Cheney: 'I know of no nation in history that has agreed to guarantee that the means of its own destruction will be in the hands of another nation'
Former Vice President Dick Cheney will have some very blunt things to say about the sellout to a nuclear-armed Iran in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday. And they are not about Israel.
The nuclear agreement negotiated between Iran and six world powers
earlier this year is "madness" and an "intricately crafted capitulation"
on the part of President Barack Obama's administration, former Vice
President Dick Cheney will say Tuesday during a speech to the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington.
The deal "will give Iran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the
U.S. homeland. I know of no nation in history that has agreed to
guarantee that the means of its own destruction will be in the hands of
another nation, particularly one that is hostile," Cheney will tell
attendees at the center-right think tank's event, according to excerpts
provided to POLITICO Playbook.
"What President Obama is asking the United States Congress to do is
unique—historically and dangerously unique. The results may be
catastrophic," Cheney will say. "It is not, as President Obama claims,
the only alternative to war. It is madness."
"Charles Krauthammer has written that it took Nazi Germany 7 years to
kill 6 million Jews. It would take a nuclear-armed Iran one day,"
Cheney will say of the possible consequences.
The deal will allow Iran " to modernize and expand its military
capabilities while the United States military suffers from devastating
Obama-era defense cuts and the effects of sequestration," Cheney will
say. As such, he will add, the United States "will be in a far worse
position" to defend its interests and prevent a nuclear Iran when the
deal expires, contrary to statements from Obama and Secretary of State
John Kerry.
Making reference to New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the
second-highest ranking Democrat to come out against the deal, Cheney
will say that his Democratic colleagues would do well to take notice.
"When a former ranking Democrat on Senate Foreign Relations says that
he fears that Iran will gain such a weapon and that he doesn't want his
name on it, his colleagues should pay very close attention. That man is
dealing in reality," Cheney will say.
Too little, too late? How many opponents are not being reported on by the uber-Leftist media?
I received this via email from a contact who lives in the Golan Heights:
In recent days, local residents of the south Golan have discovered
that a company called Afek Oil (headed by [former MK and high-ranking IDF officer] Effi Eitam) intends to begin
exploratory drilling for oil at ten sites in the south Golan at the end
of this month.
The company is actually a subsidiary of the
American firm Genie Energy which includes some big names such as Howard
Jonas (CEO), Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild. They
are also involved in shale oil production in the Piceance Basin in
Colarado and in Emek Ella in Israel.
Somehow, Afek Oil seems to have secured all manner of
permits without the knowledge and involvement of the local residents
here.The local residents are in the process of launching a public
campaign to stop this (disclosure - including me: one of the sites is
literally outside our front gate).
Beyond the obvious environmental and public health
concerns, locals are worried about the effect on tourism. With the Golan
being relatively remote and employment here hard to come by, many rely
on tourism for their main or supplementary income (it is not uncommon
here for people to have two or three jobs a bit like crofters in
Scotland). The Golan 'brand' of clean air and water and unspoiled
landscapes is obviously at odds with Big Oil and with the somewhat
antiquated Israeli law dictates that if oil is found in exploratory
drilling, it must be exploited, so clearly the initial stage is more
than likely to be just the beginning.
People here are also very concerned about another
important aspect of this project. We are already in the cross-hairs of
the BDS movement and others seeing as we are perceived as 'occupied
territory'. Many of our businesses here which export abroad go to great
lengths to remain under the BDS radar. But there is no way that Syria,
the Arab League and the UN/EU are going to sit quietly whilst an
Israeli/American company drills for oil in the Golan Heights and the
resulting unnecessary publicity is liable to damage existing businesses
too.
It will of course also be yet another issue which
those of us involved in defending Israel in the international arena will
have to tackle.
In subsequent emails:
You might wish to add something about the glaringly obvious fact that
17m high drilling platforms two or three kilometers from a border now populated
with Al Qaeda linked terrorists seems to be pushing our luck too!
