What you might call a fringe group – global conspiracy prophets are fringe, right? – have uploaded an obscure video from 1994, where then former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney defended the decision not to invade Iraq following the Gulf War (a decision which, if you remember in fairness, broke poor Al Gore’s heart).

Though it may be easy to dismiss a group called "Grand Theft Country," whose primary goal it is to prevent future state-sponsored terrorist attacks (9/11 being the first one) while exposing media cover-ups and global-fascist alliances, this is the very group that has unmasked Vice President Cheney as a man who abandoned previous (and prophetic) insights.

In the video, produced by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Cheney predicts invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein would be "a quagmire" the US wouldn’t be interested in navigating.

Cheney focused on the consequences of taking over Iraq, and the delicate balance of power there that would be obliterated by religio-political factions as they divvied up the ruins.

And then there’s this little nugget at the end, regarding George H.W. Bush’s decision not to invade:

And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?

Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

So, apparently, there was a change of heart, one that wasn’t (hasn’t been) sufficiently addressed in the past six years in the media – a good time to bring that up might have been, say, the 2004 election.

I’m not going to walk out on that limb with Grand Theft Country and point to a global-fascist conspiracy with Arab-terrorist pawns and complete media control, but I will concede they’ve made a point nicely, and that point will be tested if and when the rest of the media, which will report on YouTube videos of every other (read: unimportant) stripe, picks up this gem.

It also underscores the power and importance of YouTube, sites like it, and citizen journalism, while reminding us why  the First Amendment to the US Constitution included the Press in its protection, and why consolidated media might not be the best idea we’ve had in the past 200 years.    

Hat tip to Editor and Publisher.

Palfrey turned over phone records to the court after federal prosecutors came down on her hard with racketeering charges associated with an escort service she ran between 1993 and 2006. She says she turned over the records in order to find corroborators of her story that her escort services entailed nothing illegal, just sexual fantasies.

Right. Just like Bill never inhaled.

That’s what she says, anyway, but we all know it’s more along the lines of: If the government wants to take me down, I’m taking it down with me!

And already, the hypocrites are coming out of the woodwork. The biggest news was about Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter, who ran a "family values" campaign. He spilled his guts about patronizing Palfrey’s escort service before he ran for office before his name was even mentioned by anyone.

Vitter obviously missed Rule #1 of the Political Crisis Handbook: Deny, deny, deny.

Two other high-ranking officials were identified, just to prove her point that this went up to the highest levels of government: Randall Tobias, a deputy secretary of state who resigned after the press let him know he’d been found out; and Harlan Ullman, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and one of the principle architects of the famed "shock and awe" campaigns.

There’s even talk out there Vice President Cheney could implicated for "entertaining" Halliburton clients while he was CEO. But that’s just talk on the street.

At any rate, anybody with an Internet connection can dig through the phone records online. Dcphonelist.com supplies the search engine to check to see if a phone number you know is in that list.

Happy hunting.