Dick Cheney – The Mask Behind The Throne

Published in the Haleakala Times as a four-part series in the spring of 2007. The complete and unedited version is posted below in two parts.

"I look at this White House and I ask myself, how did they get so many draft dodgers in one place? The President; Dick Cheney, five deferments; John Ashcroft, six deferments. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hassert, Rush Limbaugh – well, you know, there are a lot of people who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. Most of them did it because they had moral qualms about that war. But not these people. These people loved the war; they just wanted somebody else to fight it." – Robert Kennedy Jr.

A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, played football as a youth and was senior class president at his Natrona County High School in Casper, Wyoming. His sweetheart and future wife, however, was more popular – she was a state-champion baton twirler and was voted Mustang Queen her senior year. When Lynne Vincent performed her famous flaming baton twirl at public gatherings, it was quiet Dick who put the fire out backstage while she basked in the applause of center stage.

Cheney earned a scholarship to Yale University and went East for the first time, but he was asked to leave after one year because of "poor academic performance", the university's polite way of saying that he flunked out. He re-enrolled two more times before dropping for good, according to Yale's enrollment records. Jacob Plotkin, a retired MSU mathematics professor, was Cheney's college roommate during his freshman year.

"It's hard to flunk out of Yale. It's something that one really has to put effort into. Yale at that time tried to make sure everybody who entered graduated," said Plotkin. "Where others might spend some time on the weekend studying, Dick was either talking, drinking or playing cards with his football buddies."

Like other young folks in the 60's, Cheney dropped in and out of college, got caught drunk driving twice in one year, and used deferments to dodge the Vietnam War draft. Unlike most young men of his era, however, Cheney sought and received a total of five deferments.

In January 1959, an 18-year-old Cheney was classified by the draft board as 1A and fully fit to join the Army. The military wasn't drafting young men in those early years of the American misadventure in Indochina, but things were different by 1963 when Cheney was granted the first of two deferments he requested that year as a new Casper Community College student.

Dick and Lynne had impeccable timing when it came to keeping him home from the war. They married in August 1964, just three weeks after Congress authorized President Lyndon Johnson to use military force in Vietnam. A third deferment followed in October, which kept Dick safe until he graduated from the University of Wyoming in May 1965. At that point he was once again classified 1A, but his status as a married man made it unlikely that he would be called up.

On October 6, 1965, the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting married men who had no children. In November Cheney started graduate school, obtained his fourth deferment, and announced that he and Lynne were pregnant.

Cheney's final "hardship" deferment granted him 3A status in January 1966, which exempted men with children. The following year Cheney turned 26 and passed the age limit to be drafted.

In a 1989 interview with the Washington Post, when asked about his unusual total of five deferments, Cheney replied, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service." But at the time of his confirmation hearings as defense secretary, when Cheney was asked by an interviewer about American involvement in Vietnam, he said, "Was it a noble cause? Yes, indeed, I think it was."

The lure of politics struck the young Cheney at some point in his youth, and he became a Republican Congressional intern in 1969. In Washington he met and befriended Donald Rumsfeld, a rising star in the Richard Nixon administration. Rumsfeld soon hired Cheney as his personal assistant in the Office of Economic Opportunity, and their careers have been closely linked since those days.

After Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment in 1974, Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's chief of staff and made Cheney his deputy, which brought the future VP to the first of his three tours of duty in the White House. Author Joan Didion, writing for the NY Review of Books, stated that in the Ford administration Cheney and Rumsfeld were know as "the little Praetorians" for insisting that the president had powers far beyond what most interpretations of the Constitution allowed.

Together Rumsfeld and Cheney engineered what was later called the "Halloween Massacre" soon after they started working in the White House. Ford was uncomfortable with Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was said to be jealous of his rival, which made it easy for Rumsfeld and Cheney to convince Ford to fire Schlesinger and tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller that he would be replaced in the upcoming election with Bob Dole.