Details of the planning application can be found at the link below if you search according to the case number 21440/ג
Revealed: Alexander Haig only cabinet member to defend Israel after Osirak bombing
At a ceremony commemorating the life of Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson zt"l (May the Memory of the Righteous be a Blessing), whose yahrtzeit (anniversary of the date of his death) is this coming Tuesday, Sherwood "Woody" Goldberg, who was Alexander Haig's Chief of Staff, discloses that Haig was the only Reagan cabinet member to defend Israel after it destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor (32 years ago today on the Gregorian calendar).
In
a surprise raid On June 7, 1981 -- 32 years ago today -- Israeli F-16s
and F-15s bombed and destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq.
As
Goldberg told it, President Reagan and his staff were furious at
Israel. Not only did she attack Iraq without consulting Washington,
seek permission nor give any warning about the attack - but Israel used
American fighter jets to get the job done.
When
the Americans learned of the strike, Reagan called an emergency cabinet
meeting the next day to determine how the administration would respond.
Goldberg
related that, one-by-one, President Reagan polled Vice President George
H.W. Bush and his cabinet. To a man, the reaction was harsh: "Crush
Israel!" was the response from the President's men.
That is, until it was Haig's turn to weigh-in.
"One
day you will get down on your knees and thank Israel for doing that,"
Haig said according to Goldberg, making him the lone dissenter.
Needless
to say, America did not "crush" Israel although there were tensions in
the immediate aftermath. Less than 10 years later America was at war
with Iraq to defend Kuwait in the Gulf War, a k a "Operation Desert
Storm."
While
we may never know if President Reagan ever did kneel in gratitude to
Israel, a nuclear-armed Iraq may have deterred America from that
obligation to our ally or cost a great many more American lives.
Yes, time proved Haig prescient.
It is well known that in June 1991, after the first Gulf War, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, presented Israel's Air Force Commander David Ivri with a satellite photo of the Iraqi reactor:
"For General David Ivri," Cheney wrote on the photo, "with thanks and
appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi Nuclear Program
in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm." Ivri, when he
was Israeli ambassador to Washington a few years ago, liked the photo
so much he had it hanging in his office.
And yet, ten years earlier, only one US cabinet member defended Israel and saw that it had done the right thing. The difference? In 1981, we had a Prime Minister who was a courageous leader instead of a politician blowing with the winds.
In a new book that's hitting the stores this week, former US Vice President Dick Cheney writes that he urged former President George W. Bush to bomb Syria's nuclear reactor in 2007 (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
“I again made the case for U.S. military action against the reactor,” Mr. Cheney wrote about a meeting on the issue. “But I was a lone voice. After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.”
Mr. Bush chose to try diplomatic pressure to force the Syrians to abandon the secret program, but the Israelis bombed the site in September 2007. Mr. Cheney’s account of the discussion appears in his autobiography, “In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir,” which is to be published by Simon & Schuster next week. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.
All of this is not surprising. Two of Cheney's closest advisers were David and Meyrav Wormser. David resigned to protest the Annapolis process (if it can be called that) in November 2007.
For two decades, we have called on Israel to take risks for peace and make painful concessions so that it will be accepted more broadly and solidly by the international community. And yet, after two decades, the voices questioning Israel’s very right to exist even in Europe are louder than ever. Polls there show that even the populations of even our closest allies revile Israel and Israelis more than even Iran or North Korea.
The prospects that this time will be different and that we will see real progress follow Annapolis, and that all these trends will be reversed, are bleak for several reasons. First, the concept behind Annapolis was divorced from the President’s forward strategy of freedom. Second, the Fatah leadership is so irredeemably weak that it cannot deliver. Third, we are ignoring the danger of the situation in Gaza. Fourth, the Annapolis framework “regionalized” the Palestinian issue when the historical record of regionalization of conflicts is tragic and violent. Finally, the Palestinian issue is not our highest national priority in the current strategic environment. Yet, it disproportionately occupies our attention at the cost of displaying commitment to more important causes, such as Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. In short, Annapolis failed to emerge from, and thus advance, our national interests.
