Dov Zahkeim: This article pulls alot of loose ends together

by **seemslikeadream** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 8:32 pm

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10cheney.html?ei=5094&en=c089e65ca50c998c&hp=&ex=1157860800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print" target="top">www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10cheney.html?ei=5094&en=c089e65ca50c998c&hp=&ex=1157860800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print</a> September 10, 2006 Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — From those first moments five years ago when Secret Service agents burst into Vice President Dick Cheney’s office on Sept. 11, lifted him off his feet and propelled him to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the man who had returned to Washington that year to remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable. Within minutes, Mr. Cheney was directing the government’s response to an attack that was still under way. Within weeks, he was overseeing the surveillance program that tracked suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States without warrants. Within months, he and his staff, guided by a loyal aide, David S. Addington, were championing the reinterpretation of the rules of war so that they could detain “enemy combatants” and interrogate them at secret detention facilities run by the C.I.A. around the world. It was Mr. Cheney and his staff that helped shape the rules under which the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and tried by “military commissions” at Guantánamo Bay — if they faced trial at all. “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,” Mr. Cheney said last December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman. “You know,” he added, “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.” But as the nation marks the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his own influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for detention, interrogation and domestic spying. On Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Cheney sat silently as President Bush urged Congress to restore to him the powers, stripped away by the Supreme Court in a 5-to-3 ruling in June, to create military commissions and define the precise meaning of the Geneva Conventions when it comes to interrogations. There is little question that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney still share the goal of expanding the power of the presidency: legislation they have sent to Congress would, if passed unamended, essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five years. But they have been stymied in their effort to simply assert those powers and carry them out with minimal oversight, as part of Mr. Cheney’s declared goal to restore to the presidency an authority that he believed was dangerously eroded after Vietnam and Watergate. On national security issues, Mr. Cheney, once the unchallenged adviser to a president who came to office with little experience in foreign affairs, remains a pivotal figure but now vies for influence with other powerful officials like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser. Over the past 18 months, Mr. Cheney appears to have reluctantly given ground on detention practices and, at least for now, on policy disputes involving Iran and North Korea. Mr. Cheney’s prediction in 2002 that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would force radical extremists “to rethink their strategy of jihad” proved wrong, as President Bush implicitly acknowledged last week when he described how the array of enemies facing America has multiplied. Mr. Cheney’s friends and former aides say they are mystified about how the same man who as defense secretary in 1991 warned that “for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire” managed, 15 years later, to find himself facing that prospect. Measuring the accumulation or the erosion of power is an imprecise art. But interviews with more than 45 people over the past five months — including current and former White House aides, foreign diplomats, members of Congress and confidants of Mr. Cheney — painted a picture of a vice president who, while still influential, has seen his power wane. Few said they had detected any change in Mr. Cheney’s views; the difference, they said, was that those views were no longer automatically triumphant. Most agreed to speak candidly only if their names were not used. Mr. Cheney himself declined repeated requests for an interview. Instead, his office encouraged Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley to give interviews to dispute the view that Mr. Cheney’s power is in decline. Mr. Hadley said the vice president “is often the first to insist that the president hear a variety of views” and argued that reports of his powers in the first term were always exaggerated. “It’s the president who creates the foreign policy around here,” Mr. Hadley said, “not some hidden hand.” Ms. Rice disputed the view that she had supplanted Mr. Cheney, pointing out that the vice president still has one-on-one lunches with Mr. Bush where he can make his views known “in his quiet way.” Mr. Cheney’s defenders note that over the summer he was among the strongest voices arguing within the White House that the United States had to give Israel as much time as possible to strike a decisive blow against Hezbollah.. But those same insiders say that in retrospect Mr. Cheney was at his peak in 2003 and 2004, before Iraq’s insurgency flared, before the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, before the setbacks in Congress and at the Supreme Court. Without the help of his closest adviser, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who resigned last fall after his indictment in the Central Intelligence Agency leak case, Mr. Cheney has lost the early warning radar that gave him and his staff such command over the federal bureaucracy. Administration insiders say that Mr. Cheney and his aides are now having to fight hard to maintain positions that just a few years ago he would have won handily. “During the first term, Cheney was considered one of the smartest guys in the administration,” said Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois. “But his influence has been diminished because of the Scooter Libby thing and because the war in Iraq has not gone well.” In his second term, Mr. Bush has grown less dependent on Mr. Cheney for information, current and former officials say. When Joshua B. Bolten became White House chief of staff earlier this year, he told associates he wanted to make sure the president heard from more voices. “My impression is that there are a lot more data points or gathering points now,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota. For instance, Mr. Bush has turned to another Washington insider, James A. Baker III, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state, for help as the co-chairman of an outside group developing options for dealing with Iraq. One group member said, “You get the sense that the president now realizes, perhaps a little late, that he needs Baker to find him an exit door.” Mr. Cheney told NBC News in May that his influence with Mr. Bush was unchanged. “I feel like he gives me the access that I need to be able to do my job,” Mr. Cheney said, adding later: “I give him the best advice I can. He doesn’t always agree. