Dick Cheney Opts for House Arrest Rather Than Face the Ire of Canada’s Citizen Jurists Who Insist That Domestic and International Laws Prohibiting Torture, Genocide, Aggressive Warfare, and 9/11 Fraud Must be Enforced on One of the World’s Most Notorious Criminals

by Anthony J. Hall

Earlier this week former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, the dominant, hands-on operative in the two-term presidency of George W. Bush, cancelled a speaking engagement in Toronto on April 24. Through a spokesperson Cheney indicated he was frightened to return to Canada after his experience last September 26 at the Vancouver Club. After promoting his book to a small local audience Cheney spent several hours hiding out in the posh venue trying to outwait several hundred citizen jurists, some of whom were planning to attempt a citizens’ arrest of the credibly-accused war criminal right on the spot.

I am proud to have played an active role in the fascinating teach-in last September of those of us who deputized ourselves at the Vancouver Club. Our goal in assembling outside one of British Columbia’s oldest and most notorious sites of political cronyism was to attempt to defend Canadian sovereignty and the rule of law in Canada against the criminal contempt of government officials for the Canadian Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act (2000). This sneering contempt for a law passed in the name of preventing Canada from becoming a haven for war criminals finds its most ardent embodiment in Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the thoroughly politicized Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP’s leadership backed the Conservative Party in a previous successful election campaign.

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The Immunity from Prosecution Extended to Those at the Top of the Feeding Chain of Criminality

The criminal behaviour of Canada’s top politicians inside and outside the police has been much in our country’s news reporting of late. The Harper government is currently in the midst of an unfolding scandal with new revelations emerging periodically that that the prime minister’s Conservative Party broke many laws many times during the last federal election. Much of the fraud entailed elaborate schemes of targeted vote suppression requiring expertise and software passed to Conservative Party operatives by their top handlers in and around the Republic Party of the United States. The Washington-based party of the elephant is the real headquarters of the branch plant operations that made Harper and his cabal the chief Canadian holders of the Bush-Cheney franchise.

There is much that is significant in the former V-P’s decision to remain imprisoned in his own country, increasingly a military dictatorship disguised as a republic after several decades during which Cheney together with Donald Rumsfeld planned and subsequently implemented after 9/11 an emergency measures regime known as Continuity of Government. Cheney’s retreat from international travel follows George Bush’s decision a year ago not to make the journey to Switzerland where he might have been arrested for his now self-confessed ordering of torture in the penal colonies under the control of the US government and its mercenary contractors.

The principle that states should not shield those government officials who order the most egregious international crimes goes back at least to the international hearings at Nuremberg and Tokyo after the Second World War. After bold beginnings, both juridical processes were essentially sabotaged so that industrialists and financiers who had played instrumental roles in building up the war machines of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan could be enlisted to lead the capitalist containment of the Soviet empire on both its eastern and western flanks.

The Nuremberg Principles and other international laws went almost completely unenforced during the Cold War. Instruments such as the UN’s Conventions on genocide and on torture were deployed polemically but all the rhetoric could not disguise the fact that the abundant legal protections extended to capital during the period were not replicated in protecting people from many violent outbursts of state-directed international crime. This failure of enforcement made it clear that there is nothing remotely resembling a genuine rule of law at the high end of the scale of international criminality.

Then at the end of the Cold War the statutes on international crime were dusted off and exploited to justify various cynical applications of one-sided victors’ justice aimed at punishing the defeated side in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq. The spectacle of the International Criminal Court focusing only on African agents of various Anglo-American-Israeli, Chinese and French crime cartels only adds to the realization that the rule of law is a sad hoax; that the immunity from prosecution extended to Dick Cheney and others of his ilk demonstrates that politics prevails over statute when it comes to dealing with the highest levels of transnational organized crime.

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Cheney and Bush on 9/11

The main operatives of the top-level crime syndicates do their dirty work from sites of impunity located throughout the corporate structure of national security state and its attending war machine. The crime dons operate in the banks clustered around the kleptocratic Federal Reserve cartel. They operate and in many media agencies where techniques of propaganda are deployed every day to continue the cover up of the lies and crimes of 9/11 in which Dick Cheney and Benjamin Netanyahu are deeply implicated.

Cheney’s ailing heart has already stopped beating. He has no pulse. Instead Cheney’s blood is pushed along in a steady flow by a ventricular assisting device. Before Cheney’s doctors get to the last of their deep bag of expensive medical tricks necessary to keep the former V-P alive, we need to get Cheney’s testimony under oath on the public record to make sense of seriously conflicting accounts about what he did or did not do on the morning of 9/11.

