[joconde]

> I think Cheney was pulling the shots and knowingly and cynically ignored all of those glaring warnings, thinking they'd get maybe a small attack somewhere with a smaller number of US deaths

Did he have so much control that he could suppress intelligence about an attack? I know he was pretty powerful for a vice president, but it sounds weird to me that one guy who isn't even in command could do that.

Note I'm not American and don't know that much about that period.

[rasz]

He shot an attorney in the face, with a shotgun, and had the victim apologize to him https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/18/usa.dickcheney

"Harry Whittington, the Republican lawyer shot by Dick Cheney in a hunting accident in Texas last weekend, emerged from hospital yesterday and apologised to the vice-president for all the trouble the shooting had caused."

[tpmx]

His face after the incident:

https://newsfeed.time.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2010/10...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Whittington

> Whittington told the paper that although many media outlets had described Cheney and him as "good friends", the pair had only met one another three times in 30 years, and had never been hunting before. The Washington Post article also said that Cheney had violated "two basic rules of hunting safety": he failed to ensure that he had a clear shot before firing, and fired without being able to see blue sky beneath his target. The paper also reported that Cheney has still neither publicly nor privately apologized to Whittington for the shooting.

[tpmx]

He was a very unusual vice president. Often described as the most powerful american VP ever. It's not clear that GWB was in control of these aspects during his presidency.

You should watch Vice (2018).

That movie really made a shitload of sense to me after following politics closely since a bit before the Bush/Gore election in 2000.

[TuringNYC]

Cheney and the well-aligned group he was part of clearly had extensive control, clearly demonstrated by how well he executed the policy in 2001-2005. It is helpful not to think of the current VP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris) as a comparison as her background [while worthy] was mostly local (SF) and state (CA) -- Cheney on the other hand decades of DC+White House experience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney) with a strong and almost singular view on Foreign Policy.

W/r/t control beyond the whitehouse, he was publicly part of multiple groups with other key players (e.g., PNAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...) as well as part of non-public "groups" -- Neoconservative. He was clearly effective because his cohorts (Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer) were also part of the same circles, well placed in the DC foreign policy / defense apparatus, also shared the same singular focus of hawkish Foreign Policy.

It also helped that half the media landscape unashamedly supported the Cheney stance. Parts of other media (NY Times) reduced their critical thinking for several years until the disaster of the Bush administration became clear.

This is also why Comedy Central and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Show took off during that time -- because they (along with PBS News Hour and NPR) were one of the few consistently thoughtful sources of news during that time. Consider how much easier it is for Cheney to execute policy when the media check-and-balance has disappeared.

[sangnoir]

> Did he have so much control that he could suppress intelligence about an attack?

Not sure about suppressing intelligence - but he sure was powerful enough to generate fake intelligence about "Sadam having weapons of mass destruction" - overriding the skepticism of multiple established intelligence services in the process[1]. Cheney basically set up a parallel intelligence service out of his office to push the "weapons of mass destruction" angle with no factual/ground-intelligence basis.

1. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/special-reports/iraq-intell...

[ksaj]

Let's not forget about the nuclear bomb factories on rails. That story sounded fake from the get-go, and since it wasn't true, they just dropped it and let it slip out of the public's memory.

[coolgeek]

Don't forget that during the 2000 election, Dick Cheney was put in charge of deciding who should be Bush's VP running mate. And he chose Dick Cheney.