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VIDEO: Suskind: Cheney wanted ’show of force’ on 9/11 anniversary
(I'm feeling awake)
David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Vice-President Dick Cheney wanted to use the arrest of the Lackawanna Six accused terrorists as an advertisement of America’s might and resolve on the first anniversary of 9/11, says a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
Ron Suskind, author of The Way of the World, a book about the Bush administration’s misdeeds in the “war on terror,” told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that “Cheney had his eye on the 9/11 anniversary, he wanted a big show, a show of force, a show of resolve, a show of expanded power, and that’s part of what I understand was driving Cheney’s desire to send troops into downtown Lackawanna.”
On Friday, RAW STORY reported on claims that Cheney had wanted to use US troops to arrest the Lackawanna Six in September of 2002, a move that would have violated the long-standing Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of the US Army on home soil.
When news of Cheney’s plan was made public, it was met with derision by the residents and mayor of Lackawanna, New York.
On the Rachel Maddow Show Monday night, Suskind said Cheney’s push to use the troops was both an attempt to test the limits of Constitutional power and an attempt to politicize the arrest of the suspected terrorists.
And now, as Maddow and Suskind pointed out, there is a battle brewing over the historical legacy of the Bush administration, with Bush supporters distancing themselves from Cheney’s policies and trying to cast the 43rd president as a defender of civil liberties in the face of an assault from Cheney — an idea both Suskind and Maddow found to be not credible.
“Cheney thinks he was right and that Bush [was wrong when he] peeled back some of the extra-legal stuff in 2005, 2006,” Suskind said. “And Cheney said ‘I’m right, you’re wrong. The legacy of this period … it’s my legacy, I was driving this ship and my ideas’ — that’s Cheney’s view — ‘were the right ideas.’
“So at this point you’ve got, I think, open warfare” between Bush loyalists and Cheney loyalists, Suskind said.
This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast July 27, 2009
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