- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
-
- Live Webcast Address by Democratic Presidential pre-candidate
Lyndon LaRouche to a Washington, DC audience on Thursday, July 15 at 1:00
pm
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- Cheney's Man Penned Torture Memo
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- David Addington, the General Counsel to Vice President
Dick Cheney, was the actual author of one of the now-infamous White House
"torture memos" that claimed for President Bush the authority
to violate the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War,
in the so-called "war on terrorism." The immediate result of
this Hitlerian document was the scenes of inhuman torture at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Baghdad, and the as-yet untold tales of similar torture at other
secret prison locations in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in
other countries around the world.
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- The revelation that Addington was the author of the Jan.
25, 2002 draft memorandum for the President first appeared in a July 3,
2004 Newsweek online story. An unnamed Gonzales aide told the magazine's
Daniel Klaidman that "the memo was actually penned not by Gonzales
but by Dick Cheney's top lawyer, David Addington, a hard-charging hawk."
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- The LaRouche campaign has independently confirmed the
accuracy of the Newsweek story, through several intelligence and legal
community sources, familiar with the deliberations that preceeded the writing
of the Jan. 2002 document, which President Bush approved. According to
one specialist in military law, familiar with the proceedings, Addington
participated in all of the meetings that led to the drafting of the memo.
An intelligence community source confirmed that Newsweek had obtained on
the record statements from Bush White House officials close to General
Counsel Gonzales, in anticipation of an Administration effort to spike
or discredit the story. One week after the Newsweek release, the Bush White
House has made no effort to challenge the account of Addington's role.
- Prior to the Newsweek posting, senior U.S. military and
intelligence sources had singled out Addington as a key player in the Cheney
circles, who aggressively promoted the trashing of international law in
the terror war.
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- The Addington-authored Jan. 25, 2002 draft was followed,
six months later by the most infamous of the "torture memos,"
the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel Aug. 1, 2002 document by
Jay Bybee, directed to Gonzales, which set the standards for what constituted
torture, under the jaundiced interpretations of international law from
the Ashcroft department. The Bybee memo sanctioned "cruel, inhuman,
or degrading" acts which "still do not produce pain and suffering
of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A's proscription
against torture." Addington was also directly involved in the preparation
of the Bybee memo.
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- Cheney's Longtime Aide
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- Addington's ties to Dick Cheney date back 15 years, when
he first served as a special assistant and deputy secretary of Defense
to Cheney in the "Bush 41" Administration. From 1992-93, he served
as the Pentagon's General Counsel, leaving government when Cheney departed
as Secretary of Defense in Jan. 1993. When Cheney chose himself as George
W. Bush's Vice Presidential running mate, he brought Addington to the White
House as his General Counsel.
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- Addington has served as Cheney's legal bodyguard, fending
off efforts by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) and John Dingell (D-Mich.) to
obtain records of the Vice President's energy task force, and later efforts
by the General Accounting Office to force full disclosure of the task force's
activities. Intelligence community sources have reported that the Cheney-led
task force was actually the first of a series of secret planning groups
for the Iraq war. In a law suit by the group Judicial Watch, a scant 16-pages
of task force documents have been made public, and none from Cheney's office;
these documents reveal that the Cheney task force was mapping out oil concessions
in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
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- Dust Bites Cheney!
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- Lyndon LaRouche said to-night: "Every indication
is, that Cheney is near to the end of his string as Vice-President. The
dropping of Cheney from the Republican ticket, is very bad news for the
Kerry campaign. Since the aftermath of the March primaries, Bush and Kerry
have been locked into a race to see which can get to the bottom first.
If a mainstream Republican is seen as a probable replacement for Cheney
on the Presidential ticket, the resulting slow-down in the rate of collapse
of Bush's popularity, could mean a likely November defeat for the recently
proposed Kerry-Edwards pair.
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- "In reacting to today's updated reports on the pile-up
of terrible troubles for Cheney's career, we must not lose sight of the
fact that neither of the presently probable tickets are mentally prepared
to cope with the presently accelerating threat of global collapse of the
world's monetary-financial system. The date that the world's financial
collapse becomes official, is uncertain; but it will be soon. We don't
need a new Herbert Hoover, either Democrat or Republican, with this financial
collapse now coming on fast.
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- "So, it will be good for the world if Cheney is
out very soon. Do not forget, that, even after Cheney were gone, the real
dangers still lie immediately ahead."
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- For more of LaRouche's evaluation, and perspective, tune
in to his website, www.larouchein2004.com, for his July 15 webcast, which
will commence at 1 pm. Eastern Daylight Time. LaRouche's topic is "The
- New Threat of Fascism."
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