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t.” Perhaps nowhere has Mr. Cheney’s shifting influence been more visible than on Capitol Hill, where the vice president’s ability to win his way without challenge — a luxury he enjoyed through much of the first term — has evaporated. During the first four years, Mr. Cheney often bypassed Congress on issues like detention policy. The vice president and Mr. Addington began to pave the way for the reassertion of executive power that they had long talked about. Mr. Cheney took control of crucial intelligence-gathering programs, including the one that involved eavesdropping on conversations between suspects in the United States and their overseas counterparts without getting a warrant from a special court set up by Congress for such cases. “They have a view of executive authority that basically smothers the other two branches,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who found himself at odds with Mr. Cheney on detention and interrogation policy. But in the second term, whether the issue was the treatment and prosecution of terror suspects or Congressional oversight of domestic spying, Mr. Cheney has been forced into an unhappy retreat. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling struck at the heart of Mr. Cheney’s goal to expand presidential powers. By mid-July, it prompted the White House to concede that terror suspects held by the United States had a right under international law to basic human and legal protections under the Geneva Conventions. Similarly, Mr. Bush’s announcement on Wednesday amounted to an opening gambit in negotiations with Congress over the rules of tribunals, in what could amount to bargaining over the scope of Mr. Bush’s powers as commander in chief. Mr. Hadley said in an interview that in recent weeks Mr. Cheney has offered advice to Mr. Bush about how to deal with the court’s decision. But Mr. Hadley, not Mr. Cheney, has been acting as negotiator with Congress, a decision that administration officials say reflects the rockiness of the vice president’s relationship with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Mr. Cheney discovered the depth of that opposition last summer, when Republicans began to rebel against the White House after he tried to block a bill by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that would bar cruel and inhumane treatment of all prisoners in American custody. In a tense, 30-minute meeting last July, Mr. Cheney scolded three Republicans — Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and Senator John W. Warner of Virginia — for proposing legislation that he said interfered with the president’s authority to protect Americans against terrorist attacks. But the senators did not budge despite the threat of a veto. “The three of us were firmly of one view, he of another,” Mr. Warner said. After the Senate and the House voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Cheney’s position, the White House decided that the vice president had become so radioactive that his interventions were losing votes, rather than winning them, White House officials acknowledge. So Mr. Cheney stepped aside, and the less ideological, more lawyerly Mr. Hadley was sent to deal with Mr. McCain. The result was a deal that Mr. Cheney himself had previously rejected. The White House also appeared to yield in July when it agreed to allow a secret intelligence court to rule on the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. Civil rights groups and lawmakers from both parties have since criticized the agreement and cast doubt on whether it will be approved by Congress. At the height of his influence in the Bush White House two years ago, Mr. Cheney stepped into the Oval Office early one June evening and raised an alarm about an agreement that American negotiators were about to sign in Beijing. The negotiators, largely from the State Department, were trying to entice North Korea to sign a document outlining the steps for resolving the standoff over the country’s nuclear weapons. But it lacked the tough language on disarmament that North Korea had rejected and that Mr. Cheney knew Mr. Bush wanted. With Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and his deputy, Richard Armitage, at a black-tie dinner where they could not be easily reached on secure telephones, Mr. Cheney “declared this thing a loser,” said a former senior official involved in the discussions that night. While Mr. Powell and Mr. Armitage were still eating, Mr. Bush sent new instructions to the negotiators in Beijing — through the National Security Council, rather than the State Department — that essentially killed the deal. “Powell and Armitage were not happy,” one official said. “But it was too late.” It would be hard to imagine a similar course of events today. Soon after the start of the second term, President Bush began signaling to foreign leaders visiting him in the Oval Office that he knew much had gone wrong in his first term, and that he empowered Ms. Rice to put a new emphasis on consultation and teamwork with allies. Ms. Rice, aides say, asserted her authority early, sending her own envoy to the North Korean nuclear talks last September, a process that she largely controlled but has since proved fruitless. But the real evidence came this spring, when Ms. Rice determined that the only way to hold together the international coalition against Iran was to volunteer to sit down and join negotiations with Tehran, but only if it first agreed to suspend its production of uranium. (So far, the Iranians have balked.) The proposal was notable because during the first term, Mr. Powell’s top aides, led by Richard N. Haass, the director of policy planning, had tried and failed to promote direct engagement with the Iranians. Ms. Rice said that when her proposal to engage Iran was presented to the president this spring, Mr. Cheney agreed that it was worth a try and that changed circumstances required a changed strategy.  “The constellations have shifted somewhat,” said Dov S. Zakheim, who served as an undersecretary of defense in Mr. Bush’s first term, giving an image used by others to suggest that Mr. Cheney has been partially eclipsed. In particular, Mr. Cheney has fewer allies in critical posts than he once did. Those who have left the administration include Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, who quit as deputy defense secretary and undersecretary of defense last year. Mr. Cheney’s associates say the forced departure last fall of Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, was particularly severe. As Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, Mr. Libby served as the vice president’s eyes and ears around Washington, working the bureaucratic machinery deftly and choking off ideas Mr. Cheney opposed before they rose to the Oval Office. “Scooter was a big loss,” Mr. Feith said. For his part, Mr. Cheney has said he does not believe his influence with Mr. Bush has diminished, and he brushes off poll approval ratings now hovering around 20 percent. “I suppose, sometimes, people look at my demeanor and say, well, he’s the Darth Vader of the administration,” Mr. Cheney told CNN in June. “I’m not running for anything. My career will end, politically, with this administration. I have the freedom and the luxury, as does the president, of doing what we think is right for the country.” Mr. Cheney maintains that what matters now is convincing the country that it is really at war and that defeat is not an option. And at 65, he seems willing to wait for his vindication. As Mr. Cheney recently told NBC, “History will decide how I did.” <a href="http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=743997" target="top">www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=743997</a>

