{"id":4038,"date":"2010-04-25T08:33:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T12:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4038"},"modified":"2010-04-25T15:23:34","modified_gmt":"2010-04-25T19:23:34","slug":"dick-cheneys-lessons-from-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/04\/25\/dick-cheneys-lessons-from-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Dick Cheney&#8217;s lessons from history&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p align=\"justify\">So there&#8217;s this question on the table, &quot;<strong>Why Were CIA Interrogation Tapes Destroyed?<\/strong>&quot; Perhaps the answer might be found in some examples from the higher-ups:<\/p>\n<table width=\"97%\" cellspacing=\"=0\" cellpadding=\"5\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\">\n<tr>\n<td align=\"center\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\"><u>Watergate Scandal<\/u><\/font><\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>\n<div align=\"justify\">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, <strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t leave any records<\/font><\/strong>.<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.historycommons.org\/context.jsp?item=aearly0177cheneypapers#aearly0177cheneypapers\">Early January, 1977: Cheney Takes Office Papers  with Him as He Leaves Office<\/a><\/strong><br \/>                                  <sup>Dubose and Bernstein, <u>Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency<\/u>, NY, Random House, 2006, pp. 27<\/sup><\/div>\n<p>                                  <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">President Ford&rsquo;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.<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.seattlepi.com\/national\/320876_cheney22.html\" target=\"_blank\">Cheney: Office not part of executive branch<\/a><br \/>                                <sup>Assertion made as part of data battle<\/sup><br \/>                                Seattle PI <\/strong><br \/>                                By JULIA MALONE<br \/>                                 June 21, 2007<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">WASHINGTON &#8212; 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.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Further, Cheney&#8217;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&#8217;s office is not an &quot;entity within  the executive branch&quot; 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.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">The vice president has  been refusing to cooperate with the National Archives office assigned to  oversee the handling of classified data since 2003.<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/articles.latimes.com\/2007\/sep\/23\/nation\/na-ticket23\">Memo from Cheney: Do not write this down<\/a><br \/>                                    Los Angeles Times<\/strong><br \/>                                    By DON FREDERICK AND ANDREW  MALCOLM<br \/>                                    September  23, 2007 <\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">One  of the major concerns of historians and academics, as society moved  into the electronic age, was that many of the written documents &#8212;  letters, diaries, messages and memos &#8212; so important in reconstructing  events later would be deleted over time and not left for archivists to  pore over as in previous centuries.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Well, historians need not  worry about memo deletions as far as Vice President Dick Cheney&#8217;s files  are concerned. He  doesn&#8217;t write memos. He leaves no paper trail. On purpose.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Speaking  last week at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in  Grand Rapids, Mich., Ford&#8217;s one-time White House chief of staff said:  &quot;Researchers like to come and dig through my files to see if anything  interesting turns up.&quot;<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">&quot;I want to wish them luck,&quot; the vice  president said to a laughing audience. &quot;But the files are pretty thin. I  learned early on that if you don&#8217;t want your memos to get you in  trouble someday, just don&#8217;t write any.&quot;<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">There was a second lesson from the Watergate era, though it&#8217;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&#8217;s case]. Again, the lesson should have been to not break laws. Unfortunately, the lesson was, <strong><font color=\"#990000\">Control the Department of Justice<\/font><\/strong>.<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p>                                       <\/p>\n<table width=\"97%\" cellspacing=\"=0\" cellpadding=\"5\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\">\n<tr>\n<td align=\"center\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\"><u>Gerald Ford&#8217;s Chief of Staff<\/u>:<\/font><\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>\n<div align=\"justify\">Cheney was able to parlay his first real job in Washington as Donald Rumsfeld&#8217;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&#8217;s Chief of Staff at the time [<a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive\/2006\/07\/03\/060703fa_fact1\"><strong>The Hidden Power<\/strong><\/a>]:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"> Kenneth Adelman, who was a high-ranking Pentagon official under Ford,  said that the fall of Saigon, in 1975, was &ldquo;very painful for Dick. He  believed that Vietnam could have been saved&mdash;maybe&mdash;if Congress hadn&rsquo;t cut  off funding. He was against that kind of interference.