheney-run company's squalid relations with these regimes, where bribery-to-do-business is the rule. Oil-industry sources say that one way oil-related giants like Halliburton get around the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is by giving sizable gifts to the private foundations run by these ruling elites, which makes the ultimate destination of this laundered money nearly impossible to trace.

•   Foreign policy in wake of the Cold War been 5yrs of ad hoc fits & starts; if continued, will jeopardize America's values, fortunes and lives;
•   Defining feature of American engagement in Post-Cold War world has been confusion;
•   Several one-time-only windows of opportunity been missed;
•   For decades ahead, only sound basis for coherent, sustainable U.S. foreign policy is clear public sense of American national interests;
• Clarity about the hierarchy of national interests will require harder thinking than was true during Cold War.