Overcast and chilly this afternoon here on California’s north coast — the fog was way-thick earlier, but now ever so often sunshine peeks through the mists, so all’s not too bad.

What’s real bad is that oil spill down in Santa Barbara, and Dick Cheney.

Seems The Dick figured wrong, right when it really counted (via The Intercept): ‘When presented with an actual terror threat — the one that turned into the 9/11 attacks — Cheney thought al Qaeda was bluffing.’

(Illustration found here).

This nugget comes from “The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism — From al Qa’ida to ISIS,” by Mike Morell, former acting CIA director and one of George W’s intel briefers in the lead-up to the war. He writes, ‘The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida — purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response.’
Jon Schwarz continues at The Intercept:

According to Morell, who was then in charge of the daily presidential intelligence briefing, the CIA felt they then needed to produce a report titled “UBL [Usama bin Laden] Threats Are Real.”
UBL Threats Are Real.
Take a minute and think about that.
Think about what would have happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 if Americans had known that had been Cheney’s attitude just a few months before.
Think about how, if he’d been a Democrat, that would have defined liberals as weak, cowardly children for the next 50 years.
So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil.
He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went.

Well, that last graph did get a bit grisly. However, since Jeb Bush’s dazzling political footwork last week, a lot of grisly Cheney-George W-Iraqi-lying stories have been produced — lying, scheming assholes require it
In the sense of the brief, Lou Dubose yesterday at the Washington Spectator with a corresponding Cheney shit-nugget:

When Jake Bernstein and I were working on Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, we interviewed CIA sources and a retired CIA analyst who described some of the cooking that Cheney did to create the intelligence he needed to justify the United States military destroying a sovereign nation that represented no threat to our national interest.
Cheney’s conduct regarding the CIA was unprecedented and unprincipled.
And probably illegal.
The CIA is the only federal agency that makes daily house calls to the White House, sending briefers to deliver what’s called the President’s Daily Briefing, a closely guarded report available to six or seven people at the top of the administration.
The briefers develop working relationships with their principals, and at times are sent back to look at the “raw traffic” for additional information.
Unhappy with the intelligence his briefer was providing, Cheney fired him.
“I’ve never heard of a briefer being fired,” a former agency analyst told me.
“It’s unprecedented.”
Never a slave to precedent, Cheney fired a second briefer when the intelligence on Iraq was unsatisfactory.

The Dick was a dick starting a war.
And Paul Waldman at The Week, also yesterday, on the lies intentionally produced to create a nightmare. A good read — some snips:

Here’s the problem, though.
It might be possible, with some incredibly narrow definition of the word “lie,” to say that Bush told only a few outright lies on Iraq.
Most of what he said in order to sell the public on the war could be said to have some basis in something somebody thought or something somebody alleged (Bush was slightly more careful than Dick Cheney, who lied without hesitation or remorse).
But if we reduce the question of Bush’s guilt and responsibility to how many lies we can count, we miss the bigger picture.
What the Bush administration launched in 2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history.
Spend too much time in the weeds, and you risk missing the hysterical tenor of the whole campaign.
…
The intelligence wasn’t “mistaken,” as the Bush administration’s defenders would have us believe today.
The intelligence was a mass of contradictions and differing interpretations.
The administration picked out the parts that they wanted — supported, unsupported, plausible, absurd, it didn’t matter — and used them in their campaign to turn up Americans’ fear.

The catch — it worked. And here we are today — the real horror is the widening ISIS Iraqi-holocaust. The loss of Ramadi in Anbar province this week has finally forced the Obama Administration to face-up
From McClatchy this morning:

For one thing, the official said, the Islamic State is an enemy like no other, with an estimated 22,000 fighters from 100 countries — twice as big as and far more diverse than the forces that flooded Afghanistan over a decade to battle the Soviet Union there.
The Islamic State is also “better in every respect” than its precursor, al Qaida in Iraq, the official said, noting that the Ramadi campaign involved around 30 suicide car bombers, including 10 that each packed explosive power akin to the bomb that devastated the federal building in Oklahoma City 20 years ago.
“Nobody is kidding themselves about what ISIL was able to pull off last week,” the official said, using the government’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State.

George W., The Dick and company created the environment for this monster…
No, Osama wasn’t bluffing, either, he probably figured liars tended to over-react.