He Remade Our World by Mark Danner _ the New York Review of Books

8/12/2019 He Remade Our World by Mark Danner _ the New York Review of Books

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He Remade Our World

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Vice President Dick Cheney and PressSecretary Scott McClellan in the Oval Office,

March 2006

Mark Danner APRIL 3, 2014 ISSUE

Decision Points

by George W. Bush

Broadway, 497 pp., $18.00 (paper)

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

by Barton GellmanPenguin, 493 pp., $18.00 (paper)

The World According to Dick Cheney

a film directed by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton

In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir

by Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney

hreshold, 565 pp., $16.00 (paper)

1.

Why didn’t I know about this? —George W. Bush

Almost exactly a decade ago, Vice

President Dick Cheney greetedPresident George W. Bush onemorning in the Oval Office with thenews that his administration wasabout to implode. Or not quite:Cheney let the president know thatsomething was deeply wrong,though it would take Bush two

more days of increasinglysurprising revelations, and the near mass resignation of his senior Justice Department and law

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enforcement officials, to figure out exactly what it was. “Onthe morning of March 10, 2004,” as the former presidentrecounts the story in his memoirs,

Dick Cheney and Andy Card greeted me with a startlingannouncement: The Terrorist Surveillance Program would

expire at the end of the day.

“How can it possibly end?” I asked. “It’s vital to protectingthe country.”

The Terrorist Surveillance Program, then known to the handfulwho were aware of it only as “the Program” or by its codename, “Stellar Wind,” was a highly secret National SecurityAgency effort—eventually revealed by The New York Times inDecember 2005 and then in much greater detail by former NSAcontractor Edward Snowden last June. Among other things,Stellar Wind empowered the agency to assemble a vastcollection of “metadata,” including on the telephone calls ande-mails of millions of Americans, that its analysts could searchand “mine” for information.

Though the program would appear on its face to violate the

Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence SurveillanceAct of 1978, President Bush had approved it three weeks after the September 11 attacks, securing the signature of AttorneyGeneral John Ashcroft after the fact. To remain in force the program had to be recertified by the president and the attorneygeneral every forty-five days.

And now, two and a half years later, Cheney and White House

chief of staff Andrew Card told Bush, Justice Departmentlawyers “had raised a legal objection to one component of the program.” Unless that “component”—apparently, the sweepingup of Internet metadata—was eliminated or modified, they toldthe president, the lawyers would refuse to certify that the program was legal.

“Why didn’t I know about this?” I asked. Andy shared mydisbelief. He told me he had just learned about theobjection the previous night.

What did the third member of the triumvirate, Vice President



B

Cheney—who had known about the conflict for weeks—say atthis moment? Did he profess to share the disbelief of the president and his chief of staff? Or did he, as so often, saynothing at all? President Bush does not say but as we read hisaccount—a remarkable two-and-a-half-page aria on what the president knew, what he didn’t, and, even as the crisis that

threatened his administration was breaking all around him, whathe still doesn’t—the president’s painfully protracted series of discoveries makes sense only if we assume Dick Cheney’s persistent and stubborn silence.

ush knows he has a crisis on his hands—confronting him witha “decision point,” as the title of his memoirs has it. By hisaccount, before flying off to deliver a speech in Cleveland, the president orders Card and his White House counsel AlbertoGonzales “to work with” the attorney general “to solve the problem.” On his return, however, he finds that “little progresshad been made.”

“Where the hell is Ashcroft?” I asked.

“He’s in the hospital,” Andy replied.

That was news to me.

The second revelation: John Ashcroft has been in intensive carefor nearly a week. Though Ashcroft is the chief lawenforcement officer of the United States—and though it is theattorney general’s signature that is required to recertify Stellar Wind—no one seems to have thought it relevant to tell the

commander in chief. No matter; Bush telephones intensivecare, insists on speaking to the heavily sedated Ashcroft, andtells him he is sending over his chief of staff and White Housecounsel “to talk to him about an urgent matter.” What followsis the famous Hospital Room Showdown, the greatmelodramatic set piece of the Bush administration, whichfeatures, as Barton Gellman describes it in the superb Angler:The Cheney Vice Presidency, “men in their forties and fifties,

stamping on the brakes, abandoning double-parked vehicles,and running up a hospital stairwell as fast as their legs could pump.”