We need especially hard evidence on Cheney’s central role in the fiasco of conflicting accounts of what did or did not happen at the Pentagon. Investigators need to question Cheney under oath about the nature of the Vice-President’s advice to the Commander-In-Chief when Bush’s Air Force One was dealing with threats emanating from sources with access to top secret White House communications codes. What happened between Cheney and Bush when Cheney was in the military command centre in the bunker under the White House and when George Bush was in Florida reading goat stories to students? What does Dick Cheney know about in the coded threats to Air Force One on 9/11? Was he a party to those threats? What was the former V-P’s counsel to the president during the hours that Cheney took over the controls of the world’s preeminent military system during its darkest hours since the War of 1812?

The ongoing crimes entailed in defrauding the public and shielding the real protagonists of 9/11 from prosecution form a necessary part of the campaign to continue the systematic toxification of the mental environment. The aim of this toxic psychological operation is to inculcate in media audiences the emotion of hatred towards whole populations of Arab, Persian and Islamic peoples. The purposeful stimulation by media cartels of these impulses of prejudiced discrimination helps to dehumanize future victims in public perception and thereby lessen public opposition to the expanding and increasingly lethal military activities of the Anglo-American-Israeli-NATO war machine.

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Cheney’s Decision to Stay Locked Up at Home Will Have a Rippling Effect in the International Community

Barack Obama is currently the enslaved CEO of Murder Inc., a many-faceted instrument of mass destruction that Dwight Eisenhower once quaintly dubbed the military-industrial complex. The evidence is growing that this pretty-faced, smooth-talking politician now in the White House is especially subject to various forms of intimidation, bribery and blackmail that compel him to continue and expand the saga of military adventurism ramped up in Eurasia by the Cheney-Bush racketeers. What other explanation can there be of the vast distance between what Obama seemed to promise when he came into the US presidency and what he delivered once he and his cronies took over the levers of power in the US executive branch, by far the most corrupt, overreaching and dangerous polity on the planet?

In spite of all the corruption and criminality at the top, however, little by little our transnational citizens’ initiative has been gathering force to hold accountable those that violate the provisions of international criminal law as often mirrored in the domestic legislation of particular countries. The decision of Dick Cheney to avoid a similar kind of reckoning to the one he faced from citizen jurists gathered at the Vancouver Club last September is a significant marker that our global movement is making headway, even in the western Canadian political base of the Bushite franchise holder, Stephen Harper.

Cheney’s decision to stay locked up at home will have a cascading affect on others in similar boats. Those with records of deep involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace will have cause to anticipate that even when corrupt governments conspire to protect them in their transborder movements, informed and conscientious citizens might intervene. We the people, we the global citizens of conscience have become something of an international wild card. More and more global citizens in all countries can be counted on to follow our example in, for instance, Calgary and Vancouver; to act proactively on behalf of a more decent, equal and law-abiding world.

The movement to make international law prevail over lawlessness picked up momentum in 1998 when some maverick jurists in Spain and Great Britain tried to hold General Augusto Pinochet legally accountable for his reign of terror in Chile. This US-backed fascist dictator made thousands of his opponents disappear even as Pinochet’s Chile was set up was as the poster regime of Milton Friedman’s Chicago school of laissez-faire political economy.

Cheney’s decision to throw in his prayer beads when it comes to evangelizing Canadians to adopt his doctrine of hatred and warring violence towards Arab, Persian, and Muslim peoples will have a multiplier effect in the international community. I think some of us in Canada are entitled to take a bow for our hard work in the step-by-step project of building up the critical mass of informed activism that led up to our stand at the Vancouver Club, an event whose international significance is now marked in Cheney’s decision not to travel to Toronto.

The power of our stance in Vancouver was buttressed by the interventions of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch who made it clear that the upper echelon of the Bush-Cheney regime fit all the criteria of credibly-accused criminals. This awkward term, “credibly accused,” will have to prevail until those in the Anglo-American-Israeli-NATO criminal cabal are brought to justice. Unlike the Cheney-Bush treatment of those they targeted as so-called unlawful enemy combatants, the credibly-accused members of the dominant military apparatus on the planet should be afforded fair trials conducted in the full light of day. They should have every opportunity to put forward the best defense they can muster.

I am particularly interested to hear their arguments of self-defence, ones that I anticipate will afford centrality to the official cover story of 9/11. This anticipation should help explain why so many millions of us have come to the same conclusion that the lies and crimes of 9/11 must be exposed; that they must be replaced with evidence-based explanations of what really happened.

Recognition and Thanks

In Canada the Arrest Cheney-Bush movement was given steady and persistent leadership by Gail Davidson. She kept the momentum going of Lawyers Against War during the transition when too many in her profession were enticed to replicate Barack Obama’s self-serving case of amnesia as he pretended not to see the massive evidence of criminality swirling around the White House as the new president took control of the levers of office.

