rssDick Cheney And Al-Qaeda’s Operational Cycle
Monday, August 31, 2009 at 2:57 pm
- 6 Comments
I can’t resist. One more from Cheney’s Fox News interview:
The thing I keep coming back to time and time again, Chris, is the fact that we’ve gone for eight years without another attack. Now, how do you explain that?
The critics don’t have any solution for that. They can criticize our policies, our way of doing business, but the results speak for themselves. And, as well as the efforts that we went to with the Justice Department and so forth to make certain what we were doing was legal, was consistent with our international treaty obligations.
Critics have “no answer” for it because no one has an answer for it. The truth is that the U.S. does not have a clear sense of al-Qaeda’s strategy for attacking the U.S. at home or abroad. Why no attack in eight years? Well, it took eight years between the 1993 and the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Perhaps al-Qaeda is biding its time. Or, perhaps, al-Qaeda is choosing other paths of opportunity, as senior al-Qaeda strategist Mustafa Abu al-Yazid recently told al-Jazeera:
[N]ow we have open fronts in many countries and in it the meanings of big operations that we used to carry out against the enemies of Allah occur there, and everyone saw and heard what happened to the Americans of big defeats including Iraq and Afghanistan and other places. So, many of the purposes of big operations actualized in open fronts. Also, we did not and will not leave these big operations, and we were preparing for some operations that reached the final stages but for some conditions these operations did not complete, and the enemy knows that very well. And, as we said, we will continue preparing for these kinds of operations and will carry them out that which will make the Muslims happy, and make the Kafirin angry, Allah-willing. And, also we demanded and still demanding all the Al-Qaida branches to carry out these great operations.
The point isn’t that we know for sure Cheney’s wrong. It’s that there’s a lot we still don’t know about al-Qaeda’s operational planning, and so it’s deceptive, and self-deceptive, to say that no attacks in the U.S. since 2001 indicate that the Bush torture methods succeeded. Indeed, during Bush and Cheney’s tenure, the United States suffered more attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi, Afghan and European civilians than before they took office. They’d probably say that such a statistic is misleading. But Cheney has a unique idea of what constitutes grounds for certainty.
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6 Comments
Comment posted August 31, 2009 @ 7:03 pm
IF THE REPUBLICANS TAKE CREDIT FOR THE PAST 8 YEARS, THEN THEY MUST TAKE
CREDIT FOR ALLOWING 9/11 TO HAPPEN IN THE FIRST PLACE
Comment posted August 31, 2009 @ 7:42 pm
No space aliens have landed on my lawn in the past 60 years. Therefore my tinfoil antenna is working!
And, what's more, by triggering trillion dollar wars in Afhanistan and Iraq, and causing untold billions to be spent on “Homeland Security”, Al Queda can simply sit back in the cave and laugh as the US destroys its own economy to fight the invisible foe of the global war on whatever.
Comment posted August 31, 2009 @ 11:12 pm
Remember Lynne Cheney on The Daily Show, claiming the same thing?
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-1…
After she claims credit for her husband and GWB for 6 “safe” years, Stewart points out the anthrax attacks and that it was 8 years after the first WTC bombing.
LC: “But during that time, there were other attacks: remember the USS Cole, for example. There were worldwide bombings going on, the bombings of the embassies in Africa. So the terrorists uh weren't uh reluctant to damage American interests and kill Americans. Friends?”
JS: “We are friends, I just–you know that they have been doing that all these past six years. They've been– I mean, you know the Spanish bombing, the English bombing, then all the bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .”
LC: “Yes yes yes but I'm talking about AMERICAN interests.”
JS: “Aren't we interested in–all right, j'd assumed that they were our allies, but all right.”
LC: “They are our allies.”
And what of the service-members and support contractors killed, leaving aside for the moment the far greater number of dead Southwest Asians? Who do ya gotta kill to get Lynne Cheney to accept it as an American interest?
Comment posted September 2, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
A more accurate assessment of national security would focus heavily on activity of al qaeda-associated groups within the US. Its amazing that Dick Cheney portrays our country as al qaeda-free. Of all the pundits who have commented on al qaeda recently, one pointed out that al qaeda has woven webs and alliances with gangs, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, sale of goods-as-money, active support and training of militias, etc.
Law enforcement agencies at all levels are dealing with this reality while Cheney is primping, showboating, supporting sadism as a national policy and deliberately misleading the public.
Pingback posted September 4, 2009 @ 10:26 pm
[...] on September 5, 2009 It seems here, that the left-wing leaning Washington Independent certainly doesn’t mind to attempt to refer that Dick Cheney somehow was involved in organizing the 9/11 attacks or that [...]
Comment posted September 13, 2009 @ 6:11 pm
total liberal rag…
You pay no tribute to the hard work of the US military and intel groups. You simply assume there have been no additional attacks, because there were none planned.
The writer of this article needs a harsh revisit to reality, and perhaps a revisit to thier own emotions on sept 12th.
–nroon, comments like that have no part in this discussion..
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