The White House men were clutching the paper they weredetermined to persuade the attorney general to sign, and theJustice Department lawyers, led by James Comey, Ashcroft’sdeputy, were determined to prevent him from signing it. Theyconverged in a hospital room around the IV-festooned body of the ailing attorney general, who “looked half dead.”

Nonetheless, Gellman tells us, in the midst of this coven of lawyers, like some unvanquishable horror movie character,Ashcroft “raised himself up stiffly” off the bed.

He glared at his visitors and said they had no businesscoming. He gave a lucid account of the reasons that Justicehad decided to withhold support. And then he went beyondthat. Ashcroft said he never should have certified the

program.

…If it were up to him now, he would refuse to approve.But it was not up to him. Gesturing at his deputy, Ashcroftsaid, “There is the attorney general.” Spent and pale,Ashcroft sank back down.

In the face of this defiance, the White House chief of staff and

counsel ignore Comey and stride from the room and then race back to the White House where, Bush informs us rather laconically, “they told me Ashcroft hadn’t signed.” Why not?Apparently they didn’t say and the president doesn’t ask.Instead, he decides to overrule the objections of theDepartment of Justice and sign “an order keeping the TSP alive based on my authority as head of the executive branch.”

It is, as will soon become clear, a momentous decision, though

there is no sign he realizes quite how momentous. Still, the president isn’t happy. “I went to bed irritated,” Bush tells us,“and had a feeling I didn’t know the full story.”

The following morning, when Bush arrives at the Oval Office,his chief of staff confirms these suspicions. “Mr. President,”Card tells him, “we’ve got a major problem.”

“Jim Comey is the acting attorney general, and he’s goingto resign…. So are a bunch of other Justice Departmentofficials.”



I was stunned. Nobody had told me that Comey, JohnAshcroft’s deputy, had taken over Ashcroft’sresponsibilities when he went in for surgery.

Revelation Three: it is Comey who is now in charge at Justice.After that morning’s FBI briefing, where Comey is sitting in for

Ashcroft, the president takes the deputy attorney general aside:

I started by explaining that I had an obligation to do whatwas necessary to protect the country…. He explained hisconcerns about the problematic aspect of the program. “I just don’t understand why you are raising this at the lastminute,” I said.

He looked shocked. “Mr. President,” he said, “your staff has known about this for weeks.”

Revelation Four: what Bush had believed, had been led to believe, was a last-minute disagreement was in fact a policyconflict that had been raging for weeks between the WhiteHouse and the Department of Justice. And that is not all:

Then [Comey] dropped another bomb. He wasn’t the only

one planning to resign. So was FBI Director Bob Mueller. Iwas about to witness the largest mass resignation in modern presidential history, and we were in the middle of a war.

“Witness” is, alas, the appropriate word. Bush has finallyreached the innermost Russian doll: a score or more of toplawyers in the Justice Department, including the deputyattorney general and possibly the attorney general himself, and

the director of the FBI, and perhaps other attorneys at the CIAand elsewhere in the national security bureaucracy, are aboutto resign en masse over a secret, highly intrusive, warrantlesssurveillance program less than eight months before Bush willhave to face the voters. And it is all going to happen today— and Bush has up until this moment known nothing about it. Itwill be an enormous scandal with George W. Bush playinghapless witness to his own destruction.

2.

I basically would have let them resign….



—Dick Cheney

Bush, the self-described “decider,” author of Decision Points,knows, he tells us, he has “to make a big decision, and fast.” Hecan agree to modify Stellar Wind as Comey and Ashcroftdemand and thus avert their resignations, and allow it to

continue; but this would mean reversing his decision of the day before, something Bush simply does not do. Or, as “some in theWhite House believed,” he could “stand on my powers under Article II of the Constitution and suffer the walkout.”

Who are these “some in the White House” who go soconspicuously unnamed in Bush’s account? “I had little patience with what I saw happening,” Dick Cheney tells us his

memoirs, In My Time. “The program had been in place morethan two years and the attorney general had approved it sometwenty times.” Speaking to R.J. Cutler for his film The World According to Dick Cheney, the former vice-president is rather more explicit:

I basically would have let them resign because I thoughtthe program was perfectly legitimate, it was totallynecessary, and it had been totally approved and signed upto twenty separate occasions by the Attorney General of the United States….

