Cheney's "Quailgate" Leaves Unanswered Questions

Retrieve Feb 15th, 2006 from: http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3096
By Jim Motavalli with Erin Coughlin

Many unanswered questions remain about Cheney's hunting adventure, which seems to have been conducted mere steps away from the comfort of luxury SUVs. Were these quail on the Armstrong Ranch wild or pen-raised captives, which are reportedly much easier to hit? Pen-raised birds, according to some veteran Texas quail hunters, are essentially "sitting ducks" that don't have enough native sense to fly to cover when flushed. They fly off in all directions instead of maintaining discipline and seeking group shelter.

The Armstrong Ranch denies that it uses pen-raised quail, but some observers have taken note of Cheney's light 28-gauge shotgun, which would more likely have been effective for domesticated fowl. It's considered a good choice for "small framed" and young shooters because it doesn't recoil much, but it's hardly the type of weapon the macho Cheney would seem to favor.

In any case, Cheney is no stranger to canned hunts. In December of 2003, he went (via Humvee) to a pheasant shooting party in Pennsylvania at the Rolling Rock Club. Gamekeepers there released some 500 pen-raised pheasants from nets, and Cheney's party, which included former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) as well as several influential Republican fundraisers, shot 417 of them. Cheney himself got at least 70. Apparently that wasn't enough slaughter, because after lunch the group went after pen-raised mallard ducks.

Cornyn had the audacity to claim later that the birds had a sporting chance, though he conceded that the hunt was so easy that at times it seemed "kind of like how Tyson's and Pilgrim's Pride and other people do it. I must tell you that people don't necessarily hunt the same way in Texas that they hunt in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, but it was enjoyable."

In 2004, Cheney got into trouble for going duck hunting with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in Louisiana while he had business before the court. It's not hard to see why the Vice President might favor guaranteed canned hunts because the shooting in Louisiana was poor. "The duck hunting was lousy," Scalia remarked. "Our host [owner of an oil services company] said that in 35 years of duck hunting on this lease, he had never seen so few ducks." But it ended well. "I did come back with a few ducks, which tasted swell," Scalia added.

Outdoor writer Ted Williams estimates there are approximately 3,000 canned hunting operators in the U.S., many of which offer the "sport" of releasing birds right in the path of waiting shotguns. This kind of hunting is banned (for at least one species) in California, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and, yes, Texas, where the practice nonetheless amounts to big business. In a typical operation, the animals are fed at specific times and locations, and learn to anticipate the sounds of approaching humans. So they're more likely to move toward the hunters than away from them.

"Cheney has a real history of questionable hunting behavior," says Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS). "He is apparently obsessed with hunting and is a regular patron of canned hunts. We don't like to see the Vice President of the U.S. providing pretty explicit endorsement of this practice, because canned hunting violates all the rhetoric that hunters use to justify themselves. Hunting is supposed to involve a fair chase with the animal having an opportunity to evade the hunter. But this eliminates the possibility of failure."

Some of the canned hunting ranches offer the chance to shoot endangered species, which typically consist of zoo-bred animals that outgrew their cuteness and were sold in exotic animal auctions. At the Renegade Ranch in Michigan, one price list charged $350 to shoot a Corsican ram, $450 for a Russian boar, $750 for a blackbuck antelope and $5,500 for a trophy elk. Among the zoos participating in such programs, according to a Humane Society of the U.S. investigation, are Buffalo Zoological Gardens, Busch Gardens in Florida, Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, the Houston Zoo, the Kansas City Zoo and even the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

The Connecticut-based Friends of Animals has filed a lawsuit aimed at keeping three species of endangered antelope out of the canned-hunt trade. "This is a lazy person's idea of hunting," says Priscilla Feral, the group's president. "They drive right up to the animal."

The first George Bush celebrated his 1988 election victory with a canned quail hunt at the Lazy F Ranch near Beeville, Texas. And he apparently didn't "get it" any more than Cheney does. "These aren't animals, these are wild quail," he reportedly responded to criticism. President Clinton also hunted in shooting preserves during his Presidency. In 1993, he shot a captive-bred mallard at a Maryland preserve owned by a lobbyist who ran DUCPAC, a pro-hunting political action committee that gave out $35,000 in campaign contributions.

