Washington Post reveals: Cheney’s really powerful
Washington Post - June 24, 2007 http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/chapter_1/
‘A Different Understanding With the President’ By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker Washington Post Staff Writers
Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the
South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round
parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page
text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out
with him after lunch.
In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that
gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times,
according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff
review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio
embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from
his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had
seen the text.
Cheney’s proposal had become a military order from the commander in
chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were
stripped of access to any court — civilian or military, domestic or
foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and
would be tried, if at all, in closed “military commissions.”
“What the hell just happened?” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening,
Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed,
sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing
said they did not know the vice president had played any part.
The episode was a defining moment in Cheney’s tenure as the 46th vice
president of the United States, a post the Constitution left all but
devoid of formal authority. “Angler,” as the Secret Service code-
named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting
orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to
President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as
hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered
aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other
times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he
has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope
views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert.
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