Also says President Bush has no need to apologize on financial crisis

Washington - Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. "I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis.

"I don't think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney said.

Yesterday, was the first day of the 111th Congress. For the first time since the November elections, members of Congress returned to the Hill, and newly elected officials were sworn in with pomp and circumstance, with their families in tow. What a proud moment for them, especially the recently minted democrats who rode the wave of national discontent with the republican party. The halls of the Dirksen, Russell and Hart Buildings were freshly scrubbed, and bustling with food, people, and new furniture.

However, gathering a few blocks away were anti-war activists determined to rain on their parade by reminding these partygoers that there are wars happening, with lots of death and destruction, compliments of Congressional funding and complicity. The "March of the Dead", created by the group "Activist Response Team" or ART, sent out a call for all those with a conscience to show up on January 6th in D.C. to wear a mask and carry the name of someone killed in illegal wars and occupations.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy ... who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war ... we are appalled."

Millions of Americans face home foreclosures, health care, job and pension losses. However, none of these crises currently threatens to alter the flow of their tax dollars to Israel's government. It takes these greenbacks and buys F-16 jets made by Lockheed Martin to drop bombs on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

This aggression is an effect of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Take about a Goliath-like edifice. Consider what euphemistically goes by the term of the U.S. defense lobby. It contributed $10.5 billion to donkeys and elephants in the 2007-2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. "Lockheed Martin is the industry's top campaign contributor," the CRP adds.

A UN convoy attacked, the Red Cross blocked and harassed, international journalists blocked in the apparent vain attempt to hide all the murders, dead men, women and children in the roads, all at the hands of the IDF. The list goes on and on. I hope this is all being carefully recorded to present to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague.