Political Irony

Dick Cheney in 1994, talking about invading Iraq:

Dick Cheney in the last few weeks:

Now here’s where it gets interesting. When Cheney attacked Colin Powell and declared that he’d rather have Rush Limbaugh as a spokesperson for the Republican party than Powell, he royally pissed off Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff for the State Department when Powell was the Secretary of State. So Wilkerson struck back, pointing out:

• “More Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney’s watch than on any other leader’s watch in US history”
• The Bush administration ignored warnings about 9/11, so they have no basis to complain about anyone else leaving the US open to terrorist attack.
• Cheney keeps saying that the Bush administration use of torture prevented terrorist attacks after 9/11, but the real reason there were no more terrorist attacks was that the Bush administration sent 200,000 troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, which were a much more tempting target for the terrorists.
• The “harsh interrogation methods” used by the Bush administration made us less safe, not more.
• In fact, after the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were revealed, the CIA stopped torturing prisoners because they were too afraid to use them. So claiming that not using harsh interrogation techniques will make us less safe is bullshit, since they weren’t used during the entire second term of the Bush administration.
• The Bush administration did not use harsh interrogation in order to prevent further terrorist attacks, they used them to create a false connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
• The Bush administration claims that it obtained legal opinions that the “harsh interrogation techniques” were legal, but they started using those techniques before they bothered to get the legal opinions.
• Cheney should go home and shut up, he is destroying the Republican party (Wilkerson is a Republican).