1. Espionage and Treason: The Valerie Plame Affair
Cheney’s chief aide, Scooter Libby, was the fall guy for the Valerie Plame affair, but Cheney was almost certainly the mastermind. Plame’s CIA network, operating under the front company Brewster Jennings, was tracking nuclear proliferation rings in the Middle East, and her exposure resulted in the arrests and deaths of agents in this network. From Sibel Edmonds’ testimony, we now know that corrupt U.S. officials were engaged with Turkish, Pakistani and Israeli agents in selling American nuclear secrets. The exposure of Plame’s network now seems to involve more than retaliation against her husband, Joe Wilson.
And if Edmond’s allegations are correct, the nuclear smuggling ring funneled nuclear technology to the black market network run by Pakistani nuke scientist A.Q. Khan, with North Korea, Libya and Iran as principal beneficiaries. It would be hard to imagine a greater crime against national security. The relevant U.S. Code espionage statute, (18 USC Sec. 794, see below*), mandates the death penalty or imprisonment for these offenses.
2. Torture
Cheney has publicly argued for allowing CIA agents to use torture against prisoners in secret detention centers, and most likely issued directives permitting waterboarding and other abusive practices. “Cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States, and the Constitution makes such treaties the law of the land, and their violation a criminal offense.
3. Illegal surveillance
Cheney has been the leading advocate for extra-constitutional surveillance, including illegal CIA and Pentagon spying on American citizens, outlawed since Watergate. The procedures include warrantless wiretaps, “National Security Letters” issued by the FBI and DOD to fish through bank accounts and other private records without court approval. After Congress outlawed the Orwellian TIA (Total Information Awareness) program, it has gone underground, and a massive database on all American citizens, Main Core, is being populated in secret, effectively abolishing the 4th Amendment.
9/11
The ostensible justification for all these high crimes and misdemeanors is the “national emergency” ensuing from 9/11. But there is compelling evidence that, at the very least, the 9/11 attacks were abetted and allowed to happen, and Dick Cheney was the crucial kingpin in this atrocity. Most suspicious is the unprecedented failure of air defense to impede the attacks (in the year prior to 9/11, USAF jets had scrambled to intercept aircraft that had lost transponder signals or veered off course a total 67 times, and the average response time was between 15–20 mins.).
1. PNAC and "the new Pearl Harbor"
In 2000, Cheney is signatory to the PNAC’s (Plan for a New American Century) manifesto, calling for a global American military empire, and virtually praying for “a new Pearl Harbor” to catalyze the revolution.
2. Cheney delegated emergency defense powers
On May 8, 2001, four months prior to 9/11, Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of “[A]ll federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction consequence management within the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies…” This included all “training and planning” which needed to be “seamlessly integrated, harmonious and comprehensive” in order to “maximize effectiveness.” This mandate created the Office of National Preparedness in FEMA, overseen by Dick Cheney.
3. 9/11 War Games:
The Air Force was running multiple war games on the morning of 9/11 simulating hijackings over the continental United States that included (at least) one “live-fly” exercise as well as simulations that placed “false blips” on FAA radar screens. These war games eerily mirrored the real events of 9/11 to the point of the Air Force running drills involving hijacked aircraft as the 9/11 plot actually unfolded. The war games & terror drills played a critical role in ensuring no Air Force fighter jocks - who had trained their entire lives for this moment - would be able to prevent the attacks from succeeding. These exercises were under Dick Cheney’s management:
4. Cheney and the Secret Service
While Bush sat reading “My Pet Goat” to elementary school children in Florida for 30 minutes after the attacks were acknowledged, Cheney was running a completely separate chain of Command & Control via the Secret Service, assuring the paralysis of Air Force response on 9/11. The Secret Service has the technology to see the same radar screens the FAA sees in real time. They also have the legal authority and technological capability to take supreme command in cases of national emergency. Dick Cheney was the acting Commander in Chief on 9/11.
5. Norman Mineta’s testimony: the Stand Down
Testifying before the 9/11 Commission, Former Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta related his experience in the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operation Center) as the attack unfolded:
“During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President...the plane is 50 miles out...the plane is 30 miles out....and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!??”
Mineta explains that while he had not known it at the time, he had surmised that the standing order the young man asked about must have been a stand down order.
Over 3000 Americans and foreign nationals were murdered on 9/11. An untold number have been kidnapped and tortured under "extraordinary rendition," many of them innocent of any crime or connection with terrorism. In 2006, the Bush administration successfully ramrodded a law through Congress giving all members of his administration retroactive immunity for war crimes. Impeachment hearings, with no possibility of "executive privilege," would surely provide enough evidence to rescind the legislated immunity.
*18 USC Sec. 794
(a) Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life, except that the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds that the offense resulted in the identification by a foreign power (as defined in section 101(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) of an individual acting as an agent of the United States and consequently in the death of that individual, or directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy.
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