So there’s this question on the table, "Why Were CIA Interrogation Tapes Destroyed?" Perhaps the answer might be found in some examples from the higher-ups:
| Watergate Scandal |
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While one might have hoped that the lesson from the Watergate Scandal might be to avoid illegal dirty tricks in an election campaign, what Dick Cheney seemed to learn was that Nixon went down because of the existence of the White House Tapes. The lesson is clear, Don’t leave any records.
Early January, 1977: Cheney Takes Office Papers with Him as He Leaves Office
Dubose and Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, NY, Random House, 2006, pp. 27
President Ford’s exiting chief of staff, Dick Cheney, takes most of his papers and documents with him instead of donating them to the Ford Library as most other White House officials do. Cheney has already made a reputation for himself as an unusually secretive bureaucrat.
Cheney: Office not part of executive branch
Assertion made as part of data battle Seattle PI By JULIA MALONE June 21, 2007 WASHINGTON — Dick Cheney, who has wielded extraordinary executive power as he transformed the image of the vice presidency, is asserting that his office is not actually part of the executive branch. In a simmering dispute with the National Archives that heated up Thursday, Cheney has long maintained that he does not have to comply with an executive order on safeguarding classified information because, in fact, his office is part of the legislature. Further, Cheney’s office tried to abolish the oversight agency involved, according to a Democratic congressman. Cheney, whose single constitutional duty is to serve as president of the Senate, holds that the vice president’s office is not an "entity within the executive branch" and therefore not subject to annual reporting or periodic on-site inspections under the 1995 executive order, which was updated four years ago by President Bush. The vice president has been refusing to cooperate with the National Archives office assigned to oversee the handling of classified data since 2003.
Memo from Cheney: Do not write this down
Los Angeles Times By DON FREDERICK AND ANDREW MALCOLM September 23, 2007 One of the major concerns of historians and academics, as society moved into the electronic age, was that many of the written documents — letters, diaries, messages and memos — so important in reconstructing events later would be deleted over time and not left for archivists to pore over as in previous centuries. Well, historians need not worry about memo deletions as far as Vice President Dick Cheney’s files are concerned. He doesn’t write memos. He leaves no paper trail. On purpose. Speaking last week at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., Ford’s one-time White House chief of staff said: "Researchers like to come and dig through my files to see if anything interesting turns up." "I want to wish them luck," the vice president said to a laughing audience. "But the files are pretty thin. I learned early on that if you don’t want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don’t write any."
There was a second lesson from the Watergate era, though it’s less well circumscribed and less easily pinned down. In fact, the lesson was repeated during the Clinton Presidency. Dick Nixon was prosecuted by the Department of Justice that Nixon himself had appointed [the same thing was true in Clinton’s case]. Again, the lesson should have been to not break laws. Unfortunately, the lesson was, Control the Department of Justice.
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| Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff: |
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Cheney was able to parlay his first real job in Washington as Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant into being named Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford. In 1974, Congress cut off all aid to South Viet Nam, effectively ending the war. Cheney was Ford’s Chief of Staff at the time [The Hidden Power]:
Kenneth Adelman, who was a high-ranking Pentagon official under Ford, said that the fall of Saigon, in 1975, was “very painful for Dick. He believed that Vietnam could have been saved—maybe—if Congress hadn’t cut off funding. He was against that kind of interference.”
It was just one of the places where Cheney learned, Don’t let Congress control the purse strings.
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| Gerald Ford’s Campaign: |
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Later, as Ford’s Campaign Manager in the race against Jimmy Carter, he made the biggest mistake in his political career:
Ford’s de facto campaign chairman, Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, contributes heavily to Ford’s loss. Unready for the stresses and demands of a presidential campaign, Cheney nevertheless wrested control from Ford’s ostensible chairman, Bo Calloway, and promptly alienated campaign workers and staffers… Cheney tried throughout the campaign to move Ford farther to the right than the president was willing to go; even with his attempts, Ford’s primary challenge from Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA) did much to peel away the right-wing Republican base, while Cheney did little to reassure the liberal and moderate Republicans whom many feel are Ford’s natural base. Cheney succeeded in persuading Ford to adopt a convention platform much farther to the right than Ford, and his supporters, wanted; in particular, the Reaganesque “Morality in Foreign Policy Plank,” which stated, “we shall go forward as a united people to forge a lasting peace in the world based upon our deep belief in the rights of man, the rule of law, and guidance by the hand of God,” alienated many more secular Republicans, who were not comfortable with the aggressive Christianity and implied imperialism contained in the statement.
The lesson might have been something like set the candidate’s platform to fit his constituency’s interests. Again, the lesson for Cheney was, Don’t let people know what you plan to do [Don’t tell the truth].