In addition to asking Cheney to explain the nearly 24-hour gap between the hunting accident and public notification, reporters are wondering how the Vice President could have broken a cardinal hunting rule. According to Time, "An eyewitness account reported by the Associated Press suggests that Cheney may have, in the heat of the moment, violated the number one rule of hunting by failing to keep track of his hunting buddies at all times….For the shooter, hunting safety dictates that focusing on the target should never be more important than keeping in mind what's behind it."

Vice President Cheney, adept at shifting the blame for Iraq and disastrous energy policies, also chose to blame the victim in the hunting incident. Whittington, a 78-year-old lawyer and Republican Party functionary, apparently failed to announce himself when he came up behind "Deadeye Dick."

Columnist Molly Ivins summed up this Bush administration's tendency to avoid any and all responsibility for the messes it creates: "I was offended by the never-our-fault White House spin team," she wrote. "Cheney adviser Mary Matalin said of her boss, 'He was not careless or incautious (and did not) violate any of the (rules). He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do.' Of course he did, Ms. Matalin, he shot Harry Whittington.

"Which brings us to one of the many paradoxes of the Bush administration, which claims to be creating 'the responsibility society.' It's hard to think of a crowd less likely to take responsibility for anything they have done or not done than this bunch. They're certainly good at preaching responsibility to others—and blaming other people for everything that goes wrong on their watch," wrote Ivins.

PNAC still moving forward

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached through his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

The Pentagon’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review, the fancy name for the Defense Department’s “big think” strategy that is supposed to come out every four years, has to be seen as the Bush administration’s ultimate Plan for Empire. It lays out a Thirty Years' War-type battle plan for an expanding U.S. military presence worldwide, to fight a war against an enemy which is, at most, a few hundred strong.

Officially, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld calls it “The Long War,” a propaganda term designed to echo “the Cold War,” and the Pentagon intends to brainwash Americans into supporting a generation-long struggle that will lay the groundwork for an American hegemony in the 21st century. It is, indeed, the Project for a New American Century.

According to The New York Times, alongside the QDR, the Pentagon has developed its own (classified) counterterrorism strategy. It is this mission, designed to combat an enemy that the Bush administration describes as equal in magnitude to the threat posed by German Nazism or Soviet communism, which is driving both the QDR and the huge expansion of the budget for the Defense Department and the U.S. intelligence community over the next few years. The QDR is the neoconservatives’ mythical World War IV, in line-item form.

Of course, it ignores the fact that the blunt instrument of the U.S. military is precisely the wrong tool to use against radical right Islamist forces. As the war in Iraq has proved to everyone but the most hard-core neoconservative, ham-handed U.S. military attacks in Muslim countries create more terrorists than they kill. The Times , in reporting the Pentagon’s counterterrorism plan, quotes a Defense Department official involved in writing it who points out:

...the American military’s effort to aid tsunami victims in southeast Asia and to assist victims of Pakistan’s earthquake did more to counter terrorist ideology than any attack mission.

Does that mean that the Pentagon will recommend a multinational Marshall Plan-style effort to provide economic security, housing and health care for the impoverished in Asia, the Middle East and Africa? Hardly—although such a program wouldn’t cost more than the $1 trillion Iraq-Afghanistan war effort, and would unquestionably do far more to calm passions, soothe anti-Americanism and dry up Al Qaeda’s recruitment pool. No, the Pentagon is proposing a vast, multi-year campaign of wars, commando raids, air strikes, military bases, naval expansion, covert actions and other military operations whose sum can only be seen as an imperial expansion of the U.S. presence around the globe.

According to the Los Angeles Times , a core element of the Long War is an increase in the size and strength of the elite U.S. military forces, including “secret Delta Force operatives skilled in counterterrorism,” Army Special Forces battalions, Navy SEAL teams, “the creation of a new SOF [Special Operations Forces] squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles to ‘locate and target enemy capabilities’ in countries where access is difficult,” “civil affairs and psychological operations units,” and “a 2,600-strong Special Operations force for training foreign militaries, conducting reconnaissance and carrying out strikes.”

These forces, says the Los Angeles Times , “will have the capacity to operate in dozens of countries simultaneously.” The QDR says: “The long war against terrorist networks extends far beyond the borders of Afghanistan and Iraq and includes many operations characterized by irregular warfare.” It outlines expanded U.S. military operations in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Horn of Africa; in the trans-Sahara region and Niger to “combat emerging terrorist extremist threats”; the “Plan Colombia” anti-drug counterinsurgency; etc. And it concludes: “Long-duration, complex operations involving the U.S. military … will be waged simultaneously in multiple countries around the world, relying on a combination of direct (visible) and indirect (clandestine) approaches.”

