Gold9472
09-09-2006, 11:33 PM
Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10cheney.html?ex=1315540800&en=af5a4757f4db1194&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
http://www.yourbbsucks.com/forum/kickfascist.gif
(Gold9472: What a joke.)
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 10, 2006
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — From those first moments five years ago when Secret Service agents burst into Vice President Dick Cheney’s office on Sept. 11, lifted him off his feet and propelled him to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the man who had returned to Washington that year to remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable.
Within minutes, Mr. Cheney was directing the government’s response to an attack that was still under way. Within weeks, he was overseeing the surveillance program that tracked suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States without warrants. Within months, he and his staff, guided by a loyal aide, David S. Addington, were championing the reinterpretation of the rules of war so that they could detain “enemy combatants” and interrogate them at secret detention facilities run by the C.I.A. around the world.
It was Mr. Cheney and his staff who helped shape the rules under which members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and would be tried by “military commissions” at Guantánamo Bay — if they faced trial at all.
“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,” Mr. Cheney said in December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman. “You know,” he added, “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”
But as the nation observes the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for detention, interrogation and domestic spying.
On Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Cheney sat silently as President Bush urged Congress to restore to him the powers, stripped away by the Supreme Court in a 5-to-3 ruling in June, to create military commissions and define the precise meaning of the Geneva Conventions when it comes to interrogations.
There is little question that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney still share the goal of expanding the power of the presidency: legislation they have sent to Congress would essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five years.
But they have been stymied in their effort to simply assert those powers and carry them out with minimal oversight, as part of Mr. Cheney’s declared goal to restore to the presidency an authority that he believed was dangerously eroded after Vietnam and Watergate.
On national security issues, Mr. Cheney, once the unchallenged adviser to a president who came to office with little experience in foreign affairs, remains a pivotal figure but now vies for influence with other officials like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser. Over the past 18 months, Mr. Cheney appears to have reluctantly given ground on detention practices and, at least for now, on policy disputes involving Iran and North Korea.
On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee — controlled by Mr. Cheney’s Republican allies — declared that there had been no basis for Mr. Cheney’s repeated claims that Saddam Hussein had harbored a Qaeda leader and had ties to the group. But Mr. Cheney has never conceded that his statement was in error.
His prediction in 2002 that overthrowing Mr. Hussein would force radical extremists “to rethink their strategy of jihad” proved wrong, as Mr. Bush implicitly acknowledged last week when he described how the array of enemies facing America has multiplied. Mr. Cheney’s friends and former aides said they were mystified about how the same man who as defense secretary in 1991 warned that “for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire” managed, 15 years later, to find himself facing that prospect.
A Waning Influence
Measuring the accumulation or the erosion of power is an imprecise art. But interviews with more than 45 people over the past five months — including current and former White House aides, foreign diplomats, members of Congress and confidants of Mr. Cheney — painted a picture of a vice president who, while still influential, has seen his power wane.
Most agreed to speak candidly only if their names were not used. Mr. Cheney himself declined repeated requests for an interview. Instead, his office encouraged Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley to give interviews to dispute the view that Mr. Cheney’s power is in decline.
Mr. Hadley said the vice president “is often the first to insist that the president hear a variety of views” and argued that reports of his powers in the first term were always exaggerated. “It’s the president who creates the foreign policy around here,” Mr. Hadley said, “not some hidden hand.”
Ms. Rice disputed the view that she had supplanted Mr. Cheney, pointing out that he still had one-on-one lunches with Mr. Bush where he could make his views known “in his quiet way.”
Mr. Cheney’s defenders said that over the summer he was among the strongest voices arguing within the White House that the United States had to give Israel as much time as possible to strike a decisive blow against Hezbollah.
But those same insiders said that in retrospect Mr. Cheney’s power was at its peak in 2003 and 2004, before Iraq’s insurgency flared, before the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, before the setbacks in Congress and at the Supreme Court.
Without the help of his closest adviser, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who resigned last fall after his indictment in the Central Intelligence Agency leak case, Mr. Cheney has lost the early warning radar that gave him and his staff such command over the federal bureaucracy. Administration insiders said Mr. Cheney and his aides were now having to fight to maintain positions that a few years ago he would have won handily.
“During the first term, Cheney was considered one of the smartest guys in the administration,” said Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois. “But his influence has been diminished because of the Scooter Libby thing and because the war in Iraq has not gone well.”
In his second term, Mr. Bush has grown less dependent on Mr. Cheney for information, current and former officials said. When Joshua B. Bolten became the White House chief of staff earlier this year, he told associates that he wanted to make sure the president heard from more voices. “My impression is that there are a lot more data points or gathering points now,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota.
For instance, Mr. Bush has turned to another Washington insider, James A. Baker III, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state, for help as the co-chairman of an outside group developing options for dealing with Iraq. One group member said, “You get the sense that the president now realizes, perhaps a little late, that he needs Baker to find him an exit door.”
Mr. Cheney told NBC News in May that his influence with Mr. Bush was unchanged. “I feel like he gives me the access that I need to be able to do my job,” Mr. Cheney said, adding later: “I give him the best advice I can. He doesn’t always agree. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t.”
