When Cheney recently said that Iran will face "meaningful consequences" if it persists with its nuclear program, it rang a bell.
Here are a few quotes involving the Bush administration and Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash 11 days before the 2002 elections.
Six months before WellStone's death, an article in The Nation magazine reported:
Paul Wellstone is a hunted man. Minnesota's senior senator is not just another Democrat on White House political czar Karl Rove's target list, in an election year when the Senate balance of power could be decided by the voters of a single state. Rather, getting rid of Wellstone is a passion for Rove, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and the special-interest lobbies that fund the most sophisticated political operation ever assembled by a presidential administration. "There are people in the White House who wake up in the morning thinking about how they will defeat Paul Wellstone," a senior Republican aide confides. "This one is political and personal for them."
A few days before his death, at a meeting with war veterans, Wellstone said that Cheney had told him:
"If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota."
The day after his death, Michael Ruppert reported:
The day after the crash I received a message from a former CIA operative who has proven extremely reliable in the past and who is personally familiar with these kinds of assassinations. The message read, "As I said earlier, having played ball (and still playing in some respects) with this current crop of reinvigorated old white men, these clowns are nobody to screw around with. There will be a few more strategic accidents. You can be certain of that."
There are plenty of other reasons to think that Wellstone's death was an assassination - or perhaps more accurately, a mob style hit, disguised as a plane crash. A good starting point for looking into this is here.
"Severe ramifications" - When Cheney said Iran will face "meaningful consequences", what it had reminded me of was his warning to Wellstone: "There will be severe ramifications".
Reading about this, even after seeing the brutality in Iraq, even after realizing that Cheney and Rumsfeld were key participants in 9/11, was eye-opening. This was not a detached operation involving the deaths of unknown people. This was a cold blooded, and yet personal, murder. This was someone who had crossed them too many times and had to be eliminated.
At that point I understood just how incredibly like the mafia this gang really is. They are not "conservative politicians". They are a criminal organization.