&rdquo;&nbsp; <\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">It was just one of the places where Cheney learned, <strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t let Congress control the purse strings<\/font><\/strong>.   <\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p>                                       <\/p>\n<table width=\"97%\" cellspacing=\"=0\" cellpadding=\"5\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\">\n<tr>\n<td align=\"center\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\"><u>Gerald Ford&#8217;s Campaign<\/u>:<\/font><\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>\n<div align=\"justify\">Later, as Ford&#8217;s Campaign Manager in the race against Jimmy Carter, he made the biggest mistake in his political career:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">Ford&rsquo;s de facto campaign chairman, Chief of Staff Dick Cheney,  contributes heavily to Ford&rsquo;s loss. Unready for the stresses and demands  of a presidential campaign, Cheney nevertheless wrested control from  Ford&rsquo;s ostensible chairman, Bo Calloway, and promptly alienated campaign  workers and staffers&#8230; Cheney tried throughout the campaign to move Ford farther to  the right than the president was willing to go; even with his attempts,  Ford&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Morality in Foreign Policy  Plank,&rdquo; which stated, &ldquo;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,&rdquo; alienated many  more secular Republicans, who were not comfortable with the aggressive  Christianity and implied imperialism contained in the statement.<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">The lesson might have been something like set the candidate&#8217;s platform to fit his constituency&#8217;s interests. Again, the lesson for Cheney was, <strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t let people know what you plan to do [Don&#8217;t tell the truth]<\/font><\/strong>.<\/div>\n<div align=\"center\">\n<ul><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/thinkprogress.org\/2008\/04\/01\/cheney-swore-off-moderate-campaign-promises-a-month-after-2000-election\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cheney swore off  &lsquo;moderate&rsquo; campaign promises a month after 2000 election. <\/a><\/strong><br \/>                          <strong>ThinkProgress<\/strong><br \/>                          By Amanda Terkel<br \/>                          Apr 1st, 2008                          <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">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 &ldquo;moderate course&rdquo; laid out in their campaign: <\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">The former Senator describes a  December 2000 meeting of Republican moderates with Vice President-elect  Cheney. Chafee listened as Cheney swore off the moderate course he and  Bush had just finished championing in their campaign.<\/div>\n<p>                             <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">Hearing Cheney say &ldquo;<strong><font color=\"#200020\">the campaign was over and that our  actions in office would not be dictated by what had to be said in the  campaign<\/font><\/strong>,&rdquo; Chafee writes, was &ldquo;the most demoralizing moment of  my seven-year tenure in the Senate.&rdquo; <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">In his book, Chafee angrily adds about the incident, &ldquo;Mr. Cheney tore  our best campaign promises to shreds and the moderates acquiesced  instead of pelting him with outrage.&rdquo;  <\/div>\n<\/ul><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p>                                       <\/p>\n<table width=\"97%\" cellspacing=\"=0\" cellpadding=\"5\" border=\"0\" align=\"center\">\n<tr>\n<td align=\"center\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\"><u>Iran-Contra Affair<\/u>:<\/font><\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>\n<div align=\"justify\">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&#8217;s <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/07\/09\/opinion\/09wilentz.html?pagewanted=1&#038;_r=1\"><strong>Minority Report<\/strong><\/a> condemned Congress for limiting the powers of the President and interfering in Foreign Policy.         <\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"> The minority report stressed the charge that the inquiry was a sham,  calling the majority report&rsquo;s allegations of serious White House abuses  of power &ldquo;hysterical.&rdquo; 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.         <\/div>\n<p>          <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"> The report made a  point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist  Papers &mdash; like Alexander Hamilton&rsquo;s remarks endorsing &ldquo;energy in the  executive&rdquo; &mdash; in order to argue that the president&rsquo;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&rsquo;s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export  Corporation, which referred to the &ldquo;exclusive power of the president as  the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international  relations&rdquo;&#8230;<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">While the lesson here was also, <strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t let Congress control the purse strings<\/font><\/strong>, there was another implied lesson, <strong><font color=\"#990000\">If you&#8217;re going to go around Congress, tell no one<\/font><\/strong>. And recall this article from last year:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/emptywheel.firedoglake.com\/2009\/03\/23\/cheneys-assassination-squads-and-iran-contra-and-findings\/\">Cheney&rsquo;s  Assassination Squads and Iran-Contra and Findings<\/a><\/strong><br \/>        By: <font color=\"#006699\"><strong>emptywheel<\/strong><\/font><br \/>        March 23, 2009<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">Sy Hersh&rsquo;s <strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cce.umn.edu\/conversations\/2009\/03-10\/\">recent  discussion<\/a><\/strong> 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 <strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/opencrs.com\/getfile.php?rid=80895\">Congressional Research  Service article<\/a><\/strong> on covert ops and presidential findings  helps to show how these two revelations relate to each other&hellip;<\/p>\n<div><strong><u>Cheney&rsquo;s Lessons Learned Meeting<\/u> <\/strong><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\">Of course, given his intimate role in the history  of presidential findings, Cheney would know that.