The QDR, says the Pentagon, is specifically designed as a 20-year battle plan. It is generational in scope. “The Defense Department unveiled the Quadrennial Defense Review today, charting the way ahead for the next 20 years as it confronts current and future challenges and continues its transformation for the 21st century,” according to the official unveiling:

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our nation has fought a global war against violent extremists who use terrorism as their weapon of choice, and who seek to destroy our free way of life. Our enemies seek weapons of mass destruction and, if they are successful, will likely attempt to use them in their conflict with free people everywhere. Currently, the struggle is centered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we will need to be prepared and arranged to successfully defend our nation and its interests around the globe for years to come.

So once again, President Bush is trying to scare us about the threat of terrorists with WMD, just as he did before the war in Iraq, even though not a single terrorist in history has ever come close to possessing WMD and even though the Bush administration has not documented a single instance of a serious effort by terrorists to acquire weaponized chemical or biological agents—never mind a nuclear device.

A hapless Ryan Henry, the Defense Department’s deputy undersecretary for policy, sounded befuddled as he tried to rationalize the Long War. It was, he said, “fuzzy”:

U.S. forces in all probability will be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they're not currently engaged. But I can tell you with no resolution at all where that might be, when that might be or how that might be. Things get very fuzzy past the five-year point.

Fuzzy.

And the fuzzy math used to calculate how much all this will cost sees the Pentagon’s bloated budget soaring toward half a trillion dollars per year, not counting perhaps a $100 billion surcharge for the ongoing fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the Bush budget slashes non-defense spending, Pentagon spending—already huge after successive post-9/11 increases—will rise another 7 percent to $439 billion, not including Iraq, and not including a ballooning budget for the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a shocking misallocation of resources, one that makes a mockery of the fact that the Cold War is long over and that the world is mostly at peace. At peace, that is, except for wars of America’s own making.


http:\\tompaine.com

Libby Trial to Start after Midterms, Hmmm, go figure!

Hmmm, go figure! The judge wanted to start the trial of Lewis Libby in September but low and behold, one of Libby's laywers just happens to be tied up.

How convenient

By Toni Locy

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – A federal judge on today set former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's trial date in the CIA leak case for January 2007, two months after the midterm congressional elections.

The trial for Libby, who faces perjury and obstruction of justice charges, will begin with jury selection Jan. 8, said U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton. Walton said he had hoped to start the trial in September but one of Libby's lawyers had a scheduling conflict that made an earlier date impractical.

Walton said he does not like "to have a case linger" but had no choice because Libby attorney Ted Wells will be tied up for 10 weeks in another case.

Drudge say Clinton protester was also escorted out! Only one problem ..

Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war activist who was removed from the House gallery last night before the State of the Union address for wearing a t-shirt with a political message, is not the first person to be tossed from a Congressional gallery at a high-profile event for wearing a political t-shirt.

In the early days of the Senate's impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in January 1999, a Pennsylvania man named Dave Delp was removed by the Capitol police from the Senate gallery for wearing a t-shirt that said, "Clinton doesn't inhale, he sucks."

The Pennsylvania school teacher was yanked out of a VIP Senate gallery and briefly detained during the impeachment trial for wearing a T-shirt with graphic language dissing President Clinton.

Delp, 42, of Carlisle, Pa., and a friend had just settled into their seats when four Capitol security guards approached them. Delp said at the time that he was ordered to button his coat and follow the guards. Outside the chamber, he was told "several people felt threatened by your shirt."

Even after establishing that Delp was a guest of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), the guards wouldn't let him back in and escorted him to a basement security area, where they questioned and photographed him.

After being given one of the photos as a souvenir, Delp said he was banned from the Capitol for the rest of the day. "They were polite and professional," Delp added, "but they really did scare me. I think I should have been given the chance to cover up."

Here are the differences between what happened to Sheehan and what happened to Dave Delp

1: Cindy Sheehan was at the State of the Union Address. Dave Delp was at the Impeachment trail. Now I am not a lawyer but I do know there is a difference between a trail and the State of the Union Address.

2. Cindy Sheehan was arrested. Dave delp was escorted upstairs, asked a few questions, then released. He was banned from coming back for the rest of the day. He even got souvenir photo's given to him

Now I don't agree with how they handled Dave Delps situation but let one thing be very clear, it is very different from what happen to Cindy Sheehan and what is happening to hundreds of people across the U.S. whenever the y tried to protest this president.