The two men were also able to sell Ford the idea of removing Kissinger from his second post as National Security Adviser and, in a move that would have long-term effects on both their futures, were instrumental in getting George H. W. Bush appointed as the Director of the CIA.

When the dust from the Massacre cleared, Rumsfeld was the new Defense Secretary and Cheney became Ford's Chief of Staff – at age 34, the youngest person ever to serve in that powerful White House position. For some perspective, that same year a 29-year-old George W. Bush lived in Midland, Texas and, by his own admission, was still drinking and partying and failing to make money in the oil business.

In 1976, Rumsfeld and Cheney supported a Kissinger-arranged, multi-billion dollar deal to sell eight nuclear reactors to the US-supported Shah of Iran, along with enriched uranium for fuel and laser equipment suitable for enriching uranium to weapons grade levels. The election of Jimmy Carter in the fall of 1976 sent Cheney home to Wyoming, but the arrangement to supply Iran continued until the unpopular Shah's regime in Iran fell to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

What seemed a matter of little consequence at the time was actually the first sign of an eagerness by Cheney to do business with whoever was in control of Iran. It was a practice he continued during the Iran-Contra scandal and later as CEO at Halliburton. It wasn't until 2001, when Iran suddenly was named as part of an "Axis of Evil" by George W. Bush, that Cheney began to take an isolationist position towards Iran.

If the United States President is truly the Leader of the Free World, then Cheney is today just a heartbeat away from that high office – but after suffering four heart attacks over the past 22 years, his heart isn't what it used to be.

In 1978, Cheney was elected to represent Wyoming in the House of Representatives despite suffering his first heart attack during the primary campaign. Three more attacks followed, in 1984, 1988, and 2000. He underwent an artery bypass graft in 1988, had artery stenting in 2000 and a balloon angioplasty in 2001. White House doctors say that his atherosclerotic disease is progressing. Cheney occasionally uses a cane when walking, he says, due to an unnamed "foot condition" that is unrelated to his cardiovascular problems.

Cheney was reelected to the House five times, serving until 1989 and establishing a consistent conservative voting record while demonstrating complete loyalty to the Republican party. His votes in the House during 1988, the last year he served there, gave him an American Conservative Union rating of 100.

In 1985 Cheney voted against a ban private citizens owning armor-piercing bullets and against a ban on plastic guns. He supported aid for anti-Marxist rebels in Nicaragua and funding for the “Star Wars” anti-missile shield.

He voted against refunding the Clean Water Act and voted to postpone sanctions against air polluters who failed to meet pollution standards. He voted against a law that would require oil and chemical industries to allow public inspection of their emissions records, and he supported tax breaks for energy corporations.

Cheney cosponsored a bill that would restrict federal jurisdiction over the discharge of dredged or fill material into navigable waters. He also voted for a 1987 bill that designated Yucca Mountain, Nevada as the only site to be studied for storing all of the nation's nuclear waste.

He opposed federal funding of abortions even in cases where a woman was raped or a victim of incest, and he argued in favor of placing a cap on cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients.

He voted in 1979 against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday and opposed extending the Civil Rights Act.

In 1986, Cheney voted against a resolution demanding that the South African government release Nelson Mandela from prison, saying later that he opposed the resolution because the ANC "... at the time was viewed as a terrorist organization and had a number of interests that were fundamentally inimical to the United States."

A firm believer in our Constitutional right to bear arms, Cheney was one of just 21 members of Congress to vote against a 1985 ban on armor-piercing bullets. In 1988 Cheney was one of just four House members to vote against a ban on plastic guns that can pass through airport security machines undetected. Even the National Rifle Association decided that there was no legitimate need for plastic guns in the hands of the citizenry and supported that ban, but Cheney has always opposed restrictions on the sale and possession of weapons.

Despite repeating every politician's mantra of always supporting the troops, Cheney repeatedly voted against funding for the Veterans Administration.

