Other than his health, what were some other things he was concerned about that prompted him to pre-write his resignation? One of many ’secrets’ revealed in Cheney’s new book, In My Time, set to be released at the end of the month. Via Reuters:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney signed a secret resignation letter shortly after taking office in 2001 and kept it in a safe, according to an excerpt of an NBC interview released on Wednesday.

Cheney, who has a long history of heart disease, said concern about a possible health crisis was one of the main reasons he kept the letter. Former President George W. Bush knew about it and so did a Cheney staff member.

“I did it because I was concerned … for a couple of reasons,” Cheney said.

“One was my own health situation. The possibility that I might have a heart attack or a stroke that would be incapacitating. And, there is no mechanism for getting rid of a Vice President who can’t function.”

[Continues at Reuters]

A Colorado man can sue two Secret Service agents who arrested him after he touched former Vice President Dick Cheney on the arm in 2006 and told him his Iraq War policies were “disgusting,” a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The ruling means Steven Howards can try to subpoena Cheney to testify about the incident, said David Lane, Howards’ attorney.

“I fully intend on deposing the former vice president,” Lane told The Associated Press.

Lane has been trying for years to subpoena Cheney, but his motion has been delayed as judges weighed the question of whether the Secret Service agents were immune in the case. He has said he wants to subpoena the former vice president because he’s “the best eyewitness to the case.”

A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Howards can sue agents Virgil D. “Gus” Reichle Jr., and Dan Doyle on First Amendment grounds. But the court ruled that two other agents named in the lawsuit are immune in the case.

The judges ruled that the four agents are immune on Howards’ Fourth Amendment claim against them of unreasonable search and seizure.

Howards was arrested after he approached Cheney at a mall in Beaver Creek, a resort town about two hours west of Denver. The agents alleged that Howards’ contact with Cheney constituted assault but a local prosecutor later dropped the case…

For more information, see original article.

Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency is to charge former US Vice-President Dick Cheney over a bribery scandal that involves a former subsidiary of energy firm Halliburton. The case centers on engineering firm KBR, which admitted bribing officials. Mr Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive before becoming vice-president to George W Bush in 2001.

KBR last year pleaded guilty to paying $180m (£115m) in bribes to Nigerian officials prior to 2007, when it was a subsidiary of Halliburton. The firm agreed to pay $579m (£372m) in fines related to the case in the US. But Nigeria, along with France and Switzerland, has conducted its own investigations into the case.

Mr Cheney’s lawyer, Terence O’Donnell, said US investigators had “found no suggestion of any impropriety by Dick Cheney in his role of CEO of Halliburton.”

“Any suggestion of misconduct on his part, made now, years later, is entirely baseless,” Mr O’Donnell said.

We’ve been told that 9/11 changed everything.

Is it true?

Let’s look:

• The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11 (see this and this)

• The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11. Indeed, former CIA director George Tenet said that the White House wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and inserted “crap” in its justifications for invading Iraq. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill – who sat on the National Security Council – also says that Bush planned the Iraq war before9/11. And top British officials say that the U.S. discussed Iraq regime change one month after Bush took office

• Cheney apparently even made Iraqi’s oil fields a national security priority before 9/11

• The Patriot Act was planned before 9/11

• Cheney dreamed of giving the White House the powers of a monarch long before 9/11

• Cheney and Rumsfeld actively generated fake intelligence which exaggerated the threat from an enemy in order to justify huge amounts of military spending long before 9/11. And see this

• Cheney and the rest of the neocons lamented – before 9/11 – that America could not truly project its power globally without the justification of a “new Pearl Harbor”

• The government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here. And see this)

• The decision to threaten to bomb Iran was made before 9/11

• The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons — and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes — all before 9/11

• The government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouths before 9/11

• Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism programs for the United States before (and on) 9/11. See this Department of State announcement, this CNN article and this essay

• It was known long before 9/11 that torture doesn’t work to produce accurate intelligence, but is an effective way to terrorize people

So did 9/11 really “change everything”? Or was it simply an excuse to implement existing plans?

SEE ALSO: 5 Facts You Don’t Know About Spying

The Bush team stopped using its harshest interrogation techniques, like waterboarding, years before leaving office. [Supposedly. - G.G.] And in Mr. Bush’s second term, Congress passed legislation bringing federal statutes into alignment with policies like military commissions and surveillance without warrants.

As a senator, Mr. Obama voted for the 2008 bill authorizing the surveillance program, which he has continued since taking office. He voted against a 2006 bill authorizing military commissions, but it passed anyway. While Mr. Obama initially halted the trials, he has since proposed reviving them in a revised form.

