A chilling thought

Now here's one to keep you awake at night. More drips from Seymore Hersh about dick cheney.

In an interview with Hersh on NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross asked about cheney's continuing influence among White House staff:

GROSS: Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward and revealing things to you about what happened in the Bush administration?

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence. And again, because of the problems this administration’s having filling jobs, a lot of people who served in the Bush Cheney government, particularly even in the White House people on most sophisticated staffs are still there. You simply can’t get rid of everybody, you may not even want to. Some are professional people. But Cheney is, I would never call it admiration, but, you know, formidable, yeah, this guy. This guy is the real McCoy.

I remember in January talking about the Obama team "sweeping out the stables." It wasn't nearly as much a clean sweep as we thought. We knew, of course, in the final months, the bush people were switching people from political appointee positions to career positions, especially in the Justice Department. I was concerned about them hogging the positions that wouldn't then be available for Obama to fill, as well about their ideology continuing.

It didn't occur to me that they might also be "moles," as in spy terms. But coming on the heels of Hersh's hints about the secret assassination squad that reported only to cheney, it does not surprise me at all if he did this to retain some power.

Abominable man.

Ralph