Democracy? That’s For Sucka MCs, G.
Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.
In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.
Cheney’s proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court — civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed “military commissions.”
“What the hell just happened?” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part.
This would have been a good moment for Mr. Powell to have resigned in protest. I mean, things were obviously not going to get better from here on out. Resigning would have at least spared him the future humiliation of the UN WMD presentation.
The episode was a defining moment in Cheney’s tenure as the 46th vice president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but devoid of formal authority. “Angler,” as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.
In fairness to Cheney: he wouldn’t have to exert so much power if Bush weren’t so stupid:
Bush works most naturally, close observers said, at the level of broad objectives, broadly declared. Cheney, they said, inhabits an operational world in which means are matched with ends and some of the most important choices are made. When particulars rise to presidential notice, Cheney often steers the preparation of options and sits with Bush, in side-by-side wing chairs, as he is briefed.
In other words, Bush can’t understand anything that doesn’t include pictures of fluffy bunnies and cruise missiles, thus leaving Cheney around to do the (very, very) dirty work.
“Angler,” as the Secret Service code-named him
How appropriate…Cheney does look like one of those scary angler fish that swim in the abysses of the Pacific.
A bottom feeder.
Colin Powell resign over an ethical issue? The military custodian who took a mop and slop bucket to the Mai Li massacre?
Why is anyone surprised that Powell was and is a spineless drone?
I read WaPo’s Cheney piece this morning and had to go outside to check the weather. The Post’s neo-wrong management must be on summer holiday already.
As for the piece, of course it’s not much in the way of relevation for anyone who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention. But it serves as a reminder that –as nearly 3000 souls suffered as flesh burned off of bone, dove into concrete salvation or were crushed under the gajillion tonage of bureaucratic ineptitude — these wankers were calling lawyers so that they could circumvent Congress, the courts, the Constitution. Because THEY hate us for our freedoms.
It’s hard to imagine anything more pornographic.
tag
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. If she was so incensed, why didn’t she do something about this? If you asked her, I’m sure she’d say, “No one could have imagined the Vice President was th incarnation of evil!”
Silly Libs, don’t you know Gore secretly ran the Clinton Administration. Quayle ran the Bush Administration, Bush ran the Reagan Administration, and uhm,… shit who the fuck was Carter’s VP?
Anyway CLINTON DID IT TOO!!
If bush works best at the level of “broad objectives” and that’s OK for a president there are probably something like 50 million people in this country qualified to be president.
“Angler”.
Do you think they choose these code names for a particular reason? I mean, here’s an angler fish:
http://fish.jrc.cec.eu.int/fish/impast/angler%20fish.jpg
It’s the stuff of nightmares.
owlbear1…Fritz Mondale, fyi.
shit who the fuck was Carter’s VP?
That’s a damn good question I never thought of before. Without looking it up, I bet not too many people would be able to answer.
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Ummm, Carter’s VP was Mondale. You mighta heard of him.
As for Cheney, I just hope he sees a jail cell before he dies. Humanity as a whole needs the karmic boost it’d provide.
Oops, beaten to it.
If I may offer an admittedly small upside. By actually taking the actions he has taken, putting his name and office behind many crimes, misdemeanors and extra constitutional acts, cheney is the one high-level thug within this criminal administration who may very well face harsh justice. He has run roughshod over people who actually meant well, who believed in the american constitution and the things it stands for, who served government rather than party. And while the risk to them with cheney in office is unacceptably high, the things that will come out shortly after January 2009, and the accompanying documentation may very will result in multiple prosecutions.
Of course, it very well may not happen, and cheney might well not live long enough with his crappy ticker, but it’s at least possible that the government, as a single entity, may well look at the excesses, criminal acts, lies and relentless thuggery and collectively demand “Never Again”…
mikey
From the WAPO article:
Previous accounts have described Cheney’s adrenaline-charged evacuation to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center that morning, a Secret Service agent on each arm. They have not detailed his reaction, 22 minutes later, when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
“There was a groan in the room that I won’t forget, ever,” one witness said. “It seemed like one groan from everyone” — among them Rice; her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley; economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey; counselor Matalin; Cheney’s chief of staff, Libby; and the vice president’s wife.
Cheney made no sound. “I remember turning my head and looking at the vice president, and his expression never changed,” said the witness, reading from a notebook of observations written that day. Cheney closed his eyes against the image for one long, slow blink.
Pretty chilling.
http://icrontic.com/images/prime/articles/psychonauts/psychonauts2.jpg
Sure would be ironic if the next president decided to … “detain” certain high level 2001-2009 administration officials. You know. Just to find out what they know. I”m sure they’d be released before 2030. Maybe. Who knows. Their lawyers sure wouldn’t.
Sounds like Cheney’s actually aced himself out of the Veep’s office by creating a new illegal government branch unsupported by any law.
Call it resignation or secession; either way, he’s inadvertently made impeachment unecessary.
I love Rahm Emmanuel’s proposal to defund the VP’s office. His logic: since the VP thinks he’s not part of the executive branch, then the operating budget for the VP’s office and staff should be yanked out of the executive branch’s budget.
Funnily enough, they all seem to have slighty odd secret service names:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2105301,00.html