1 Boring Old Man

Will Justice Go After Cheney?

By Dan Froomkin
Thursday, January 3, 2008; 12:46 PM

How high will the newly-launched criminal investigation into the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes go? And will it eventually target Vice President Cheney? Cheney has been the administration’s central figure on all things related to torture. It was Cheney who pushed so hard for "flexibility" in interrogations of terrorist suspects. Former secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, has long argued that it is "clear that the Office of the Vice President bears responsibility for creating an environment conducive to the acts of torture and murder committed by U.S. forces in the war on terror."

In the weeks proceeding the November 2005 destruction of the torture tapes, Cheney was pulling out all the stops in a failed lobbying effort to get fellow Republicans on the Hill to exempt the CIA from a proposed torture ban. Cheney’s arm-twisting was so unseemly that a Washington Post editorial dubbed him the "Vice President for Torture." (When the law passed, Cheney’s office authored a " signing statement" for Bush, in which he reserved the right to ignore it.)

So it should have come as no surprise when the New York Times reported last month that David S. Addington, Cheney’s chief of staff and former legal counsel, was among the three White House lawyers who participated in at least one key meeting about the videotapes in 2004.

(For background on Addington, the indomitable and secretive agent of Cheney’s will, see this May 2006 profile by Chitra Ragavan in U.S. News; this July 2006 profile by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, and my Sept. 5 column.) The initial spin from the White House was that only Harriet E. Miers, then a deputy White House chief of staff, had been briefed about the tapes — and that she had advised against their destruction.

But with anything related to torture, it’s pretty clear the CIA took its orders from Cheney — via Addington. And how plausible is it that, in his exchanges with the CIA, Addington advised against the tapes’ destruction? Or that the CIA would have done it if he had told them not to? Isn’t it more likely that he supported the idea, either overtly or with a nod and a wink? So one has to wonder what will happen if Addington is hauled in front of a grand jury to testify not just about his relevant conversations with the CIA, but about his conversations with Cheney.

"Did you, Mr. Addington, indicate in any way to the CIA that destroying the tapes would be acceptable, or even preferable? Did you do so based on instructions from your boss, the vice president?"

Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear Addington answer those questions under oath? Then again, he might just lie.

The last time a federal prosecutor got close to Cheney, of course, was in the CIA leak case. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who investigated the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, indicated during and after the trial of Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, that he had been hot on the trail of the vice president himself until Libby obstructed his investigation. There was considerable evidence that it was Cheney who instructed Libby to out Plame as part of a no-holds-barred crusade against her husband, an administration critic. Libby’s own notes showed he first heard about Plame from Cheney. But when the FBI came calling, Libby denied remembering anything about that or any other related conversations with Cheney, choosing instead to make up a fanciful story about having learned of Plame’s identity from NBC’s Tim Russert.

When Libby was indicted and stepped down as chief of staff, Cheney’s choice to replace him was obvious: He chose Addington…

To me, it all hinges on Cheney’s deeply flawed character. He was able to use his manipulative skills in the Ford White House, in the House of Representatives, and as Secretary of Defense under Bush I. He worked by back office deal making and rule bending, and had a good run of it. I don’t think we knew what a wheeler dealer he really was. David Addington joined up with him when Cheney was a Congressman on the Iran Contra Affair Committee – helping draft the contraversial report that came out of that scandal. He and Cheney have been together in one form or another since then – over twenty years. When they made it to the White House, they’d had years of practice and apparently hit the ground running with a series of very jury-rigged legal rationalizations for doing some very irrational things. I agree with Froomkin that Cheney is the center of all things torture. I expect he’s been the center of much more than that – like all things sleazy. And David Addington has been at his side parsing the Law to fit their abysmal world view.

What I think happened was that the country was in such turmoil after 911, dominated as it was by a Republican Congress and grasped is a wave of Religious lunacy, that Cheney and Addington could get away with anything they wanted to dream up. Cheney operated as a back-room power monger just as he had when he was a Congressman. What I hope, is that those tactics will not stand inspection in the light of day. He’s been lucky so far – participating in disasters but coming out unscathed. This time, he may have crawled out too far on the limb to get back in time. Froomkin seems to smell blood. I’m too biased at this point to know anything for sure except that I want blood, but for what it’s worth – I smell it too. It smells just like the U.S. Attorney firings. That little mis-step took out the entire Justice Department. This C.I.A. tape business throws Cheney into the nastiest of positions and it wouldn’t take much and the entire house of cards could come tumbling down. I expect that a break in this case could punch a hole in Cheney’s firewall – and the whole story could finally come out – the Energy Conference, the pre-war Intelligence, the Plame outing, the torture policy, and the countess other manipulations that have characterized his Imperial Vice Presidency. I doubt that even "Executive Privilege" will save him. At least, that’s what I hope.

2008 is going to be an interesting year – the presidential races, the continued investigations, the flagging war, and the economic downturn. It’s a different country than the one they got elected in. So they’re not yet out of the line of fire, and justice may still prevail in these final hours. I’m counting on it…