End Part I
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10cheney.html?ex=1315540800&en=af5a4757f4db1194&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
http://www.yourbbsucks.com/forum/kickfascist.gif
(Gold9472: What a joke.)
By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 10, 2006
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — From those first moments five years ago when Secret Service agents burst into Vice President Dick Cheney’s office on Sept. 11, lifted him off his feet and propelled him to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the man who had returned to Washington that year to remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable.
Within minutes, Mr. Cheney was directing the government’s response to an attack that was still under way. Within weeks, he was overseeing the surveillance program that tracked suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States without warrants. Within months, he and his staff, guided by a loyal aide, David S. Addington, were championing the reinterpretation of the rules of war so that they could detain “enemy combatants” and interrogate them at secret detention facilities run by the C.I.A. around the world.
It was Mr. Cheney and his staff who helped shape the rules under which members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and would be tried by “military commissions” at Guantánamo Bay — if they faced trial at all.
“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,” Mr. Cheney said in December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman. “You know,” he added, “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”
But as the nation observes the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for detention, interrogation and domestic spying.
On Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Cheney sat silently as President Bush urged Congress to restore to him the powers, stripped away by the Supreme Court in a 5-to-3 ruling in June, to create military commissions and define the precise meaning of the Geneva Conventions when it comes to interrogations.
There is little question that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney still share the goal of expanding the power of the presidency: legislation they have sent to Congress would essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five years.
But they have been stymied in their effort to simply assert those powers and carry them out with minimal oversight, as part of Mr. Cheney’s declared goal to restore to the presidency an authority that he believed was dangerously eroded after Vietnam and Watergate.
On national security issues, Mr. Cheney, once the unchallenged adviser to a president who came to office with little experience in foreign affairs, remains a pivotal figure but now vies for influence with other officials like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser. Over the past 18 months, Mr. Cheney appears to have reluctantly given ground on detention practices and, at least for now, on policy disputes involving Iran and North Korea.
On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee — controlled by Mr. Cheney’s Republican allies — declared that there had been no basis for Mr. Cheney’s repeated claims that Saddam Hussein had harbored a Qaeda leader and had ties to the group. But Mr. Cheney has never conceded that his statement was in error.
His prediction in 2002 that overthrowing Mr. Hussein would force radical extremists “to rethink their strategy of jihad” proved wrong, as Mr. Bush implicitly acknowledged last week when he described how the array of enemies facing America has multiplied. Mr. Cheney’s friends and former aides said they were mystified about how the same man who as defense secretary in 1991 warned that “for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire” managed, 15 years later, to find himself facing that prospect.
A Waning Influence
Measuring the accumulation or the erosion of power is an imprecise art. But interviews with more than 45 people over the past five months — including current and former White House aides, foreign diplomats, members of Congress and confidants of Mr. Cheney — painted a picture of a vice president who, while still influential, has seen his power wane.
Most agreed to speak candidly only if their names were not used. Mr. Cheney himself declined repeated requests for an interview. Instead, his office encouraged Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley to give interviews to dispute the view that Mr. Cheney’s power is in decline.
Mr. Hadley said the vice president “is often the first to insist that the president hear a variety of views” and argued that reports of his powers in the first term were always exaggerated. “It’s the president who creates the foreign policy around here,” Mr. Hadley said, “not some hidden hand.”
Ms. Rice disputed the view that she had supplanted Mr. Cheney, pointing out that he still had one-on-one lunches with Mr. Bush where he could make his views known “in his quiet way.”
Mr. Cheney’s defenders said that over the summer he was among the strongest voices arguing within the White House that the United States had to give Israel as much time as possible to strike a decisive blow against Hezbollah.
But those same insiders said that in retrospect Mr. Cheney’s power was at its peak in 2003 and 2004, before Iraq’s insurgency flared, before the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, before the setbacks in Congress and at the Supreme Court.
Without the help of his closest adviser, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who resigned last fall after his indictment in the Central Intelligence Agency leak case, Mr. Cheney has lost the early warning radar that gave him and his staff such command over the federal bureaucracy. Administration insiders said Mr. Cheney and his aides were now having to fight to maintain positions that a few years ago he would have won handily.
“During the first term, Cheney was considered one of the smartest guys in the administration,” said Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois. “But his influence has been diminished because of the Scooter Libby thing and because the war in Iraq has not gone well.”
In his second term, Mr. Bush has grown less dependent on Mr. Cheney for information, current and former officials said. When Joshua B. Bolten became the White House chief of staff earlier this year, he told associates that he wanted to make sure the president heard from more voices. “My impression is that there are a lot more data points or gathering points now,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota.
For instance, Mr. Bush has turned to another Washington insider, James A. Baker III, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state, for help as the co-chairman of an outside group developing options for dealing with Iraq. One group member said, “You get the sense that the president now realizes, perhaps a little late, that he needs Baker to find him an exit door.”
Mr. Cheney told NBC News in May that his influence with Mr. Bush was unchanged. “I feel like he gives me the access that I need to be able to do my job,” Mr. Cheney said, adding later: “I give him the best advice I can. He doesn’t always agree. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t.”
End Part I