On its face this argument seems sophistical: Ashcroft, as hesuggested from his hospital bed, had been able to do little if anylegal research or consultation before he first certified the program, and in any event the requirement that it be recertifiedevery forty-five days was meant to allow for reevaluation of it

and the emergency conditions that supposedly required it.Cheney’s refusal to accept the lawyers’ refusal was in effect anadmission that he believed the president hadn’t needed thelawyers to begin with; their approval of the program was somuch decoration draped over the bedrock of the president’s“Article II powers.”

Cheney believed in a “unitary executive,” believed quite

literally that “the executive Power shall be vested in aPresident of the United States of America.” He believed thatthe various post-Watergate hearings of the mid-1970s, theChurch and Pike committees and others—he had watched their



C

progress as the thirty-four-year-old chief of staff in PresidentGerald Ford’s White House—and the laws that had followedtheir exposé—had “neutered” the intelligence agencies, had“put the gloves on,” and that a vital part of the Bushadministration’s post–September 11 mission, his mission, was totake those gloves off.

One of those “gloves” was the Foreign Intelligence SurveillanceAct of 1978—the law Comey and now Ashcroft believed thatStellar Wind’s sweeping warrantless metadata collectionsviolated. The president had approved Stellar Wind on October 4, 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attack, and giventhe temper in Washington and in the country at that time helikely could simply and easily have amended the law. “We

could have gone to Congress, hat in hand, the judicial branchand the executive together,” Royce Lamberth, then the chief FISA court judge, tells Gellman, “and gotten any statutorychange we wanted…. But they wanted to demonstrate that the president’s power was supreme, and the judiciary was just atagalong when necessary, but not appreciated.” They didn’twant 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.

heney and his allies—most prominently the vice-president’sformidable counsel, David Addington—seem to have had asimilar attitude toward the Department of Justice. The lawyersworked for the president; if they forgot that, let them go aheadand resign. Yet in the end the Stellar Wind confrontation—withwhose consequences, in the form of the Snowden revelations,

among other things, we are still living—serves as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of this particular position. Bush himself summarizes it rather eloquently: “I was willing to defend the powers of the presidency under Article II,” he writes in Decision Points, “But not at any cost.”

I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s firing of Watergate

prosecutor Archibald Cox led his attorney general anddeputy attorney general to resign. That was not a historicalcrisis I was eager to replicate. It wouldn’t give me muchsatisfaction to know I was right on the legal principles



while my administration imploded and our key programs inthe war on terror were exposed in the media firestorm thatwould inevitably follow.

This is the mundane, pragmatic truth. Such a mass resignationwould certainly have led immediately to high-profile hearings

on Capitol Hill, though the intense press coverage probablywould have exposed Stellar Wind before they could beconvened—exposed it and likely severely curtailed or ended it,given the circumstances: senior Justice Department lawyers,who resigned rather than violate the law, criticizing advocatesof a secret program that snooped on Americans’ telephone callsand e-mails without a warrant.

Cheney, no less able a politician than Bush, could certainly seethis. And yet, at the end of the day, standing on principle— making the “tough decision” and taking the political hit for it— was more important to him than the survival of the programitself. Principle trumped pragmatism, even when “these programs and keeping them secret,” as he tells us in hismemoirs, “are critical for the defense of the nation.” Gellmanclaims that this makes Cheney “the nearest thing there was to

an antipolitician in elected office.”The statement is provocative, the word alluring; but if he means by “antipolitician” that Cheney was “above politics,” as heseems to (“A vice president…could afford to be. Bush couldnot”), then the term seems hardly adequate. In this vitalinstance Cheney would choose purity and toughness eventhough such a course would have led to the exposure anddestruction of the program itself. Perhaps the word“ideologue”—“an adherent of an ideology, especially one whois uncompromising or dogmatic”—better captures the coldsterility of such a choice, where dead “principle” is deemedmore important than a living, supposedly vital program. But if Cheney is better described as an ideologue, what precisely washis ideology?

3.It is a truism and a quite inadequate one to say that RichardBruce Cheney was the most powerful vice-president in



American history. It was Cheney’s singular genius to take anoddly archaic constitutional office that had at best beenregarded as a useful if perilous stepping stone to a presidentialrun and at worst as “not worth a bucket of warm piss” (in theimperishable words of James Nance Garner), and to reshape it, by force of will, quiet audacity, and a peculiar institutional

brilliance, into the most powerful position in the Americangovernment. In doing this he doubly benefited from that vitalattribute of the successful politician: luck.

