Dick, Cheney is a....

[Rob P]

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that's democracy for ya. way to go champ.
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Thursday, June 21, 2007

Administration Oversight
Vice President Exempts His Office from the Requirements for
Protecting Classified Information

The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President's position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President's staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President's executive order.

In his letter to the Vice President, Chairman Waxman writes: "I question both the legality and wisdom of your actions. ... [I]t would appear particularly irresponsible to give an office with your history of security breaches an exemption from the safeguards that apply to all other executive branch officials."

A fact sheet prepared by Chairman Waxman describes other instances in which the Vice President's office has sought to avoid oversight and accountability.

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As someone has said, ‘when you describe what has happened as a coup d’etat; it all makes sense’.

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June 22, 2007

Cheney in Dispute on Oversight of His Office

By SCOTT SHANE

For four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has resisted routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information, and when the office in charge of overseeing classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president’s office suggested that the oversight office be shut down, according to documents released today by a Democratic congressman.

The oversight office, a unit of the National Archives, appealed the issue to the Justice Department, which has not yet ruled on the matter.

The effort by Mr. Cheney to shut down the oversight office was disclosed by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Waxman, who has played a leading role in the stepped-up efforts by Democrats since they took control of Congress to investigate the Bush administration, outlined the matter in an eight-page letter sent today to the vice president and posted, along with other documentation, on the committee’s Web site.

Officials at the archives and the Justice Department confirmed the basic chronology of events outlined in Mr. Waxman’s letter.

The letter said that after repeatedly refusing to comply with a routine annual request from the archives for data on his staff’s classification of internal documents, the vice president’s office in 2004 blocked an on-site inspection of records that other agencies of the executive branch regularly go through.

“I know the vice president wants to operate with unprecedented secrecy,” Mr. Waxman said in an interview. “But this is absurd. This order is designed to keep classified information safe. His argument is really that he’s not part of the executive branch, so he doesn’t have to comply.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Megan McGinn, said, “We’re confident that we’re conducting the office properly under the law.” She declined to elaborate.

But other officials familiar with Mr. Cheney’s view said that he and his legal adviser, David S. Addington do not believe the executive order applies to the vice president’s office because it has a legislative as well as an executive status in the Constitution.

Other White House offices, including the National Security Council, routinely comply with the oversight requirements, according to Mr. Waxman’s office and outside experts.

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The dispute is far from the first to pit Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington, against outsiders seeking information, usually members of Congress or advocacy groups. Their position is generally based on strong assertions of presidential power and the importance of confidentiality, which Mr. Cheney has often argued was eroded by post-Watergate laws and a prying press.

But the National Archives is an executive branch department headed by a presidential appointee, and it is assigned to collect the data on classified documents under a presidential executive order. The archives’ division that oversees classification and declassification, the Information Security Oversight Office, is an obscure part of the federal bureaucracy.

Mr. Waxman asserted both in his letter and the interview that Mr. Cheney’s office should take the efforts of the National Archives especially seriously because it has had problems protecting secrets.

He noted that the vice president’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to a grand jury and the F.B.I. during an investigation of the leak of classified information — the secret status of Valerie Wilson, the wife of a Bush administration critic, as an undercover Central Intelligence Agency officer.

He added that in May 2006 a former aide in Mr. Cheney’s office, Leandro Aragoncillo, pleaded guilty to passing classified information to plotters trying to overthrown the president of the Philippines.

“Your office may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information,” Mr. Waxman wrote to Mr. Cheney.

In the tradition of Washington’s semantic dust-ups, this one might be described as a fight over what an “entity” is. The executive order, last updated in 2003 and currently under revision, states that it applies to any “entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information.”

J. William Leonard, the head of the Information Security Oversight Office, has argued in a series of letters to Mr. Addington that the vice president’s office is indeed such an entity. He noted that previous vice presidents have complied with the request for data on documents classified and declassified, and that Mr. Cheney did so in 2001 and 2002.

But starting in 2003, the vice president’s office began refusing to supply the information. In 2004, it blocked an on-site inspection by Mr. Leonard’s office, routinely carried out across the government and intended to check whether documents were being properly labeled and safely stored.

Mr. Addington did not reply in writing to Mr. Leonard’s letters, according to officials familiar with their exchanges. But Mr. Addington stated in conversations that the vice president’s office was not an “entity within the executive branch” because, under the Constitution, the vice president also plays a role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, able to cast a vote in the event of a tie.

Mr. Waxman rejected that argument. “He doesn’t have classified information because of his legislative function,” Mr. Waxman said of Mr. Cheney. “It’s because of his executive function.”

Mr. Cheney’s general resistance to complying with the oversight request was first reported last year by The Chicago Tribune.

In January, Mr. Leonard wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales asking that he resolve the question. A Justice Department spokesman, Erik Ablin, said tonight, “This matter is currently under review in the department.”

Whatever the ultimate ruling, according to Mr. Waxman’s letter, the vice president’s office has already carried out “possible retaliation” against the Information Security Oversight Office.

