1 Boring Old Man

^{David Addington and John Yoo sharing a smirk at the Congressional Hearing on Torture}

Having read Angler and The Dark Side back to back, I find it impossible not to compare them – but not on an axis of which was "better." They both were "best." Barton Gellman’s Angler takes vignettes from the Cheney Vice Presidency and uses them to frame the character of the man [or its absence]. Since it’s impossible to separate anything Cheney from David Addington, his Counsel, Chief of Staff, and alter-ego, Addington is well represented in Gellman’s pages. Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side in less a character study, more like an exquisitely detailed and finely drawn narrative of a country going insane – our country.

In both of these books, the guides for our trip into the darkness were these two once secret players – David Addington and John Yoo. Most of us never heard of John Yoo until after he was long gone from government, back in California teaching Constitutional Law. The first I really ever knew of David Addington was when he testified in the Libby Trial in January 2007. In researching who he was, I ran across this article in the U.S. News and World Report [May 2006], aptly subtitled [Cheney’s Guy …the most powerful man you’ve never heard of]. But we didn’t get to know the pair of them in person until they testified together in a Congressional Hearing this time last year [June 2008]. They were both evasive, arrogant, and sarcastic — visibly sneering at the Congressmen questioning them — but Addington was more openly hostile, exuding contempt from every pore [I posted a couple of clips from that testimony last week].

In Jane Mayer’s narrative, Addington is everywhere. Even though Bush’s Counsels [Alberto Gonzales and later Harriet Miers] were presumably higher ranked because they were connected to the President, David Addington clearly ran the show – appearing at every meeting apparently acting like he did in his Congressional testimony – like a bully. He was obviously a major author of the torture and spying memos signed by Yoo. He was the one that kept them secret. He was the force that blocked, undermined, silenced critics of the Torture Program. As the story unfolds, Mayer makes it painfully clear that Addington ruled the roost at the White House. While Addington spoke as if these absurd rulings and programs came from the President [Unitary Executive], we presumed all along that he was really speaking for Vice President Cheney. But after reading these two books, I wondered if that wasn’t backwards – that Cheney was following Addington’s lead.

And it wasn’t just his obsession with unlimited executive power, or with his guarded secrecy, or  the power of his bullying and contemptuousness that shaped the crazy story. It was by direct manipulation of appointments. One instance will illustrate the pattern. When Jay Bybee got his judgeship, John Yoo wanted his job as director of the Office of Legal Counsel – the DoJ office that generated the outrageous legal opinions that justified Torture and Domestic Spying. Attorney General Ashcroft said no, in part because Yoo had consulted with Addington in writing the memos rather than his boss [Ashcroft]. So Bybee was replaced with Jack Goldsmith who, in spite of his strong conservative credentials, saw how crazy Yoo’s memos were and withdrew several of them. As an index of Addington’s power, Goldsmith withdrew one of the memos and resigned the next day – presumably as a way of circumventing Addington’s wrath. So the next appointee, David Levin, came to OLC and was immediately asked to reaffirm Yoo’s torture permissions. He was too contientious, too straight, so he was replaced with Stephen Bradbury on a probationary appointment – pending his performance. That is remarkable! They appointed someone to the DoJ office that was supposed to make independent determinations of the legality of Presidential policy – but made his job dependent on whether he gave them what they wanted. Like I said, it’s a "narrative of a country going insane."

Mayer and Gellman not only document the incredible power wielded by Addington and Cheney, they also makes explicit another thread that runs throughout this  story – lying. Everyone in the piece lies, over and over – particularly about Torture. They said Abu Ghraib was the work of a few rogue soldiers, yet they knew that wasn’t true – not even close to true. The Abu Ghraib photos appeared in April 2004. By then, the Torture Program of the CIA was everywhere – GTMO, "black sites" around the world, and in Military Policy at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan. They just lied and continued to lie for years. The Torture Program never slowed from its inception shortly after we began to collect detainees in October 2001. If anything, it accelerated after it was being exposed and widely condemned. They all lied about it from the top to the bottom. There were some heros along the way that tried to stop it, but they were suppressed or removed. And the Administration just kept lying – not twisting the truth a little bit – but outright lying.

These two books carry the words [Mayer] and the music [Gellman] of a terrible dirge that is the biggest blot on the American Soul in our history. It’s not only that these misguided power-mongers did things that were wrong in an absolute sense, they did them badly. Their precious programs [Domestic Surveillance and Torture], as horrible as they both  were, were done so poorly that they produced nothing of value. If anything, they shamed us on the world stage, and probably interfered with our intelligence gathering abilities. Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo were each dark actors, on their own. But the devastating impact of their Triumvirate was greater than the sum of its parts.

^{Dick Cheney and David Addington in the White House Bunker on 9/11}