Meyrav (they're married to each other) was the person who told the World that the Bush administration had given Israel a green light to strike Syria during the Second Lebanon War in 2006. If Israeli Prime Minister Ehud K. Olmert had the guts to attack Syria in 2006, there may not have been a need to take out its nuclear reactor in 2007.
Did the administration expect Israel to attack Syria?
"They hoped Israel would do it. You cannot come to another country and order it to launch a war, but there was hope, and more than hope, that Israel would do the right thing. It would have served both the American and Israeli interests.
"The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space… They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its strategic and important ally should be hit."
You may want to read both those posts in their entirety. Cheney was probably the biggest Israelphile of the entire Bush inner circle (including Bush himself). As Defense Secretary during the first Gulf War, he presented David Ivry, the commander of Israel's Air Force when the IAF took out Iraq's nuclear reactor, with a satellite image of the former Osirak reactor site, and a note of thanks for making America's job easier in the first Gulf War.
If anyone has or gets hold of the book, please let me know what (if anything) Cheney says about the Second Lebanon War.
Barack Obama and his administration have been trying hard - really hard - to take as much credit as possible for the death of Osama Bin Laden. But do they deserve that credit? Consider this (Hat Tip: Dan F):
U.S. officials said the information that ultimately led to bin Laden's capture originally came from detainees held in secret CIA prison sites in Eastern Europe. There, agency interrogators were told of an alias used by a courier whom bin Laden particularly trusted.
It took four long years to learn the man's real name, then years more before investigators got a big break in the case, these officials said. Sometime in mid-2010, the man was overheard using a phone by intelligence officials, who then were able to locate his residence — the specially constructed $1 million compound with walls as high as 18 feet topped with barbed wire.
Who were these detainees? What kind of 'secret CIA prison sites'? And what motivated them to talk to their interrogators? Hint: It wasn't a promise of chocolate cake.
Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Shy Guy).
That's right - the information about Osama Bin Laden's courier, which led to Sunday night's targeted killing came from waterboarding terrorists.
But Barack Obama opposed waterboarding and has put a stop to it since his administration came to power.
Barack Obama's campaign has just sent over a statement saying that he cannot support Michael Mukasey for AG absent some clearer language from him on waterboarding:
"I have been consistent in my strong belief that no Administration should allow the use of torture, including so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' like water-boarding, head-slapping, and extreme temperatures. It's time that we had a Department of Justice that upholds the rule of law and American values, instead of finding ways to enable the President to subvert them. No more political parsing or legal loopholes. I cannot support Judge Mukasey unless he clearly and unequivocally rejects techniques like water-boarding."
President Barack Obama said Wednesday night that waterboarding authorized by former President George W. Bush was torture and that the information it gained from terror suspects could have been obtained by other means. "In some cases, it may be harder," he conceded at a White House news conference capping a whirlwind first 100 days in office.
...
The president also said he was "absolutely convinced" he had acted correctly in banning tough interrogation techniques including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, and in making public the Bush administration memos detailing their use on terrorist suspects. "Not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees ... but because we could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are."
Obama has come under heavy criticism for his actions from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Republicans. They have urged Obama to release memos they say will show the tough methods were successful in obtaining information.
Obama told reporters he has read the documents Cheney and others are referring to but said they are classified and declined to discuss their details. In a White House exchange with House Republican leader John Boehner last week, Obama said the record was equivocal.
Maybe the information that led to Osama Bin Laden's death could have been obtained without waterboarding. But the fact is that it was not. The fact is that the death of Osama Bin Laden would not have happened without the waterboarding pursued by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Michael Mukasey. Obama has no right to take credit. If we had done things his way, Osama Bin Laden would probably still be alive.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