A cynic would say that Obama wanted to maintain the force of the precedents enabling him to ignore any existing legal constraints on the urge for further global aggrandizement of presidential powers, but especially in the chief executive’s capacity of US Commander-In-Chief. In 2004 Lawyers Against War was formed to try to pressure Crown officials in Canada to press criminal charges on President Bush when he came to Canada to confer with the then-Leader of the Opposition, Stephen Harper. Gail Davidson and LAW worked closely with us in 2009 as we prepared for George Bush’s speaking engagement in Calgary.

Mohawk activist Splitting The Sky upped the ante in Calgary when he attempted to deliver a citizen’s warrant on the former US president after it became clear that law enforcement officials in Canada would not do their job. Cynthia McKinney, Ramsay Clark, Steve Poole, Carol Brouillet and Kevin Barrett were prominent among those who joined us in our efforts to use the trial of STS to draw attention to the underlying issues beneath the effort of Canadian authorities to criminalize a true patriot who took ameliorative action to bring Canada in line with the highest order of law. For STS this highest law is the Great Law of the Longhouse Confederacy whose original five nations aligned themselves around the Great White Pine of Peace.

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Prof. Michael Chossudovsky and Michael Pengue together with other members of the 9/11 Truth group in Montreal worked closely with us as well, hosting an event in their hometown where Splitting The Sky and I held forth. Professor Chossudovsky hosted many of our videos and articles on his important web site, Global Research.ca.

Bush has spoken in a number of Canadian cities. At every venue he has been met with hundreds of activists who demanded that the former US president be arrested. I followed in particular the organizing work of Sandra Finley and Peter Garden. They helped set in motion the Arrest Bush event in Saskatoon. One of the participants in the proceedings in Saskatoon was Joshua Blakeney whose many contributions to the issues being addressed here merit particular recognition and praise.

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Joshua, who is rightfully seen as one of the rising stars of political commentary at VT and Press TV, made a series of You Tubes on our Calgary actions entitled “Arresting Impunity.” His video output on this subject and related events has been prolific as have been his many writings concerning the trial we dubbed Splitting The Sky versus George W. Bush. Joshua was front and centre in the two events in Surrey BC, the first to build up awareness of Bush’s impending visit and the second when Bush was actually on the ground. Joshua also played a prominent part in the demonstrations at the Palliser Hotel in Calgary. This demonstration helped show Dick Cheney he was no more welcome in the Albertan capital of Texas North than he was in Vancouver. We are legion. We are everywhere.

In our efforts in British Columbia we have worked closely with members of Vancouver’s 9/11 Truth group including Darren Pearson, Travis Ball, James Macdonald, Carl Chaplin and Kevin Kelso. All have been involved as active participants in the Occupy Vancouver whose tent encampment in 2011 was on the grounds of the main municipal art gallery. Prominent among the Occupy Calgary cohort that includes Joshua and I is Tavis Ford who I first met as one of the organizers of the Arrest Bush action at the Telus Convention Centre where the former US president made his first public presentation as a regular citizen, supposedly without diplomatic immunity.

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Summing Up

One of the reoccurring memes in the media coverage of the Arrest Cheney-Bush movement in Canada is that the various protests were mere expressions of dislike towards the former US president and vice-president. Again and again media reports failed to explain clearly the true dynamic of the actions, which was to put pressure on law enforcement officials to do their job, to uphold domestic and international law when it comes to responding to the highest order of international crime. This meme of misrepresentation was repeated in the many flawed and dishonest reports of the events in Vancouver that caused Dick Cheney to back off his commitment to go to Toronto; to stay locked up instead in his gated enclosure. How much longer do we have to get Cheney on the stand to face an array of charges for crimes that are so serious that they affect and shame all humanity?

See Also:

• “Cheney in the Bunker, Cheney in Canada“
• “Citizen’s Arrest of War Criminals Tony Blair and George Bush“
• “Should George W. Bush Be Arrested in Calgary, Alberta and Be Tried for International Crimes”

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Anthony James Hall

Anthony Hall is a Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada where he has taught for 25 years. Along with Kevin Barrett, Tony is co-host of False Flag Weekly News at No Lies Radio Network. Prof. Hall is also Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune. His recent books include The American Empire and the Fourth World as well as Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism. Both are peered reviewed academic texts published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Prof. Hall is a contributor to both books edited by Dr. Barrett on the two false flag shootings in Paris in 2015.

PART I
The American Empire and the Fourth World: The Bowl with One Spoon, Part One (McGill-Queen’s Native and Northern)

PART II
Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism: The Bowl with One Spoon (Mcgill-Queen’s Native and Northern Series)

Part II was selected by The Independent in the UK as one of the best books of 2010. The journal of the American Library Association called Earth into Property “a scholarly tour de force.”

One of the book’s features is to set 9/11 and the 9/11 Wars in the context of global history since 1492.