He's a strong defender of public access to our National Parks, voting over the years to allow skiing, snowmobiling, hunting, trapping, oil and gas development and production, and the leasing of geothermal and mineral lands within the parks.

Although President Bush has spoken many times of expanding the Head Start program for children and moving it into the Dept. of Education, Cheney voted against Head Start funding in 1986. In fact, he voted against the creation of the Dept. of Education in the first place, calling it "an encroachment on states' rights." Cheney reversed his long-held position once he became Bush's VP in 2000.

During the Iran-Contra controversy in the late 1980s, he served on the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Deals with Iran. Cheney disagreed with the majority findings, defended the Reagan administration and supported Lt. Col. Oliver North. He did so despite the fact that North's own diaries tied him directly to a cocaine smuggling operation of amounts up to four tons a month along with the illegal sale of military weapons to Iran. Cheney later endorsed North's unsuccessful campaign for the Virginia Senate seat in 1994.

Cheney left the House when Bush the Elder made him the second choice for Secretary of Defense in March 1989; Texas Sen. John Tower withdrew his nomination when Senate hearings revealed his long history of drinking heavily and chasing women. The Tower hearings were such an ugly embarrassment that when Cheney was offered as a replacement, he was unanimously confirmed to head the Defense Department despite having repeatedly avoided military service himself.

For someone considered to be a war hawk, Cheney surprised many people when he took a strong stand against use of US ground troops in the Bosnian War that began in April 1992. Over Cheney's four years the overall budget for the Defense Department declined from $291.3 billion to $269.9 billion despite the costs of the 1991 Iraq war.

Shortly after Iraqi invaded Kuwait in 1990, Cheney made the first of several visits to Saudi Arabia to secure King Fahd's permission to station US troops in that country. The presence of "Western military infidels" in the Muslim Holy Land is what Osama bin Laden has described as "a sacrilege" that drove him to declare jihad against his former supporters in the American government.

After Operation Desert Storm had driven Iraqi soldiers out of Kuwait, Cheney was asked in a 1991 television interview why the administration had not gone "all the way" to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

"I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire," Cheney replied. "Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all."

Dick Cheney – From Halliburton to the White House

"I want to know who the men in shadows are;
I want to hear somebody asking them why
they can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are,
but they're never the ones to fight and to die..." – Jackson Browne

With a net worth estimated at more than $40 million, Vice President Dick Cheney is a wealthy, powerful man. He enjoys hunting and fishing in the company of other rich and powerful men – in 1995, the former Wyoming congressman and Defense Secretary was offered the job of CEO and chairman of Halliburton while on a fly-fishing trip with officers of that corporation, so his fondness for the great outdoors comes as no surprise.

Cheney and Halliburton have a long-term relationship; during his tenure as Defense Secretary from 1988 until 1992, Cheney paid Halliburton $8.9 million for two studies on how to downsize the military and awarded them the job of privatizing routine army functions such as cleaning and cooking meals.

During Cheney's five years of running Halliburton the company and its subsidiaries received $2.3 billion in federal contracts and another $1.5 billion in taxpayer-insured loans. The invasion of Iraq and the administration's "Global War On Terror" have brought another $18 billion – that's correct, eighteen billion dollars – in contracts to the corporation during the past six years. Cheney still holds a lot of Halliburton stock and still receives deferred compensation from them, which he donates to a variety of conservative political and social organizations.

As a businessman running Halliburton, Cheney criticized government-imposed sanctions against doing business with Iran and Libya, saying in a 1998 speech at the Cato Institute that unilateral moves to isolate those countries would "damage US interests" in the region. He didn't mention at the time that Halliburton subsidiaries in offshore tax havens (which increased from 9 to 44 under Cheney) were already doing business in both countries.

The late, great columnist Molly Ivins once described how Halliburton violated economic sanctions against Iraq in her own unique way: "One of the disgusting companies actually making profits from dealing with the despicable dictator in the 1990s, long after his depravities had become evident to even the less attentive sectors of the world was – well, golly, look at this – Halliburton. Between 1997 and 2000, while Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the company sold $73 million worth of oilfield equipment and services to Saddam Hussein."