As part of an inter-agency review of Executive Order 12958, Mr. Cheney’s office proposed eliminating appeals to the attorney general — precisely the avenue Mr. Leonard was taking. According to Mr. Waxman’s investigation, the vice president’s staff also proposed abolishing altogether the Information Security Oversight Office.

The inter-agency group working on revising the executive order has rejected those proposals, according to Mr. Waxman. Ms. McGinn, Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Mr. Cheney’s penchant for secrecy has long been a striking feature of the Bush administration, beginning with his fight to keep confidential the identities of the energy industry officials who advised his task force on national energy policy in 2001. Mr. Cheney took that dispute to the Supreme Court and won.

The vice president’s office has stopped providing information for the “Plum Book,” a Congressional publication listing federal political appointees. It has asserted “exclusive control” over Secret Service records of visitors to Mr. Cheney’s residence, preventing their disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

Steven Aftergood, who tracks government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and last year filed a complaint with the Information Security Oversight Office about Mr. Cheney’s noncompliance, called the situation “astonishing.”

“This illustrates just how far the vice president will go to evade external oversight,” Mr. Aftergood said.

But David B. Rivkin, a Washington lawyer who served in Justice Department and White House posts in earlier Republican administrations, said Mr. Cheney had a valid point about the unusual status of the office he holds.

“The office of the vice president really is unique,” Mr. Rivkin said. “It’s not an agency. It’s an extension of the vice president himself.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/washington/22cnd-cheney.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1182478082-A6OyGlmy8PQQmRNcCayhDw&pagewanted=print

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Responsibility for Torture and Abu Ghraib: The Post Shows It Goes at Least as Far as the Vice President

by Patrick McElwee

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004, there has been widespread speculation that the abuses captured in the shocking photos were more than the work of a few “bad apples.” Historian Alfred McCoy, who has written a history of CIA interrogation practices, noted that the practices at Abu Ghraib, including sensory deprivation and stress positions, came right out of the CIA handbook.

Those closely involved shared this suspicion. Last week, Seymour Hersh revealed that the Army’s lead Abu Ghraib investigator, retired Major General Anthony Taguba, believes that responsibility went up the chain of command. But he was not allowed to investigate higher-ups.

Congress has not yet conducted a serious investigation.

But thanks to some intrepid reporters, the time of speculation may be ending. The Washington Post (in two stories, available here and here) has presented strong evidence that culpability for authorizing torture goes straight to the vice-president’s office, and possibly to the president.

After an extensive investigation, including interviews with over 200 people, the Washington Post has placed Vice President Dick Cheney at the helm of intense bureaucratic in-fighting with the aim of authorizing cruelty and torture in interrogations. Both cruelty and torture are against international law and were against domestic law, specifically the War Crimes Act, at the time they were authorized by the White House.

The vice president and his allies, basing their actions on legal theories of an executive branch with nearly unlimited powers to make war, conspired to secretly authorize interrogation practices like those exposed at Abu Ghraib. These revelations demand follow-up by the Congress and serious consideration of articles of impeachment, as well as criminal prosecution of those involved.
Among the Post’s many revelations, we learn that the memo sent to President Bush in January 2002 calling the Geneva Conventions “quaint” was actually written by Cheney’s chief legal counsel, although it was signed by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who was very much a Cheney ally. It was part of the vice president’s overall strategy to ensure that alleged terrorists, already stripped of access to US civilian and military courts thanks to Cheney’s legal team, would not be protected by the Geneva Conventions either.

When, in February 2002, the president issued the directive that was to form the alternate basis of treatment of detainees, the language came directly from the vice president’s office. It was carefully crafted to allow cruelty in interrogations, a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the War Crimes Act. It called for humane treatment in general, but authorized the military and intelligence services to make unrestricted exemptions.

That determination led directly to the so-called “torture memo” of August 2002, written by Cheney ally John Yoo, which claimed that U.S. law permits all but “the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” When the memo’s existence was revealed to the public two years later, the administration disavowed its contents, claiming that it was written only to deal with a hypothetical situation.

In fact, the Post shows, the memo was a direct response to a CIA inquiry about the specific case of Abu Zubaida, an alleged high-level Al Qaeda operative. That it was not repudiated for two years suggests that it governed interrogations for that long period.

The Post further reveals that a still-secret memo released on the very same day as the torture memo actually approved a long list of interrogation techniques for the CIA, including the heinous practice waterboarding. Those techniques were later adopted by the military, many surfacing in the Abu Ghraib scandal, which was certainly only the tip of a much larger iceberg.
The Post thus shows that the interrogation practices of Abu Ghraib for which some low-ranking soldiers have been given substantial prison sentences were authorized at the highest levels of government with Cheney playing a central role. The President himself may well be implicated.

The Post also uncovered Cheney’s role in authorizing warrantless wiretapping, in maintaining secret detention sites for kidnapped suspects around the world, and in denying American citizen José Padilla access to an attorney.

The evidence of the vice president’s role in authorizing cruel treatment and torture in interrogations demands that Congress act. We need a full Congressional investigation and a serious consideration of impeachment of the vice president for war crimes.



Patrick McElwee is a policy analyst with Just Foreign Policy (www.justforeignpolicy.org). He can be reached at patrick@justforeignpolicy.org.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/26/2092/