Cheney intends to ignore Democratic Congress over Iran

Seymour Hersh has a new article being released on November 27th in which he reports that Vice President Dick Cheney attended a national-security discussion that touched on the impact of Democratic victory in both chambers on Iran policy.

"If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said.

This is staggering stuff and proof that Cheney really does think the fact that Bush is "a wartime President" means that he has the power to usurp any act that Congress chooses to pass.

In other words, Cheney believes that the opinions of millions of Americans who voted to take this power away from this particular White House are of no consequence as he intends to circumvent any restrictions they seek to impose.

In this scenario the elections become meaningless as the new powers that they have bestowed on the Democrats can simply be ignored. You'd actually have been as well not to have the elections at all for all the difference that Cheney thinks it's made. This is the mindset of the Bush administration and gives us some idea of how serious Bush is when he talks of his new found wish to be bipartisan.

However, Cheney's efforts to plan war with Iran have run into another problem:

The administration's planning of a military option was made "far more complicated" in recent months by a highly classified draft assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb," he wrote.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency," Hersh wrote, adding the CIA had declined to comment on that story.

A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis and said the White House had been hostile to it, he wrote.

Cheney and his aides had discounted the assessment, the official said.

"They're not looking for a smoking gun," the official was quoted as saying, referring to specific intelligence about Iranian nuclear planning.

"They're looking for the degree of comfort level they think they need to accomplish the mission."

So Cheney's cohorts now admit that they are not even looking for proof, they are looking for an opportunity.

It was exactly this mindset that the American people voted against. However, Cheney is letting it be known that he has no intention of listening to anything as inconsequential as the voice of the American electorate.

Make no mistake, Cheney means this. And that fact should be scary to all Americans. He's signalling his intention to ignore Congress. If he gets his way, then America will become a very strange democracy indeed.

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tag: Bush, Republican, Party, mid-term, elections, war on terror, Seymour Hersh, Dick Cheney, Iran,