1 Boring Old Man

Over time, various pieces of the nightmare in the White House become clearer. The obsession with Iraq seems to have come from the American Enterprise Institute shepherded by Laurie Mylroie, but then carried as a banner by Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfield to the Project for the New American Century, then imported directly into Bush’s cabinet as part of the Bush Doctrine. Now, the current New Yorker has a fascinating article, The Hidden Power, about another idealogue who, along with Cheney, came up with something called the New Paradigm. He is I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby‘s replacement as Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff, David S. Addington.

Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share—namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside.
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Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who has spent considerable time working with Cheney and Addington in recent years, believes that they are still fighting Watergate. “They’re focussed on restoring the Nixon Presidency,” she said. “They’ve persuaded themselves that, following Nixon, things went all wrong.” She said that in meetings Addington is always courtly and pleasant. But when it comes to accommodating Congress “his answer is always no.”

Addington’s been with Cheney for decades as they both pushed their agenda for an unregulated executive:

The Iran-Contra scandal substantially weakened Reagan’s popularity and, eventually, seven people were convicted of seventeen felonies. Cheney, who was then a Republican congressman from Wyoming, worried that the scandal would further undercut Presidential authority. In late 1986, he became the ranking Republican on a House select committee that was investigating the scandal, and he commissioned a report on Reagan’s support of the Contras. Addington, who had become an expert in intelligence law, contributed legal research. The scholarly-sounding but politically outlandish Minority Report, released in 1987, argued that Congress—not the President—had overstepped its authority, by encroaching on the President’s foreign-policy powers. The President, the report said, had been driven by “a legitimate frustration with abuses of power and irresolution by the legislative branch.”
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In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed Cheney Secretary of Defense. Cheney hired Addington first as his special assistant and, later, as the Pentagon’s general counsel. At the Pentagon, Addington became widely known as Cheney’s gatekeeper—a stickler for process who controlled the flow of documents to his boss.
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At the Pentagon, Addington took a particular interest in the covert actions of the Special Forces. A former colleague recalled that, after attending a demonstration by Special Forces officers, he mocked the C.I.A., which was constrained by oversight laws. “This is how real covert operations are done,” he said. (After September 11th, the Pentagon greatly expanded its covert intelligence operations; these programs have less congressional oversight than those of the C.I.A.)
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A decade later, when hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Addington, perhaps more than anyone else in the U.S. government, was ready to act.
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Once Cheney became Vice-President, Addington helped oversee the transition, setting up the most powerful Vice-Presidency in America’s history. Addington’s high-school friend Leonard Napolitano said Addington told him that he and Cheney were merging the Vice-President’s office with the President’s into a single “Executive Office,” instead of having “two different camps.” Napolitano added, “David said that Cheney saw the Vice-President as the executive and implementer of the President.” Addington created a system to insure that virtually all important documents relating to national-security matters were seen by the Vice-President’s office.
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On September 25th, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo declaring that the President had inherent constitutional authority to take whatever military action he deemed necessary, not just in response to the September 11th attacks but also in the prevention of any future attacks from terrorist groups, whether they were linked to Al Qaeda or not. The memo’s broad definition of the enemy went beyond that of Congress, which, on September 14th, had passed legislation authorizing the President to use military force against “nations, organizations, or persons” directly linked to the attacks. The memo was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel who worked closely with Addington, and said, in part, “The power of the President is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces, because the power of the Commander-in-Chief is assigned solely to the President.”

And so it goes on and on – a continuity from Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s Iran-Contra, and now Cheney’s and Addington’s New Paradigm. The only person missing in this chain of Republicans is George H.W. Bush. But recall that the current "Bush Doctrine" is simply a revival of Paul Wolfowitz’s Defense Guidance [scrapped because of a fortuitous leak].

The New Yorker article goes on to connect Addington with the whole string of things that have simply appeared in this Administration: ignoring the Geneva Conventions, detention without trial, torture of prisoners, the NSA Unwarranted Domestic spying, Bush’s Signing Statements that invalidate Congress, etc.

It takes a lot of people to build a system, but it apparently doesn’t take many to destroy it:

• The leaders of the Religious Right
• A weak president with a devious manager
• A small group of paranoid idealogues

Just add 911 and you have the Perfect Storm…

And by the way, this statement:

“The power of the President is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces, because the power of the Commander-in-Chief is assigned solely to the President.”

is laughable. None of us believe that "the President" is "directing military operations of the armed forces." His brief attendance in the National Guard didn’t prepare him for that. Nor did Addington’s half year at the Naval Academy [he dropped out]. Nor did Cheney’s deferments.