by **darkbeforedawn** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 11:00 pm

Good god, he's still around talking to reporters as if there had been no missing trillions and hadn't taken a job which gave funding to "terrorist" organizations...unbelievable. Why hasn't he been railroaded and his reputation tarred?

by **dbeach** » Sun Sep 10, 2006 12:19 am

cuz its competing criminal syndicates al capone vs bugsy moran with most of the coppers on the take BUT they have near control of much of the planet Russia and China being wild cards{with their own competing syndicates} Zacheim must be checking up on Evil Dickie Cheney and vice versa BTW they will all meet in Switzerland some day to divide the loot and then of course another St Valentines Day Massacre

by **Joe Hillshoist** » Sun Sep 10, 2006 2:04 am

Nearly 10 years ago a stormfront member threatened to shoot me, over the internet. (They threatened me over the internet, from the US - talking about contacts here in Aus.) Still waiting for that threat to materialise, and I am not holdiong my breath. That was a real white supreme cyst. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>therefore this board is racist. therefore i see no diversity here, therefore DE makes sure no REAl blacks (welfare cheaters), Israelis (lunatics who have suffered bad relationship and should attend to mental health), etc. are actually needed here to speak for themsleves. each "otherling" has a proper white spokesman who limits their full humanity to a poster, or a comic figure. "let me speak for you...." says the advocate.<hr></blockquote> This is a pretty unreasonable statement hava. I speak for myself and don't cop any bullshit neocolonialist meme control when I see it. And I am about as white as mud. Remember my merchant banker comment? That was the first time I had ever heard anyone refer to that as a codeword for "Jew". I try not to use that term these days despite the fact that I thought you were overreacting in your response to it. (Guys I went to school with became merchant bankers. the only people in that field I ever knew. We were all raised Catholic... The internet is a white supremecists club on the level you refer to Hava. As is the global economy and the current consensus reality. White european culture has had more influence on the world views of most people here and how could it be any different. not many people in the Sudan have internet access. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Holocaust for me, is people being stripped of their individuality, becoming numbers. the board here is well within the hell of post holocaust discourse, and "representation", DE included.<hr></blockquote> I thought the holocaust was a mass murder done with typical german efficiency ( thats a culturist observation not a racist one). If its just a turning of people into numbers then thats what the net is, after all I am just a number, trace my responses and you will get a series of numbers that ID me. How is it possible to be un holocaust like on the net. you yourself are doing what you accuse DE of doing, by reducing him to a caricature of whatever he is trying to represent. I am doing that now to you by missing out on so much of what you were getting at with that post and focussing on a few things that caught my attention. Its an unavoidable trap.

