Yesterday’s jaw-dropping profile on Dick Cheney in the Washington Post was just the first in a four-part series. Today, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker add to the story by explaining how Cheney and his team were responsible for the U.S. torture policies.
The vice president’s lawyer advocated what was considered the memo’s most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to “commit torture,” that passage stated, “do not apply” to the commander in chief, because Congress “may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”
That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA — including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.
This, I’m afraid, is what passes for restraint in Dick “4th Branch” Cheney’s office.
Where, exactly, was the rest of the White House in the midst of Cheney’s radical power grab? Well, it appears that the president was blissfully ignorant, signing off on whatever Cheney put in front of him. There were several members of the president’s team, however, that had serious problems with Cheney’s policies, but lacked the will to stand up to him directly.
On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.
Rice “very angrily said there would be no more secret opinions on international and national security law,” the official said, adding that she threatened to take the matter to the president if Gonzales kept them out of the loop again. Powell remarked admiringly, as they emerged, that Rice dressed down the president’s lawyer “in full Nurse Ratched mode,” a reference to the ward chief of a mental hospital in the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Neither of them took their objections to Cheney, the official said, a much more dangerous course.
Sure, Gonzales was a useless sheep who did what Cheney told him to do, but Rice and Powell aren’t exactly going to win any Profiles in Courage awards for avoiding the Office of Vice President. They saw what was going on, knew it was indefensible, and decided to take action … by reading Gonzales the riot act? They might have made some progress if they threatened to resign. Or perhaps confronted Cheney directly. They didn’t.
In the big picture, however, there’s a certain irony in Cheney’s plans backfiring.
“The irony with the Cheney crowd pushing the envelope on presidential power is that the president has now ended up with lesser powers than he would have had if they had made less extravagant, monarchical claims,” said Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan.
It’s an important point. As Anonymous Liberal explained, “The legal positions that Cheney demanded the administration take were so audacious and unsupportable that they essentially forced the courts to step in and rebuke the administration, thereby creating important legal precedents in areas where none previously existed. Had the administration adopted positions that were aggressive but not insane, the courts would likely have been more deferential.”
Of course, Cheney’s desire to push the legal envelope well beyond the breaking point caused him to lose all perspective, if he ever had it to begin with. The costs of this crusade have been enormous — for Cheney and the rest of us.