The Washington Post has some excerpts from the Cheney biography [Angler] today. As I looked over the timeline of the Unwarranted N.S.A. Domestic Spying story, I realized how the "ends justify the means" mentality leads people into the wilderness. After the September 11, 2001 attack, the first real "Presser" was Cheney’s interview on Tim Russert’s Meet the Press on September 16th. Cheney famously said:
I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I–clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.
We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
I don’t recall hearing him say those things, but I’m glad he did. I think he was thinking about America as a patriot. And we all know, the President was paralyzed at the time. We’ve seen the tape. And in as many words, Cheney told us what was coming: Suspending the Geneva Conventions and Habeus Corpus, Torture, Guantanamo, Unwarranted Domestic Spying. We just didn’t know what we were hearing.
As you go through the timeline, you can see that Cheney’s patriotism and his character flaws interact at key points that magnify the problems as time passes.
| Unwarranted N.S.A. Domestic Wiretapping |
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| 2001 | Sept. 11: | Terrorist attacks kill more than 2,900 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. |
| Sept. 18: | Congress authorizes use of military force against perpetrators of 9/11 attacks. | |
| Oct. 4: | President Bush authorizes warrantless domestic surveillance proposal presented by Vice President Cheney. The program goes operational two days later. | |
| 2003 | Oct. 10: | Jack L. Goldsmith is sworn in as chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The job gives him authority to make legal rulings that bind the whole executive branch. |
| November: | Goldsmith becomes doubtful about the legal memos prepared by John C. Yoo in support of domestic eavesdropping. | |
| December: | Goldsmith brings his doubts to Attorney General John D. Ashcroft who tells him to do whatever is necessary to bring the program into compliance with the law. | |
| Dec. 9: | David S. Addington, Vice President Cheney’s counsel, intercedes to stop Justice Department officials from showing the disputed legal memos to Vito Potenza, the NSA’s acting general counsel, and Joel Brenner, the agency’s inspector general. | |
| 2004 | January: | Ashcroft and Goldsmith ask for permission to consult Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. Addington, backed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, refuses. "Forget it," Addington tells Goldsmith. |
| Feb. 19: | Addington relents after Goldsmith threatens to rule against the program, and Comey is briefed on the codeword-classified program. Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the NSA director, tells Comey: "I’m so glad you’re getting read in, because now I won’t be alone at the table when John Kerry is elected president." | |
| March 4: | Ashcroft and Comey meet privately and decide to withhold legal approval unless the surveillance program is scaled back. Hours later, Ashcroft is hospitalized for acute gallstone pancreatitis and Comey becomes acting attorney general. | |
| March 6: | The Justice Department formally rules that parts of the surveillance program are illegal, refusing to certify a renewal order that is due on March 11. | |
| March 9: | Vice President Dick Cheney gathers intelligence chiefs, presses Comey to reauthorize surveillance: "How can you possibly be reversing course?" Still unaware of the crisis, Bush appears at an award ceremony in Northern Virginia. | |
| March 10: | Bush learns that the program is about to expire without Justice Department approval. He dispatches Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. to visit Ashcroft in the hospital; Ashcroft backs Comey and says he never should have ruled the program legal. | |
| March 11: | Bush signs a new order, drafted in Cheney’s office, that renews the surveillance program and asserts that the president is the final authority on the law. Comey, Goldsmith and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, among many others, prepare to resign. Bush – unlike Cheney and Card – is unaware of their plans. | |
| March 12: | After national security adviser Condoleezza Rice warns of turmoil at Justice, Bush pulls Comey aside for an unscheduled meeting. Comey is stunned when Bush accuses him of a "last minute" objection; Bush is surprised to learn that Mueller and Comey are about to quit. "Told him he is being misled," Comey writes in an e-mail sent moments after leaving Bush’s private study. When Mueller confirms his intention to resign, Bush withdraws the order he signed the previous day. | |
| March 19: | Bush signs a new surveillance order, scaling back the program and bowing to the Justice Department’s legal authority. | |
| 2005 | Jan. 20: | President Bush inaugurated to second term. |
