1 Boring Old Man

Vice: The Dispiriting Legacy of Dick Cheney
By Stephen Holmes
The Nation.
May 27, 2009
published in the June 15^th issue

Gellman lavishes most of his attention on the fabrications Cheney used to enable the executive branch to circumvent constitutional checks and balances. One of the boldest involved the Bush administration’s ongoing program for intercepting domestic communications without a judicial warrant, which Gellman describes as an "operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president." When briefing the Republican and Democratic heads of Congress’s Intelligence Committees about this program in early 2004, Cheney (with White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, National Security Agency director Michael Hayden and others) connived to hide the fact that high-ranking lawyers from the NSA and Justice Department had expressed grave doubts about the program’s legality. "Cheney, who chaired briefings for select members of Congress, said repeatedly that the NSA’s top law and ethics officers had approved what their agency was doing," Gellman explains. Cheney was not vague about the facts of the case but conveyed inaccurate information about the legal opinions of others. To thwart Congressional oversight and thus eliminate outside review and potential criticism of a favored White House program, Cheney knowingly misled key members of a constitutionally coequal branch. 

Cheney’s "major role in bringing war to Iraq" likewise required a strategic twisting of the truth. Gellman details a private briefing in late September 2002 that Cheney provided to Republican Congressman Dick Armey, then majority leader of the House. Armey opposed an invasion of Iraq on the reasonable grounds that the United States should not attack a country that had not attacked it. Usually hawkish, Armey presented an embarrassing hurdle to the war party in the administration. As Gellman says, "If Armey could oppose the war, he gave cover to every doubter in waiting," making him "the center of gravity of the political opposition." Something had to be done, and Cheney did it. According to Gellman, Cheney, brandishing top-secret satellite photos, made statements about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear arsenal and ties to Al Qaeda that he knew to be erroneous: "In the privacy of his office, for this one crucial vote, Cheney leveled claims he had not made before and did not make again." Some of these claims "crossed so far beyond the known universe of fact that they were simply without foundation." Gellman concludes that Cheney deliberately told Armey "things he knew to be untrue," bamboozling a Congressional leader of his own party just long enough to extract a go-ahead vote. Having been preapproved on false pretenses by a gullible or complicit Congress, the misbegotten invasion was launched six months later.

Dick Cheney lied to me on war, says GOP leader
LA TIMES
September 16, 2008

It is the central charge against the Bush White House, that the administration lied its way into a war in Iraq…

Now comes Dick Armey, once House Majority Leader, who described a classified one-on-one briefing in the vice president’s hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol where he says Vice President Dick Cheney went beyond that into outright deception.

According to a new book on Cheney called "Angler," by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, Armey, a Texas Republican, had spoken out against the war. Cheney was trying to change his mind. So the vice president told him the threat from Iraq was actually "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large." In Armey’s account, Cheney told him:

Iraq’s "ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been "substantially refined since the first Gulf War," and would soon result in "packages that could be moved even by ground personnel….We now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as Al Qaeda."

"Did Dick Cheney … purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?" Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case…Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."

As the stories mount up, it’s a little hard to understand how he thought he could get away with all this deceit and rule bending without being called to task somewhere down the road – or if he even thought about it that possibility. I presume he still thinks that he’s "untouchable." For example, his recent comments about Richard Clarke were so far off the mark ["he obviously missed it"] to be ludicrous – or his saying the Colin Powell wasn’t a Republican. It is not possible that the Memos he wants released say what he claims they say. And these Comey emails make him look like a boldfaced liar. Yet he prattles on. Dick Armey, a hard core Conservative, is out there saying that Cheney lied to him – his actual term was "bull-shited."