Unapologetic Cheney Instead Should Be Expressing Regret

Thought we were rid of the shenanigans of former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as well as former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Cheney and his wife have written their memoirs, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, in which he is critical of Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet, and former national security advisor (during Bush's first term) Brent Scowcroft.

Susan Page of USA Today, who interviewed Cheney, writes, "he is the quintessential Cheney: combative, unapologetic, dismissive of his critics and suspicious of reporters."

Unapologetic when he, Powell, and Bush have so much to apologize for.

Conservative columnist George Will on ABC's This Week exclaims, "565 pages [Cheney's memoir] and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years was we went to war - a big war, a costly war - under false pretenses. To write a memoir in which you say, essentially, nothing seriously went wrong?"

Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson say that Dick Cheney never apologized to them either after the Bush administration turned their world upside down in an attempt to convince the public to support an invasion of Iraq.

And Cheney needs to apologize to the American people for all of the lies perpetrated to justify the Iraq War, the first preemptive war in America's history, and his missteps following the invasion. In September 2006, The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that provides prima facie evidence of a systematic campaign of lies told to the American people to sell them on the need to invade Iraq. The lies became necessary, and continued to be necessary, because they allowed the government to claim that the occupation of Iraq was part of a "war on terror."

He needs to apologize to the American people for his role in sanctioning torture as an interrogation technique.

Furthermore, we can't let Colin Powell off of the hook. On February 5, 2003, he knew, or should have known, that he was lying to the UN Security Council when he presented the United States' case for an invasion of Iraq -- or, was Colin Powell collateral damage? According to the guardian.co.uk, the former US secretary of state has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons capability. On CBS' Face the Nation, Powell claims Cheney accuses him in the book of not being forthcoming with his opinions to former President George W. Bush ahead of the Iraq War in 2003. Powell called the critique "nonsense," but If he knew the report that Hussein's bio-weapons capability was unreliable and was not forthcoming, perhaps Cheney is right.

Robert Scheer, writing in Deceit of Shakespearean Proportions, says "Behold this unctuous knave, a disgrace to his nation as few before him, yet boasting unvarnished virtue. The deceit of Dick Cheney is indeed of Shakespearean proportions, as evidenced in his new memoir. For the former vice president, lying comes so easily that one must assume he takes the pursuit of truth to be nothing more than a reckless indulgence."