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It would be fitting, then, for this most powerful of all vice presidents to be the first in American history to be censured. He has it coming. -snip- It won't happen, of course. But Cheney ought to be made to account for his repeated exaggerations of the Iraqi threat. I am referring specifically to his dire warning that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was working on a menacing nuclear weapons program and the United States had to do something about it. We know now that such a program did not exist. -snip- But those inspectors were not only dismissed by Cheney as Hussein's useful idiots, they were actually bullied by him. Former assistant secretary of state James P. Rubin wrote in Foreign Affairs that when Cheney met with Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the two most prominent U.N. inspectors, he bluntly told them that if the Bush administration found fault with their judgment, "we will not hesitate to discredit you." It now appears that it's Cheney who's been discredited. -snip- Cheney did not limit his bullying to U.N. inspectors. His growling impatience with dissent pervaded the Bush administration, especially the intelligence agencies. In the New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh reports that Cheney dismissed intelligence that did not fit his preconceived notions and seized on reports that validated his views. He basically short-circuited the laborious process for vetting intelligence -- one that worked well -- and instead reached down into the CIA and elsewhere to mine the particle of information that suited his purposes. It was fool's gold. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26880-2003Oct27.html
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