Cheney was lucky to be vice-president during the attacks of September 11, a national security crisis that drew on preciselythe encyclopedic knowledge and bureaucratic skills he hadcultivated in a quarter-century spent at the heights of power in

Washington, from White House chief of staff in the 1970s toleading member of the House Intelligence Committee in the1980s to wartime secretary of defense in the 1990s. And hewas particularly lucky in serving an untested president who,while intelligent and strong-willed, found himself at the apex of a government suddenly under attack, a government that heknew he lacked the experience and knowledge and confidenceto effectively lead.

While the caricature of George W. Bush as his vice-president’s puppet is plainly false—“The alpha male in the White Housewas the president,” as former Joint Chiefs Chairman GeneralRichard Myers put it—after September 11 Bush clearly neededCheney, and he knew it. He needed Cheney’s knowledge of foreign and security policy, particularly his familiarity with “thedark side” where Cheney proclaimed, less than a week after the

attacks, a major part of the war on terror would be fought, andeven more he needed Cheney’s deep knowledge of thegovernment and his unique ability to push forward effectivelywhat was a truly radical transformation. These changes couldnot have been imposed without experience, dedication, andruthlessness. For as Gellman remarks, while the death anddestruction of September 11 were horrible, “decisions made inthe White House, in response, had incomparably greater impact

on American interests and society.”It is an astute point, all the more so for seeming obvious: theunique policies put into effect by Bush and Cheney were notconsequences 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 militarycommissions; 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. Cheney, Gellman writes,“freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven bya shared belief that the government had to shake off old habitsof self-restraint.” As noted, some of these “habits” Cheney, asPresident Ford’s chief of staff, had seen inscribed in law duringthe post-Vietnam revolution of the 1970s, when governmentmisdeeds, not only those by the White House but by the FBI,CIA, and NSA, were exposed, and Congress acted to restrain

those institutions, and the president’s power to make use of them, with new legislation. September 11 offered theopportunity for a counterrevolution, which Gellman neatlysummarizes:

With Bush’s consent, Cheney unleashed foreignintelligence agencies to spy at home. He gave them legalcover to conduct what he called “robust interrogation” of

captured enemies, using calculated cruelty to break their will. At Cheney’s initiative, the United States strippedterror suspects of long-established rights under domesticand international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House ownership. Everything fromcapture and confinement to questioning, trial, and punishment would proceed by rules invented on the fly.

The depth of this transformation is truly breathtaking and itssurface signs are still visible all around us, if we take the troubleto look: in the detainees still languishing at Guantánamo, in theunpiloted drones tracking and killing thousands of people, andindeed in the sweeping up of our telephone and Internetmetadata by the four programs that have been the successors of Stellar Wind. These revolutionary changes in our government’s policies toward holding prisoners, toward waging war, and

toward surveilling its citizens could never have been effectedwithout the imagination, experience, and audacity of Dick Cheney.



The “interagency process” embodied in the National SecurityCouncil system, whereby policies are carefully developed andevaluated across the bureaucracy, rising stepwise through theassistant secretary, deputy secretary, and finally principlelevels, is inherently conservative, making substantive systemicchanges slow and cumbersome. As Gellman shows in detail,

Cheney made use of secrecy and a cadre of dedicated andruthless allies that he, as chief of Bush’s transition— unprecedented for a vice-president elect—had seeded atstrategic points throughout the government. This enabled Bushto circumvent that process and instead make policy in tiny,highly secret groups. And it was Cheney who urged Bush toimpose those policies unilaterally, relying on his own assertedauthority as commander in chief—even policies like Stellar

Wind that appeared to violate express provisions of the law.

4.

In the end, perhaps inevitably, Bush would disappoint Cheney, bowing, in the steely unforgiving view of the older man, to theshoddy demands of politics and the fear of “negative pressstories.” As Cheney describes the end of the Stellar Windconfrontation in his memoirs, one can almost hear thecondescending disappointment in the former vice-president’svoice:

Faced with threats of resignation, the president decided toalter the NSA program, even though he and his advisorswere confident of his constitutional authority to continuethe program unchanged.