ThinkProgress By Amanda Terkel Apr 1st, 2008 In his new book, former Rhode Island Republican senator Lincoln Chafee reveals that even before President Bush was sworn into office after the 2000 elections, Cheney had rejected the “moderate course” laid out in their campaign:
In his book, Chafee angrily adds about the incident, “Mr. Cheney tore our best campaign promises to shreds and the moderates acquiesced instead of pelting him with outrage.”
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| Iran-Contra Affair: |
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In Congress for ten years after Ford was defeated, Cheney had an extremely conservative voting record. He was good at Congressional wheeling and dealing, becoming the Minority Whip in the House. He was a lead in filing a Minority Report to the Congressional Committee investigating the Iran-Contra Affair. Congress had blocked giving aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Ollie North sold Arms to Iran [for hostages] and diverted the proceeds to the Contras, a secret transaction designed to go around Congress. Cheney’s Minority Report condemned Congress for limiting the powers of the President and interfering in Foreign Policy.
The minority report stressed the charge that the inquiry was a sham, calling the majority report’s allegations of serious White House abuses of power “hysterical.” The minority admitted that mistakes were made in the Iran-contra affair but laid the blame for them chiefly on a Congress that failed to give consistent aid to the Nicaraguan contras and then overstepped its bounds by trying to restrain the White House. The Reagan administration, according to the report, had erred by failing to offer a stronger, principled defense of what Mr. Cheney and others considered its full constitutional powers. Not only did the report defend lawbreaking by White House officials; it condemned Congress for having passed the laws in the first place.
The report made a point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist Papers — like Alexander Hamilton’s remarks endorsing “energy in the executive” — in order to argue that the president’s long-acknowledged prerogatives had only recently been usurped by a reckless Democratic Congress. Above all, the report made the case for presidential primacy over foreign relations. It cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, which referred to the “exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations”…
While the lesson here was also, Don’t let Congress control the purse strings, there was another implied lesson, If you’re going to go around Congress, tell no one. And recall this article from last year:
Sy Hersh’s recent discussion at University of Minnesota included a number of tidbits, two of which are pertinent to this post. Hersh explained that the Joint Special Operations Command was doing operations that directly reported to Cheney, up to and including assassination. And Hersh revealed that Cheney had convened a meeting not long after 9/11 where he and other alumni of Iran-Contra brainstormed how to avoid the legal problems they had with Iran-Contra. A recent Congressional Research Service article on covert ops and presidential findings helps to show how these two revelations relate to each other… Cheney’s Lessons Learned Meeting
Of course, given his intimate role in the history of presidential findings, Cheney would know that. Cheney would know all the details about the requirements on presidential findings (indeed, much of what he wrote in the minority dissent on Iran-Contra objected to that kind of Congressional oversight over covert ops.
Which is why Hersh’s description of Cheney’s meeting to discussion "lessons learned" from Iran-Contra is so fascinating [this is about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through the MP3–and the following is my imperfect transcription].
I’ve been talking about how Cheney had clearly integrated lessons learned from all his previous scandals and I’m glad that Hersh has now confirmed that.
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Don’t leave any records
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Control the Department of Justice
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Don’t let people know what you plan to do
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Don’t tell the truth
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Don’t let Congress control the purse strings
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If you’re going to go around Congress, tell no one
As I said in an earlier comment Cheney learned how to manipulate from his years of experience in gov’t. I remember someone saying that Cheney had a huge safe in his VP office. I read a terrific book about FBI’s J E Hoover. He kept his files in his house. The day he died his friend and roommate went to Hoover’s house with a large station wagon to dispose of the not so secret files Hoover hung over the heads of just about anybody who he needed to control with blackmail etc.
In some of your previous postings someone said that Harriet Myers and of all people David Addington warned about not destroying the CIA tapes of interrogations etc. I found that statement so out of character for Addington who was so much more involved in this outrageous and inhuman mess and was at least as secretive and hateful of Congress and their committee hearings to weed out the secrecy.
Those enjoinders not to destroy the tapes came later, and I expect they were covering their own backsides – everyone was. They didn’t want to be the ones that said “destroy them.” Notice that no one came down on Rodriguez. I’ll bet Addington, Miers, Gonzales, Rizzo, and Goss were glad he did it, and glad they didn’t tell him to it. Off the hook in two ways…
As Rodriguez was reported to have said at the time, “if there was any heat, he’d take it.”
There are all kinds of ways to tell someone not to do it, while also signaling that’s exactly what you want them to do. I’m sure they’re all quite adept at this.
Example: Spoken with stern authority: “Do not destroy the tapes!!” And at the same time your whole body language is saying otherwise — crossed fingers prominently displayed; nodding head while saying “don’t.” A savvy and loyal underling will know what you mean and comply.
“Deniability” used to be a big word in such discussions. They don’t seem to bother with it any more.