Republican Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) told Politico he would like to see war monger Dick Cheney as the next Speaker of the House.
And of course, Tom Cotton, the junior senator from Arkansas, needs no introduction. In case you’ve been off the grid, he’s the traitor who authored that letter to the Iranian leadership in an attempt to undermine the nuclear deal. To make matters worse, he met with a group of defense contractors the day after penning that mutinous letter.
World leaders condemned Cotton and his letter; CBS News delivered a knock-out blow to Cotton with one word during an appearance on on “Face The Nation.” Even Fox News host Megyn Kelly came after Cotton and his ridiculous letter, grilling him during a March appearance on The Kelly File and ultimately dismissing him with a “pffft, whatever.“
In March of 2013, while serving as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Cotton proposed punishing family members of anyone violating U.S. sanctions to Iran with up to 20 years in prison with “no investigation” or trial. According to Cotton, family members targeted for punishment include any relative to the third degree such as “spouses… parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grand kids, great grand kids.”
Cotton told a markup hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time that:
There would be no investigation. If the prime malefactor of the family is identified as on the list for sanctions, then everyone within their family would automatically come within the sanctions regime as well. It’d be very hard to demonstrate and investigate to conclusive proof. [emphasis added]
Last October Cotton suggested that ISIS could carry out terrorist attacks in Arkansas through their connection with Mexican drug cartels:
The problem is with Mark Pryor and Barack Obama refusing to enforce our immigration laws, and refusing to secure our border. I’ll change that when I’m in the United States Senate. And I would add, it’s not just an immigration problem. We now know that it’s a security problem. Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism.
They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas. This is an urgent problem and it’s time we got serious about it, and I’ll be serious about it in the United States Senate.
There is also the time he time he boasted on Fox’s “The Kelly File” about how “proud” he was about the way the “savages” were treated in Guantanamo Bay military prison.
Terrorists need no excuse to attack us here. They’ve shown that for decades and decades. We should be proud for the way we treated these savages at Guantanamo Bay and the way our soldiers conduct themselves all around the world to include the people doing the very hard work at Guantanamo Bay.
Earlier this year, Cotton blasted President Obama’s efforts to close the facility, telling a Senate Armed Services Committee that:
In my opinion, the only problem with Guantanamo Bay is that there are too many empty beds and cells there right now. We should be sending more terrorists there for further interrogation to keep this country safe. As far I’m concerned, every last one of them can rot in hell. But as long as they don’t do that, they can rot in Guantanamo Bay.
Turning to Dick Cheney, even conservatives are pushing back against the pro-war Republican who has been hitting the right-wing news circuit lately promoting his new book and squawking about how President Obama‘s nuclear deal with Iran will end civilization as we know it.
A great case in point point is last year when Megyn Kelly shredded Cheney in a June 2014 interview in what Fox News later described as “an accountability moment for the ex-veep.”
Kelly began by paraphrasing liberal Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman, who reported earlier that week about Cheney and Iraq:
There is not a single person in America — not Bill Kristol, not Paul Wolfowitz, not Don Rumsfeld, no pundit, not even President Bush himself — who has been more wrong and more shamelessly dishonest on the topic of Iraq than Dick Cheney.
And now, as the cascade of misery and death and chaos he did so much to unleash rages anew, Cheney has the unadulterated gall to come before the country and tell us that it’s all someone else’s fault, and if we would only listen to him then we could keep America safe forever. How dumb would we have to be to listen?
Kelly then asked: “The suggestion is that you caused this mess, Mr. Vice President. What say you?” As Fox News reported at the time, Cheney gave his standard defense of the wars, replying:
I think we went into Iraq for very good reasons. I think when we left office, we had a situation in Iraq that was very positive… What happened was that Barack Obama came to office, and instead of negotiating a stay behind agreement, he basically walked away from it.
Kelly came back and slammed Cheney, telling him:
But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well in Iraq, sir. You said there were no doubts Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in the last throes back in 2005. And you said that after our intervention, extremists would have to, quote, ‘rethink their strategy of Jihad.’ Now with almost a trillion dollars spent there with 4,500 American lives lost there, what do you say to those who say, you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?
Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, sat down for an interview with Thom Hartmann, host of of RT’s “The Big Picture,” to discuss Dick Cheney‘s opposition to the Iran Agreement, telling him:
Dick Cheney should go away. Dick Cheney has become a profane obscene blemish on the American reputation. Dick Cheney in 1998 as CEO of Halliburton, for example, said dramatically that sanctions don’t work. He wanted the sanctions on Iran lifted. He wanted to do business with Iran. Now all of a sudden, Dick Cheney is not just for sanctions – he is for discarding the Iran agreement and essentially going back to sanctions, even more draconian sanctions. Dick Cheney is in a word an “idiot.”
Then there are those who continue to push for Cheney’s arrest and conviction as a war criminal, such as Thomas Buergenthal, who served as a judge at the International Court of Justice at the Hague for ten years until his retirement in 2010, is considered by many the world’s most distinguished living specialist in international human rights law.
Newsweek reports that, a natural diplomat, Buergenthal “occasionally finds that his instinct for tact deserts him.” During a July interview with Robert Chalmers the conversation turned to Cheney and the possibility of his prosecution as a war criminal at the International Criminal Court. Burgenthal told Chalmers that “I think – yes – that it will happen.”
Some of us have long thought that Cheney, and a number of CIA agents who did what they did in those so-called black holes [overseas torture centers] should appear before the ICC. We [in the USA] could have tried them ourselves. I voted for Obama but I think he made a great mistake when he decided not to instigate legal proceedings against some of these people. I think – yes – that it will happen.
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