by **blanc** » Sun Sep 10, 2006 12:41 pm

never ceases to astonish me how many times huge sums of money simply vanish, and yet never enough for health, education, housing, hurricane damage limitation. What else has Dov done?

by **rocco33** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 6:47 pm

Fourth Base, I got that off a set of World Net Daily articles, J. Post, L.A. Times, ABC News, and an actual FAA draft. Links below to articles with a copy of the actual draft and articles... Also, a Wayne Madsen page references the entirety of the clip as an "original FAA memo" and provides the fuller content of the same Executive Memo WND published. <a href="http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/Artstudents.htm">www.waynemadsenreport.com/Artstudents.htm</a> Here's the World Net Daily Article... <div style="text-align:center">As fate would have it, Daniel C. Lewin, a 31-year-old Israeli-American, was seated on American Airlines Flight 11 between hijackers Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari in the row in front of him, and hijacker Satam al-Suqami in the row behind him.</div> <snip> Continuing...[/font] <div style="text-align:center">A secret Federal Aviation Administration executive summary, first uncovered by WorldNetDaily, says that al-Suqami, who would have been sitting directly behind Lewin in seat 10B, shot and killed Lewin with a single bullet. The FAA maintains the high-level report was a mistaken first draft and that Lewin was more than likely stabbed, not shot, along with American Airlines crew members on Flight 11. (Box cutters were allowed that day through airline security, which the FAA regulated, but not guns.) But a childhood friend who served with Lewin in the Israel Defense Force says only a bullet would have stopped Lewin. "He'd be more than a match for those skinny little (expletive)," said Brad Rephen, a New York lawyer who grew up with Lewin in Jerusalem. "With his training, he would have killed them with his bare hands." "I can tell you, their knives would not have stopped him," he added. "He would have taken their knives or their box cutters away and used them against them." Rephen recalls Lewin's injured hands after he returned from an Israeli anti-terrorist training course. "They were pretty beaten up from the fighting he did," he said. "He knew how to fight with knives and take knives away from people." He described Lewin, at about 5-11, 200 pounds, as "thick-boned." He says he witnessed him bench-press more than 300 pounds and squat close to 500 pounds. "He was very, very strong and had a lot of meat on him," Rephen said. "They couldn't have subdued him by slashing him. The only way they could have stopped him was by shooting him." Before returning to America, where he worked as an Internet company executive in Boston, the Denver-born Lewin was a captain in Sayeret Matkal, a top-secret reconnaissance unit of the Israeli army used for special anti-terror missions such as the raid on Entebbe. In 1976, Israeli commandos rescued 103 hostages from a gang of Arab terrorists at the airport in the Ugandan capital. Lewin went on dozens of such missions, friends say. In the '80s, for example, he helped rescue thousands of Jews stranded in Ethiopia. His outfit ï¿½ Unit 269 ï¿½ secured the airport there during the airlift operation, friends say. Rephen called Lewin "the best of the best." "About 2,500 guys try out for the unit he was in," he said. "Twenty-five make it, and one gets chosen as an officer. It was him." He was also extremely tough and determined, Rephen says. . He guesses that Lewin, who understood Arabic, sensed something was wrong on Flight 11 the moment he took his seat next to the three terrorists, including Atta, the ringleader. </div>(If true, why didn't he do or say something before the plane took off? In the FAA report, it says the plane was in the air for at least 15 minutes. And if I remember correctly, the plane was also late in taking off.)  <div style="text-align:center">"He probably picked up that they were on a suicide mission by what they were saying or wearing," Rephen said. <snip> "If I know Danny, when he realized what they were doing, he attacked them," Rephen said. "He probably cursed them in Arabic to scare them, and then he hurt them." He speculates that during the struggle with Atta and the other hijacker sitting in front of Lewin in row 8, al-Suqami shot him from behind. "I have no doubt they got a gun on the plane as a backup for a situation like that," Rephen said, speculating that they either brought it on board the plane, likely in pieces, or had it planted there earlier by ground services crew. The FAA report, though very specific, does not indicate whether Lewin was killed during a struggle or while sitting in his seat. Whatever happened, it likely went down within 15 minutes or so of takeoff. Authorities say the pilots were overpowered by then. Rephen, like other Lewin friends and associates contacted by WorldNetDaily, doubts the report of gunfire was written in error. "If this were an error, they wouldn't have been so fact-specific," Rephen said. The FBI says the Lewin incident is still under investigation. "I don't think we know for sure right now if he was killed" on board the flight, said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson. "All of this is something we're trying to figure out ourselves." Attempts to reach Lewin's family were unsuccessful. His wife and children live in the Boston area, and his parents, both