Talking to Cutler for his film, Cheney is more explicit and in histypically precise phrases lets peep through more than a hint of asneer:

If you’re a man of principle, compromise is a bit of a dirtyword. The President made the decision that he wanted toavoid major controversy. It was his call so that’s what wedid.

It is clear who is the man of principle and who is not. There is ahint here of the complicated emotional strains of mutual



dependency inherent in this relationship. Cheney needed Bush,of course, for without him his high title would have been whatit had been for so many of his predecessors: empty words. Bushalone had the power to give Cheney power—and becauseCheney’s power came from him personally the president couldexpect loyalty and discretion in return. But in Cheney’s

recollections of Bush one also senses resentment and a kind of moral trumping that is none too subtle. “If you’re a man of principle, compromise is a bit of a dirty word.”

We see a more obvious sign of the instability built into thismutual dependency in Bush’s own account of the Stellar Windcrisis, where Cheney, strikingly, is hardly mentioned. Behindthe scenes the vice-president is very much the lead actor in the

drama—the conflict is inconceivable without the central part he played in pushing forward Stellar Wind, in maintaining that itcould be recertified without Department of Justice approval,and in insisting that the resulting high-profile resignations could be survived. But the reader is left to puzzle out who exactlyBush is referring to when he writes that “some in the WhiteHouse” wanted him to let Comey, Muller, and their colleagues,and perhaps Ashcroft himself, resign. Even writing his memoirs

years after leaving office Bush is loathe to identify Cheney asthe antagonist who almost scuttled his presidency—though hadhe done so, his account, which portrays an incurious presidentvery much out of touch, might have been less embarrassing tohim personally.

“I made clear to my advisers that I never wanted to be blindsided like that again,” he writes in Decision Points. In the

film Gellman tells Cutler that with that confrontation the highwater mark of Cheney’s power had passed, that Bushunderstood that the incident had been “a mortal threat to his presidency. He understood…that Cheney had walked him rightto the edge of a cliff and it changed their relationship forever.”Perhaps; but is it resentment, embarrassment, or even lingeringgratitude, or a mixture of the three, that leaves Bush unable tomention Cheney by name?

The final irony is that Stellar Wind survived because Bush,when faced with a political crisis that would have exposed it,was willing to compromise, while Cheney, “the antipolitician,” preferred to hold to principles that would have meant watching



Stellar Wind collapse into controversy. If there had been a massresignation, there can be no doubt that the principled objectionsof the high Justice Department officials would have beenwidely heard. It is quite possible that had Bush followed thechosen course of “the man of principle”—and had the JusticeDepartment officials resigned while their objections were

leaked to the public—the metadata collection would haveended in the spring of 2004, and eight months later, very possibly, the presidency of George W. Bush.

Instead, Stellar Wind lived on, first without the Internetmetadata collection that Ashcroft, Comey, and other JusticeDepartment lawyers had refused to approve, and then, threemonths later, in its original form but according to a different

legal theory under the authority of the FISA court. Meanwhile alawyer farther down the hierarchy in the Justice Departmentwho found himself deeply troubled by the program, and whowas warned, after raising his concerns with a superior, “not togo there,” put in a call to Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of The New York Times. After the Times, under heavyadministration pressure, held their story for a year, the paper finally revealed Stellar Wind to Americans in December 2005.

The story brought shock and controversy but in the event therewere no high Justice Department officials who had resignedtheir posts rather than approve warrantless surveillance; therewas just the Times and its unnamed sources. The controversycooled, the collection of metadata went on under Stellar Wind’ssuccessor programs, only to be revealed again, thanks toEdward Snowden, by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and

Gellman himself in The Washington Post in June 2013.It goes on still. This is the way of the post–September 11 world,where whistleblowers and news organizations reveal whatwould have once been considered illegal and then, years later,find themselves “revealing” it yet again, and then again. So ithas been with torture and extrajudicial killing and warrantlesswiretapping. We might call these frozen scandals, which beginin revelation and white-hot controversy and end with our

learning to live with secret wrongdoing that is in fact no secretat all. This is our new normal—and a vital attribute of the worldDick Cheney bequeathed us.



—This is the fifth in a series of articles.

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He Remade Our World by Mark Danner _ the New York Review of Books

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