The Secret Service prepares to provide Dick Cheney with six months additional protection at taxpayer expense. I kid you not.
The Secret Service is preparing to provide Vice President Cheney with agents, transportation, advance work and other security-related trappings of executive power for six months after the Bush administration packs up and moves out in January, the agency’s director, Mark Sullivan, told Congress last week. The expected cost: $4 million.
… Extending Cheney’s detail would require a directive from the president or a joint resolution of Congress.
“We believe that it’s a pretty safe bet with the threat environment we face today that Vice President Cheney will be afforded Secret Service protection upon his departure,” Sullivan told the House Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security last week.
Experts say such precautions make sense. The United States is at war abroad and faces the persistent threat of terrorism at home. Cheney, a principal architect of the administration’s foreign and national security policies, has been an unusually high-profile No. 2 — and would remain a target long after his term.
“The critical factor is we are at war,” said William H. Pickle, former Secret Service special agent in charge of the vice presidential division from 1998 to 2001, who said he was speaking based on experience and was not privy to current threat information. “We have an enemy who has sworn to destroy this country, and they have sworn to kill both the president and the vice president. So why in the world would we not protect him? It’s common sense. The government and this country owe the president and vice president, they owe them that safety.”
Where to begin?? The injustice of our broke country paying to protect the architect of our ruin? The fact that Pickle uses the manufactured enemy al Qaeda to justify the expense? The fact that this country owes anything to Bush and Cheney but a speedy trial and life in prison? Who are the ‘experts’ that say this makes sense?
I think if Mr. Cheney wants extra security next year, let him take some of the millions he stole from the American people and pay Blackwater to do it.
This is a no-brainer. Call your congress people and tell them under no circumstances do you want one more cent going to the preservation of Dick Cheney’s life.
Hey, he volunteered to be VP.
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