"At least Halliburton was not selling luxury cars to the Baathist elite. The oilfield equipment company merely kept Saddam Hussein's oil fields pumping, the only thing that allowed the s.o.b. to stay in power. Halliburton cleverly ran its business with Saddam through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser, in order to avoid the sanctions."

During the 2000 campaign Cheney spoke with ABC News about his years at the helm of Halliburton, saying, “I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal.”

According to business reporter Dan Briody, however, Cheney negotiated the purchase of Dresser Industries for $7.7 billion in 1998 and should have known what kind of business it was conducting. "Dick Cheney says he wasn't aware that Halliburton was doing business with Iraq while he was CEO," Brody said. "If you believe that, he's a very bad CEO for not being aware – or he's not telling the truth."

When Cheney left for the White House in 2000, he was Halliburton's largest individual shareholder. The company offered him a $20 million retirement package and further deferred compensation. Some of his political friends, who worried that the offer would seem excessive and unethical, convinced Cheney to accept only $13.6 million as a gesture of ... well, as a gesture, anyway.

Running a large corporation didn't prevent Cheney from putting his three decades of political experience to work. In 1997 Cheney helped start up the "Project for the New American Century," a self-described "non-profit educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership." Five members of the group were later given high positions in the Bush administration – Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, John Bolton, Richard Perle and Zalmay Khalilzad – and others continue to have a great deal of influence at the White House, especially Donald Kagan, Stephen Rosen and Elliott Abrams.

The PNAC statement of principles describes a need to restore "...the essential elements of the Reagan Administration's success: a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities." It asks the question, "Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?"

Three years later, just before the 2000 election, the PNAC published a report titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century". The policy paper was essentially an updated version of a forty-page report titled "Defense Planning Guidance" written by Wolfowitz as a defense undersecretary working in Cheney's office in 1992. Many people who read it at the time considered that report a blueprint for worldwide military and economic domination, but Cheney approved it and offered it to the first President Bush as a policy option.

The elder Bush rejected the proposals in the report, calling them "unachievable and undesirable" and ordered Cheney to rewrite the document. Cheney did so, but he never lost faith in the original concept – those same theories and proposals were expressed in greater detail and with stronger language in the 2000 PNAC report. Several of those policies are now being carried out under the misleading name of a "Global War on Terror".

At the same time that he was running Halliburton and founding a neoconservative think tank, Cheney also served on the Kazakhstan government’s oil advisory board and the board of advisers for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Journalist Seymour Hersh describes Kazakhstan as a country "notorious for exploitation, corruption and seemingly bottomless fields of oil" which also has strategic importance as a route for massive oil and gas pipelines in the various plans of Russia, China and the US. JINSA describes itself as a "nonsectarian educational organization working to explain the role Israel can play in bolstering the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel."

In 1996, Cheney made his second short-lived attempt to win the Republican nomination for President. Two years later as George W. Bush was being prepared for his 2000 presidential bid, Cheney was asked to evaluate potential candidates for Vice President. At the end of that process, Cheney the evaluator had somehow become Bush's running mate. One close, contested election and one split Supreme Court decision later, Dick Cheney reached his pinnacle of power, the highest and last public office he will ever hold.

A preference for secrecy has long been a Cheney character trait, and he showed it immediately after taking office. He formed the National Energy Policy Development Group and used it to create a national energy policy, but refused to name the members of the task force and claimed an executive privilege to keep the nature of the discussions secret. In Nov. 2001, Bush made Cheney the first vice-president in American history to hold the same executive privilege to classify information as the president.

The policy that came out of the NEPDG focused on the need to establish new sources of oil, to make "energy security a priority of US trade and foreign policy" and to promote outside investment in oil and gas industries of Middle East and Persian Gulf countries. The task force worked quickly by Washington standards, meeting for less than 100 days to prepare a comprehensive national policy regarding a complex and critical aspect of modern life.