doctors, and two younger brothers live i</div>[/center] From the earlier release... World Net Daily article Hijacker shot passenger on Flight 11: Posted: February 27, 2002 <div style="text-align:center">An internal Federal Aviation Administration memo summarizing the Sept. 11 hijackings says a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11 was shot to death by a single bullet, WorldNetDaily has learned. <snip> Brown refused to release the final draft, however, arguing it is "protected information." WorldNetDaily has obtained a copy of the first draft of the memo, which <a href="http://wnd.com/images2/faa911memoside.jpg">can be viewed here</a></div> <snip> <div style="text-align:center">...an American flight attendant on the plane did call and report a passenger being killed by hijackers seated in rows 9 and 10 ï¿½ although the passenger died of stab wounds, according to the FBI's account of what she said. And she called Logan International Airport in Boston, however, not American's system operations control center at Fort Worth. It was another American flight attendant who called Fort Worth, but she apparently did not mention a passenger being killed.</div> <div style="text-align:center">The FBI, which got the manifest from American within hours of the first crash, denies it was the FAA source for the gun story. And officials at the bureau say they have come up with no evidence in their investigation of the hijackings to suggest any passengers were shot aboard the flights. "There is no evidence that any shots were fired at any time on any of the flights," FBI spokesman Bill Carter told WorldNetDaily.</div> So how did a detailed account of a shooting on Flight 11 end up in a high-level government report from the only flight attendant to call from an actual plane phone? <a href="http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26732">worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26732</a> From the other World Net Daily article... <snip> <div style="text-align:center">She also relayed the exact seat numbers of the hijackers in the ninth and 10th rows -- the very rows cited in the controversial FAA report. The FBI's account of the unrecorded call was leaked to the Los Angeles Times, which ran a story Sept. 20. The 31-year-old Lewin, an Israeli citizen since a teen, was a captain in the Israel Defense Force and had extensive anti-terrorism training. "Anyone who knows Danny knows that it was not his nature to go down without a fight," Schwartzberg said. "Maybe this (memo) shows that he died a hero." An FAA special agent agrees. "With his background in special forces, he would have had more of a fighting instinct click into gear, rather than be herded around" or fooled by their cover, said the agent, who wished to go unnamed. "They probably killed him first because he was fighting back." </div> <a href="http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26973">www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26973</a> Plus there's this... FAA covering up 9-11 gun, whistleblower agent says <a href="http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26641">www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26641</a>  More links compiled by Paul Thompson... <div style="text-align:center">A report in Israeli newspaper Haï¿½aretz on September 17 identifies Lewin as a former member of the Israel Defense Force Sayeret Matkal, Israelï¿½s most successful special-operations unit. [United Press International, 3/6/2002] Sayeret Matkal is a deep-penetration unit that has been involved in assassinations, the theft of foreign signals-intelligence materials, and the theft and destruction of foreign nuclear weaponry. Sayeret Matkal is best known for the 1976 rescue of 106 passengers at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. [New Yorker, 10/29/2001] </div> <a href="http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-1959">www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-1959</a> (At the very least, you have to wonder why this story was hushed up. I mean this is easily as Hollywood as "let's roll". And none of this is from judicial-inc, but you can go there to get an idea of the seating arrangement that day in business class for Flight 11.)  And lastly, getting back to Dov, there's this... <div style="text-align:center">According to Conspiracy News.net writers Shadow and ï¿½Paxï¿½ in Dov Zakheim and the 9/11 Conspiracy, (and I suggest you look at <a href="http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:Y_mUdEMLTYUJ:www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/articl...">this link</a>) ï¿½According to the SPC website (4), a recent customer at that time was Eglin AFB, located in Florida. Eglin is very near another Air Force base in Florida-MacDill AFB, where Dov Zakheim contracted to send at least 32 Boeing 767 aircraft, as part of the Boeing /Pentagon tanker lease agreement. (5) ï¿½As the events of September 11, 2001 occurred, little was mentioned about these strange connections, and the possible motives and proximity of Dov Zakheim and his group. Since there was little physical evidence remaining after the events, investigators were left only with photographic and anecdotal evidence.</div>

Dov Zahkeim: This article pulls alot of loose ends together

Re: The constellations have shifted somewhat

Re: The constellations have shifted somewhat

Re: The constellations have shifted somewhat

Re: deserves repeating:

amazing

Re: Lewin

Who is online