Mr. Obama has also drawn fire from human rights advocates for fighting to prevent detainees in Afghanistan from having habeas corpus rights. But his legal team notes that the 2006 Military Commissions Act contains a provision saying such prisoners may not challenge their detentions in court.

Still, Mr. Obama has also continued other Bush-era policies where statutory law is murkier or absent — like the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition” program in which detainees are transferred to other countries and the invocation of the “state secrets” privilege to shut down some lawsuits. (The administration is reviewing both policies.)

And after grappling with how to close the prison at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Mr. Obama proposed a new system of preventive detention to deal with those terrorism suspects who, he says, would be hard to prosecute and dangerous to release.

But Mr. Obama’s insistence that he would create such a preventive detention regime only with Congressional authorization may pose little pragmatic obstacle, because he can claim lawmakers have already granted it.

In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, that Mr. Bush could detain — indefinitely, without trial and on domestic soil — a man accused of fighting for the Taliban. It cited Congress’s authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks, which remains on the books.

To be sure, Mr. Obama has made some significant changes to Bush policies. He closed the Central Intelligence Agency’s long-term prisons and required strict adherence to antitorture rules. He also released secret legal memorandums about interrogation.

Those changes have opened him up to attacks from the right. In particular, former Vice President Dick Cheney accused Mr. Obama of abandoning the Bush-Cheney strategies, suggesting that Mr. Obama would bear direct responsibility for any future terrorist attack.

Mr. Obama has embraced Mr. Cheney’s premise that he is an agent of change, as his campaign rhetoric suggested he would be. In a speech in May, Mr. Obama described his policies as “a new direction from the last eight years.”

But Jack Goldsmith, a top legal official in the Bush administration, said the claim of a vast gulf between Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism policies and those at the end of Mr. Bush’s tenure was false.

“There is a faux debate that something new is afoot and both the Obama administration and Cheney have an interest in that being the case, but it’s just not true,” he said. “It just serves almost everyone’s political interests to make it seem like something brand new is happening, but it’s mostly window dressing for just what was going on before.”

Divide et imperum.

Read more here.

The growing accountability movement got a major shot in the arm recently when it learned that on April 19, an Argentinian judge sentenced the last of Argentina’s dictators, Reynaldo Bignone, age 83, to 25 years in prison. Bignone’s crime: kidnapping and torturing 56 victims in a concentration camp during the reign of terror known as the “dirty war” that gripped Argentina from 1976-1983. This is huge, surpassing the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in his hospital bed back in 1998. (Pinochet died before justice could be done). The conviction of a former head of state for crimes he committed while in office sends a powerful message to all those suspected war criminals still on the loose, including some of the top leaders of the Bush administration.

George W. Bush, who lied our country into war resulting in the deaths of over 4,000 American troops, heads the list. He, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also authorized waterboarding of prisoners seized in Afghanistan, violating U.S. and international law against torture in the process…

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking — and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session — and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session — a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

Read More: Salon

Monday’s heart attack was Cheney’s fifth. The first occurred in 1978, when he was 37. He suffered his second in 1984 and his third in 1988 before undergoing quadruple bypass surgery to unblock his arteries. His fourth heart attack occurred in November 2000, after he became vice president. At that time, doctors inserted a stent to open an artery.

Doctors in 2001 implanted a device to track and control his heart rhythm. In 2008, he underwent a procedure to restore his heart to a normal rhythm.

Dick Cheney’s statutory crimes are notable for their severity, their number, and his public confessions to them. Torture is the least of it.

We can start with the crimes found in the three articles of impeachment contained in H Res 333 in the 110th Congress:

1. “Cheney has purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States by fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests, to wit:” (H Res 333 goes on to list evidence).

2. “Cheney purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive the citizens and Congress of the United States about an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to justify the use of the United States Armed Forces against the nation of Iraq in a manner damaging to our national security interests, to wit” (H Res 333 goes on to list evidence).

[Read more at Alternet]

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), the congressman who gained nationwide fame after declaring that the Republican plan for health care amounts to hoping that people “die quickly,” has a few choice words — or, rather, one choice acronym — for former Vice President Dick Cheney: “STFU.”

For those not familiar with the expression, that’s Internet parlance for “shut the fuck up.”

Grayson made the comment during an interview on MSNBC’s Hardball Wednesday night. Host Chris Matthews had asked the Florida congressman about Cheney’s comments on Fox News Tuesday, in which the former VP called Obama a “radical” and said the president’s decision to bring accused 9/11 plotters to Manhattan to face trial was “a huge mistake.”

“On the Internet there’s an acronym that’s used to apply to situations like this. It’s called ‘STFU,’” Grayson told Matthews. “I don’t think I can say that on the air, but I think you know what that means.”

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