Legacy of the Big Dick

Mark Danner has an interesting article on Dick Cheney wherein he recounts the movie moment (one of them) in Dubya’s presidency where – if you are to believe Dubya’s memoir – the dunce prince was not even involved in his presidence enough to know that the surveillance order he signed was being resisted by his justice department.

The key passage, I think, is this:

The president had approved Stellar Wind on October 4, 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attack, and given the temper in Washington and in the country at that time he likely could simply and easily have amended the law. “We could have gone to Congress, hat in hand, the judicial branch and the executive together,” Royce Lamberth, then the chief FISA court judge, tells Gellman, “and gotten any statutory change we wanted…. But they wanted to demonstrate that the president’s power was supreme, and the judiciary was just a tagalong when necessary, but not appreciated.” They didn’t want to change the law, that is; they wanted to circumvent it, and so demonstrate that, in the face of the president’s wartime powers, the law didn’t matter.

And I believe that Dick Cheney’s agenda all along was to take the oval office himself at the end of Bush’s second term. But then it all went horribly wrong for him.

Read the article – very interesting, even though some assessments may be questionable. (For instance, he calls Dubya “intelligent” – what does that make every other president? Genius?)

It is an astute point, all the more so for seeming obvious: the unique policies put into effect by Bush and Cheney were not consequences of the September 11 attacks but calculated responses to them. There was nothing fated about Stellar Wind, or “black sites” and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were practiced in them, or Guantánamo and military commissions; these and the other distinctive post–September 11 policies that still cast their shadows over us were born of choices made by government officials and, in the event, by a vanishingly small number of them.

Which makes the secret way our government runs a recipe for disaster. Barton Gellman, quoted by Danner, says Cheney ushered in a new world where the executive proceeded “by rules invented on the fly.” Unfortunately, he’s right.

But the reader is left to puzzle out who exactly Bush is referring to when he writes that “some in the White House” wanted him to let [Deputy Attorney General James] Comey, [FBI Director Robert] Muller, and their colleagues, and perhaps [Attorney General John] Ashcroft himself, resign. Even writing his memoirs years after leaving office Bush is loathe to identify Cheney as the antagonist who almost scuttled his presidency—though had he done so, his account, which portrays an incurious president very much out of touch, might have been less embarrassing to him personally.

Perhaps he’s too clueless to be embarrassed. Or perhaps he thought it better not to be shot in the face.

It goes on still. This is the way of the post–September 11 world, where whistleblowers and news organizations reveal what would have once been considered illegal and then, years later, find themselves “revealing” it yet again, and then again. So it has been with torture and extrajudicial killing and warrantless wiretapping. We might call these frozen scandals, which begin in revelation and white-hot controversy and end with our learning to live with secret wrongdoing that is in fact no secret at all. This is our new normal—and a vital attribute of the world Dick Cheney bequeathed us.