PBS Frontline: Inside the battle between Vice President Cheney and CIA to control the 'dark side'

Raw Story | June 18 2006

Tuesday's episode of the PBS public affairs series Frontline will probe the battle between Vice President Dick Cheney and the CIA to control the 'dark side,' according to a press release for the show.

"Amid daily revelations about prewar intelligence and a growing scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president's chief of staff and presidential adviser, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruce Cheney, the most powerful vice president in the nation's history," says the press release.

The title for the show is derived from a television interview Cheney gave five days after September 11, 2001, when asked how the government might respond to the terrorist attacks by NBC's Tim Russert.

"I'm going to be careful here, Tim, because I--clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward," Cheney said. "We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world's finest military - they've got a broad range of capabilities - and they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy."

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will," Cheney added. "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world."

"A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful," Cheney continued. "That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."

Cheney also told Russert that he envisioned a "very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with," and that the "mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there" neccessitated putting "some very unsavory characters" on the payroll.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/180606Cheney.htm

this is gonna be good.

"....When the Pentagon Papers came out, thanks to the courage of Daniel Ellsberg, all my patriotic illusions were shattered. Here was the U.S. government's own account of how it had fabricated the pretext to drag our nation into the Vietnam war and how it was literally sold to the public by manipulating the media and Congress. My life was never the same after that and I've been a professional organizer since 1978, first trained by the United Farmworkers Union and then leading peace and justice organizations ever since. In 1992, I and a couple of others created the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space in order to try to prevent the next round of the arms race from moving into the heavens. Today I live in Maine and travel all over the U.S. and around the world talking about how space technology now allows the U.S. to militarily control the entire planet. With space satellites now in place, the U.S. can see everything on the earth, hear everything on the earth, and ultimately target anyone or anyplace on the earth below.

The day after 9-11, I went to my world atlas to look up the Central Asian countries that I admittedly knew very little about. What I found is common knowledge these days. They have some of the largest deposits of oil and natural gas in the world in this region. Uzbekistan has the world's largest goldmine.

My Pentagon Papers experience had taught me to always ask the next question. Who? What? Why? When? How? For me, 9-11 unleashed a slew of new questions about U.S. foreign and military policy.

Five days after 9-11, I boarded a very empty airplane in Gainesville, Florida to fly to Cleveland in order to speak about space to a Rotary Club in a Republican neighborhood. While reading the Gainesville Sun newspaper on the plane, an AP story jumped out at me. The piece quoted an "unidentified" Pentagon spokesman who said, "We've been planning this war for the last three years." Of course the Pentagon spokesman was referring to the almost immediate discussion that the U.S. had to respond to 9-11 by bombing and invading Afghanistan. Memories of reading the Pentagon Papers flashed through my mind. ...."

BLUEPRINT FOR WORLD DOMINATION

The International Inquiry Into 9/11, Phase 2, Toronto, 26 May, 2004

By Bruce K. Gagnon

http://www.911inquiry.org/Presentations/BruceGagnon.htm