&nbsp; 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.<\/div>\n<p>        <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">Which is why Hersh&rsquo;s description of Cheney&rsquo;s  meeting to discussion &quot;lessons learned&quot; from Iran-Contra is so  fascinating [this is about 1\/4 to 1\/3 of the way through <strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cce.umn.edu\/media\/greatconversations\/hersh_jacobs_mondale\/hersh_jacobs_mondale.mp3\">the  MP3<\/a><\/strong>&#8211;and the following is my imperfect transcription]. <\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">They set about and talking about how to sabotage  oversight. And what is the model for sabotaging oversight? The model  turned out to be the Bill Casey model. The Congress&rsquo; hold, in the  Constitution, over the executive is about money. Everything that&rsquo;s being  spent must be approved by the Congress&ndash;even the most secret operation, there are  secret committees in Congress that review it. And so the answer was,  &quot;let&rsquo;s run operations off the books. Let&rsquo;s find money elsewhere and the  hell with Congress.&quot; And it was talked about as &quot;this is the way to  finally put those creeps in place.&quot; The contempt for Congress in the  Bush-Cheney White House was extraordinary, just extraordinary. And it  came out of Iran-Contra.&nbsp; <\/div>\n<div align=\"center\"><em>[Mondale explains Iran-Contra] <\/em><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\">The critical thing about Iran-Contra is that they  were specifically barred from using money, and they went around. They  were selling arms &ndash; the Israelis were involved in this &ndash; they were selling  arms for a profit, taking the profit and the thought was to invest it. <\/div>\n<div align=\"center\"><em>[snip]<\/em><\/div>\n<div align=\"justify\">Elliott Abrams was also involved, he became a key  player in the Bush-Cheney White House. <\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">So what makes Bush-Cheney  so interesting is that at some point, they had a meeting after 9\/11 of  the people who were in, in the White House, who worked in  Iran-Contra &ndash; that would be Abrams and Cheney, and there were others  involved who were also in the White House and they had a meeting of  lessons learned, I&rsquo;m telling you literally took place. They had a  meeting with a small group of people who worked for Reagan and for  George Bush when he was Vice President, his father, George Herbert  Walker Bush, anyway.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\"><strong>And at the meeting, here were some of the  conclusions: that the Iran-Contra thing, despite the disasters, proved  you could do it, you could run operations without Congressional money  and get away with it<\/strong>. <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">The reason they got exposed, and this is what was  said in the White House, there were too many people that knew too  much&ndash;too many people in the military knew in &lsquo;85 and &lsquo;86, and too many  people in the CIA knew, and Oliver North who you might remember what a  great witness he was, was the wrong person to be running that. So what  you do is you tell nobody. One of things Cheney wrote in his dissent to  the Iran-Contra committee, Cheney said, &quot;my god, <strong>Reagan was  telling too many people too much, don&rsquo;t tell Congress anything. You  don&rsquo;t tell the CIA much, you don&rsquo;t tell the military much, and YOU, Mr.  Vice President, you&rsquo;re the Ollie North for this. We&rsquo;re going to run  operations off the books and you&rsquo;re going to honcho them.<\/strong>&quot; And  this is what they did. And this is what is still left to be reported,  this kind of stuff, this kind of extraordinarily contemptuous attitude  towards the Constitution.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div>I&rsquo;ve been talking about how Cheney had clearly  integrated lessons learned from all his previous scandals and I&rsquo;m glad  that Hersh has now confirmed that.<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div><strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t leave any records<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><strong><font color=\"#990000\">Control the Department of Justice<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t let people know what you plan to do<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t tell the truth<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><strong><font color=\"#990000\">Don&#8217;t let Congress control the purse strings<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><strong><font color=\"#990000\">If you&#8217;re going to go around Congress, tell no  one<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So there&#8217;s this question on the table, &quot;Why Were CIA Interrogation Tapes Destroyed?&quot; Perhaps the answer might be found in some examples from the higher-ups: Watergate Scandal 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}