The Sierra Club, Judicial Watch and the Government Accounting Office filed separate lawsuits against Cheney, seeking the release of all documents related to the energy task force. Cheney had refused the GAO’s direct agency-to-agency request, saying that it would compromise “the confidentiality of communications among a President, a Vice-President, the President’s other senior advisors and others.”

In July 2003, the Supreme Court denied Cheney's bid for secrecy and ordered the NEPDG to release its documents to the public, which showed that members of the task force included Ken Lay, CEO of an already-troubled Enron, along with six other Enron executives; ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond and others from ExxonMobil, and representatives from the American Petroleum Institute.

Other documents described which countries and transnational companies had agreements with Saddam Hussein to develop Iraq's oil. There were maps and charts detailing Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries, terminals and gas projects. There were also maps of all oil and gas development in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The documents are dated March 2001, two years before the invasion of Iraq.

Cheney's personal insistence on secrecy didn't interfere with his role in leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA officer who had the misfortune of being married to a man who became a target for the what Gore Vidal refers to as "the Cheney/Bush junta". The perjury trial of Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, has revealed that Cheney was deeply involved in the attempt to discredit Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he blew the whistle on Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger to build a nuclear weapon.

According to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, "Cheney enlisted Libby to act as his surrogate and personally respond to reporters' queries about the veracity of Wilson's allegations by authorizing his chief of staff to leak classified information to journalists. The classified information that was leaked may have included Plame's covert status," Fitzgerald said, "in retaliation for her husband's stinging rebukes of the administration's Iraq policies."

"There is a cloud over the vice president. ... a cloud over the White House over what happened," Fitzgerald told the jury. "That cloud is something you just can't pretend isn't there."

It was Cheney's office that wrote up the 2002 "torture memos" claiming the Geneva Conventions don't apply to "enemy combatants". It was Cheney himself who described Sen. John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees as a law that "would cost thousands of American lives." Based on that record, Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former director of the CIA, referred to Cheney as "the Vice President for torture."

"Cheney's manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities," according to Chas Freeman, who was an ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the first Bush administration. "It was clear from the start that George W. Bush required adult supervision – but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on the ass."

The Casper Star Tribune isn't too pleased with Cheney these days either, saying in a December 2006 editorial: "During Cheney's tenure as VP, Wyoming has seen a virtual takeover of our public lands by the oil and gas industry. As the chief architect of the Bush energy policy, Cheney deserves much of the credit (or blame) for the unplanned, uncontrolled sprawl of oil and gas development across Wyoming's open spaces. So far, it seems that the vice president has brought little more than destruction and embarrassment to Wyoming during his term in office."

Cheney's not even a true conservative, according to David Pyne, a national security expert and occasional Fox News commentator – a man so conservative that he considers George W. Bush to be a "centrist " President.

"For a longtime, I was willing to look past Cheney's growing list of false assertions and support for dubious and decidedly un-conservative policies," Payne wrote in July 2004. "For over three years, I observed his misguided embrace of neo-conservatism and his record as chief propagandist for the administration's unprovoked war against Iraq."

Payne's ultimate conclusion was that in order for the Republican party to get back to "a Reaganite policy of conservative realism that puts America's national interests first", the Vice President that he once supported "simply has to go."

IRAQ ON THE RECORD – THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S PUBLIC STATEMENTS ON IRAQ
UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
MINORITY STAFF, SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS DIVISION
PREPARED FOR REP. HENRY A. WAXMAN, MARCH 16, 2004
Vice President Cheney made 51 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 25 separate public statements or appearances. Of the 51 misleading statements by Vice President Cheney, 1 claimed that Iraq posed an urgent threat; 22 exaggerated Iraq’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons; 7 overstated Iraq’s chemical or biological weapons capacity; and 21 misrepresented Iraq’s links to al Qaeda