| Dec. 16: | New York Times first reports domestic surveillance program; executive editor says newspaper withheld the story for a year at White House‘s request. | |
| Dec. 17: | Bush defends warrantless wiretapping as "critical to saving American lives" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." | |
| 2006 | Feb. 6: | Testifying before Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says NSA surveillance "falls squarely within the broad authorization" of military force. |
| July 13: | In reversal, Bush administration agrees to submit wiretap program to federal court for constitutional review. | |
| 2007 | Jan. 17: | Justice Department transfers oversight of wiretap program to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. |
| July 7: | Federal appeals court rejects lawsuit challenging constitutionality of spy program, ruling plaintiffs had to prove they were directly targeted. | |
| Aug. 14: | Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell publicly acknowledges for first time that private companies cooperated with NSA program. | |
| 2008 | July 9: | Senate passes FISA amendments act, granting immunity to telecom companies that participated in domestic surveillance. |
Timeline from Washington Post
Cheney and Addington have always claimed that the secrecy surrounding this program had to do with national security. I don’t believe that. From the start, the secrecy was used to hide what they were doing from people who might object. On October 4th, just two weeks after his Press appearance, Cheney presented Bush with a domestic wiretap plan. None on us would’ve objected at that point. It was to right thing to do. But why Unwarranted? We had an F.I.S.A. Court set up for oversight of just this sort of thing. They later said it would slow things down. Maybe they thought that, but it’s not true. That court could’ve expanded to handle the program, and secrecy could easily be maintained. As we learned years later, they got the telecoms to go along with it and help. That would have been okay with me, but why Unwarranted? Cheney would argue again that it would slow things down. I don’t actually believe him. He doesn’t respect oversight of any kind.
They got the now infamous John Yoo to come up with some legalese that explained how the President could do this illegal program [and others] because he was the President. When Jack Goldsmith and later James Comey saw those memos, the knew they were illegal and went to AG John Ashcroft who told them to do the right thing. Cheney/Addington tried to block them at every turn, including forbidding Goldsmith to consult his boss or the N.S.A. Lawyer. That wasn’t for national security. It was because they didn’t want any oversight. Addington/Cheney kept all of this from President Bush – again, not because of national security considerations. At first, Bush joinsed in the illegal fun, but finally recanted when Condi Rice told him what’s going to happen if he didn’t get it right [or at least, more right].
We finally found out about all of this four years into the program when the New York Times published the story, a story they’d withheld for a year. The story wasn’t domestic spying. The story was Unwarranted domestic spying. Since then, they’ve been busy covering their tracks. What was wrong in the first place? It was Cheney’s thought, "We can’t have the courts and lawyers interfering." So he mobilized his prodigious skills in wheeling and dealing, manipulating, sliding in and out among the cracks, to bring it off. It wasn’t his patriotism of the first kind that was his problem – protecting our Homeland. It was Cheney’s patriotism of the second kind that faltered – respect for our system of government. I doubt Cheney even knows that. It’s not his thoughts about what to do that are on trial, it’s his devious methods of implementation that matter. A con man in the service of the highest ideals is still a con man – plain and simple. And then there’s his self righteous denial of his deviousness, as in this interview. Says Cheney:
THE VICE PRESIDENT: What happened then was they had the information we had, they knew how we were doing it, they knew what we were producing through that process. But then when — Nancy Pelosi, for example, was part of that group. But then it became public. The New York Times broke the story I think in December of ‘05, won the Pulitzer for it, which always aggravated me.
QUESTION: Absolutely, the worst –
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Not with all members. I don’t want to cast a wide net here, but you’ll end up with some specific members who knew about the program, had been briefed in the program because of their responsibilities, and who had said to proceed with the program, then suddenly are critical of it publicly because it’s controversial. They don’t want to stand up and say, well, I was briefed on that program, and it’s a good program. So it’s that kind of thing that is most frustrating of all.
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