Dick Cheney Lies About His Undisclosed Location

A little advice to Dick Cheney: if you're going to lie, make sure it's nothing that can be uncovered.

Not so in the memoirs of the former vice-president, who, the Washington Post reports

notes that he was “surprised by the intensity of the media interest” in the “undisclosed location” where he was sometimes reported to be, mentioning a “Saturday Night Live” skit that imagined him in a cave in Afghanistan.

But, he writes, the “undisclosed location” was the more mundane Vice President’s Residence, his home in Wyoming and, most often, Camp David.

But it wasn't Wyoming and it wasn't Camp David, though very close to the latter. From a July 15, 2009 post entitled "Not Quite Undisclosed" on this site:

On December 16, 2001, Dennis Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote

Three hours after Osama bin Laden turned the Pentagon into a broken rectangle, five helicopters touched down a few hundred yards from Hal Neill's house at the base of Raven Rock Mountain along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.

Within minutes, a convoy of SUVs with black-tinted windows zoomed up Harbaugh Valley Road, turned left, and deposited the weight of the free world inside Site R, the inexplicably named city-in-a-mountain from which the Pentagon has operated and, from all indications Vice President Dick Cheney has directed his office in the days since the Sept. 11 attacks.

But.if you do a google search under "undisclosed location wikepedia," you'll find, as the second entry, "Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." The wikipedia entry on Blue Ridge Summit notes that is the location of Vice President Cheney's "undisclosed location," crediting this article as appearing in the Boston Globe on July 20, 2004. More specifically, the piece was written for Knight-Ridder by Steve Goldstein and appeared in not only the Boston Globe, but also The Philadelphia Inquirer and probably elsewhere. Goldstein visited the site, dubbed "the underground Pentagon" by "government insiders," and explained

The location is a highly secure complex of buildings inside Raven Rock Mountain near Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., close to the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line and about seven miles north of Camp David.

A recent book, "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies," by James Bamford, was credited with spilling the beans about the supposedly supersecret hideaway....

Site R -- also known as Raven Rock or the Alternate Joint Communications Center -- is a 53-year-old facility conceived at the start of the Cold War as an alternate command center in the event of nuclear war or an attack on Washington.

Sloping, round-humped Raven Rock Mountain sprouts a thicket of antennae, satellite dishes, and a microwave tower. From state Route 16, the main road that passes the mountain, two oversize metal doors in the hillside are visible through the heavy foliage giving it that Fortress of Solitude touch.

Bamford, Roddy, Goldstein, and maybe a few others performed their job and disclosed the "undisclosed location." To all others, including the Washington Post, it has been a punchline good for a snicker here and there. But the undisclosed location is in fact disclosed

Share|