Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House & "Jewish Activism"

The Truth About Bush (and Cheney)

By PETER BAKER, November 22, 2013

On the evening of the 2000 presidential election, as the vote counting stretched late into the night, a weary Dick Cheney slipped into his hotel room in Austin to lie down. But his rest was soon interrupted when word arrived that Al Gore had just conceded. Cheney was awakened and told, albeit prematurely, that he had just been elected vice president.

But who woke him up?

In his memoir, In My Time, Cheney recalls being roused with the news of Gore’s concession by his daughter, Liz Cheney.

Mary Cheney, Liz’s sister, remembers it differently in her book, Now It’s My Turn. She writes that their mother, Lynne Cheney, was the one who stirred the future vice president.

Nick Brady, an old friend from the first Bush administration who was in the hotel suite that night, recalls being the one to interrupt Cheney’s repose. And then there is Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator and longtime Cheney friend, who believes he was the waker. “Get up, bastard!” he remembers calling out. “You’re the vice president of the United States.”

The disparate memories of that night take on a little more meaning these days as the Cheney clan and its friends fracture over gay rights.

While supportive of her lesbian sister when Mary thought about quitting the 2004 campaign because of Bush’s support for a ban on same-sex marriage, Liz Cheney, now running for Senate in Wyoming, says she opposes legal recognition of such unions. Mary Cheney and her wife, Heather Poe, have implied Liz never used to be against it and in fact welcomed their marriage. Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, have weighed in to affirm that Liz has indeed always stood against same-sex marriage. But Simpson, increasingly estranged from the family, says Liz is doing whatever it takes to win an election.

The conflicting accounts underscore the challenge in reconstructing the story of any presidency. In both big details and small, the major players often remember events quite differently, sometimes out of obvious self-serving motives but quite often just due to the natural reality of flawed human memories. In writing Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, a history of the last administration told through the prism of the relationship between its two major protagonists, I found that one of the most daunting tasks was trying to reconcile varying versions of what happened when.

Did CIA Director George Tenet give Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, a stark warning about a coming terrorist attack two months before Sept. 11, 2001? Did Bush authorize Cheney in advance to order the military to shoot down any further hijacked planes after the first ones hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Did Attorney General John Ashcroft agree to reauthorize a controversial surveillance program before changing his mind? When did Bush first broach the idea of an invasion of Iraq?

In coming years, the Bush archives will divulge the papers and emails that may help us set the record straight, but until then, in the course of six years of research, I relied on nearly 400 interviews with about 275 key players, along with notes and other documents they gave me and a bibliography of some 200 books, including a host of I-was-there memoirs. It may be that the Bush-Cheney administration produced more memoirs than any in history. Of course, the major figures all published books, including Bush, Cheney, Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and Laura Bush, as well as numerous Cabinet secretaries and an array of generals.

"Accounts vary over whether Cheney, in the White House bunker on Sept. 11, received permission from Bush on Air Force One before ordering the military to shoot down suspected hijacked airplaces that did not respond to orders on land," writes Baker. Above, Bush and Cheney talk to each other on Sept. 11, 2001. | White House Photos/Reuters

But plenty of other lesser-known figures did as well. Not one but two chief speechwriters wrote books, and so did at least two deputy speechwriters. There were books by a deputy national security adviser and a deputy director of faith-based services, not to mention the domestic policy adviser to the vice president, the Pentagon comptroller and the White House chef. The guy who brokered the deal for Bush to install Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan wrote a book, as did the guy who brokered the deal to dismantle Muammar al-Qaddafi’s weapons program in Libya. So did the guy who couldn’t find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

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Many of the discrepancies in all these varied accounts can be resolved by repeated interviews with as many people in the room as possible and by understanding that no two people see the same event in quite the same way. Sometimes it is a matter of interpretation. But other times, even seemingly simple math becomes confounding. The Lebanon war of 2006 drove a wedge between Cheney and Rice, but how long did it last? Some newspapers and reports added it up to 33 days, while others came up with 34 days. Even the historians could not agree. One book on the war is titled The 33-Day War. Another is titled 34 Days.

Many of the inconsistencies were over timing. Did outgoing President Bill Clinton call Colin Powell, the new secretary of state, to kvetch about the Palestinians on the day of Bush’s inauguration (as Karen DeYoung writes in Soldier, her critically acclaimed biography of Powell) or the day before (as Patrick Tyler says in his definitive history of Middle East policymaking, A World of Trouble)? Did Bush tell Vladimir Putin that the Taliban unraveled “like a cheap suit” after the fall of Mazar-e Sharif (as the former president recalls in Decision Points) or after the fall of Kabul (as Rice recalls in No Higher Honor)? Did Bush ask Powell to give his ill-fated Iraq presentation to the United Nations on Jan. 30, 2003 (as Powell writes in It Worked for Me) or on Jan. 27 (as DeYoung and news clips from the time indicate)? Did Bush have his decisive meeting approving his PEPFAR program fighting AIDS in Africa on Nov. 18, 2002 (as Michael Gerson, the president’s top speechwriter, writes in Heroic Conservatism) or on Dec. 4 (as Jay Lefkowitz, another Bush aide, writes in a history of the program for Commentary magazine)?

Getting it right does matter; in some cases, it even alters the understanding of the event. Lefkowitz recalled the AIDS meeting coming immediately after Bush met with Jewish activists who admired Bush’s boldness overseas and told him that had he been president during World War II, he would have saved more Jewish lives; Bush seemed quite moved by the comment, and Lefkowitz believed that the sentiment emboldened him to approve PEPFAR because it was his own way of saving millions of lives overseas. The meeting with the Jewish activists was indeed on Dec. 4.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/the-truth-about-bush-and-cheney-100123.html#ixzz2lcqdb0aQ

Masters of Deception by Zander C. Fuerza

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Zander C. Fuerza

In this book, “Masters of Deception: Zionism, 9/11 and the War on Terror Hoax,” writer Zander C. Fuerza documents a Zionist conspiracy behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. Collecting the most potent pieces of evidence available, the author forms a cohesive narrative demonstrating that the Israeli Mossad, with the assistance of Zionist assets in the American government, conspired to execute the 9/11 attacks as a false-flag event designed to initiate the devilish neocon dream of a “Clash of Civilizations” between the Western world and the Islamic world, for the benefit of Israel and Zionism.

The complete book can be downloaded HERE or HERE

Copyright © 2013 Zander C. Fuerza. All rights reserved.

http://mastersofdeception.wordpress.com/