Angler-The Cheney Vice Presidency. 'A Different Understanding With the President' (4 Part WP series)

[Pirate Smile]

Dick Cheney is the most influential and powerful man ever to hold the office of vice president. This series examines Cheney's largely hidden and little-understood role in crafting policies for the War on Terror, the economy and the environment.

Today: Part 1
Working in the Background
A master of bureaucracy and detail, Cheney exerts most of his influence out of public view.

Monday: Part 2
Wars and Interrogations
Convinced that the “war on terror” required “robust interrogations” of captured suspects, Dick Cheney pressed the Bush administration to carve out exceptions to the Geneva Conventions.

Tuesday: Part 3
Dominating Budget Decisions
Working behind the scenes, Dick Cheney has made himself the dominant voice on tax and spending policy, outmaneuvering rivals for the president’s ear.

Wednesday: Part 4
Environmental Policy
Dick Cheney steered some of the Bush administration’s most important environmental decisions — easing air pollution controls, opening public parks to snowmobiles and diverting river water from threatened salmon.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/


'A Different Understanding With the President'

Web Q&A: Monday, 1 p.m. ET
» Reporter Barton Gellman, will be online on Monday, June 25 to answer readers' questions about the Cheney series. Submit a Question Here.

By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 24, 2007; Page A01

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.


Vice President Cheney, standing behind the president's desk during a July 2003 meeting, circumvented Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in 2001 on the military commissions order.

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.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/chapters/chapter_1/

[MissWaverly]

1. May the Wash Post's magic work a 2nd time

Since we now have Watergate II

May impeachment be back on the table, it's a bizarre form of government when people make secret pacts with their own legal counsel and then do an end run around all of Bush's cabinet to nail out a major doctrine like this.

What's that again, the blueprint of the government, we, of the special counsel, by the special counsel, for the special counsel,
yep, that means the same as of the people, by the people, for the people.

What's unusual is that Nightly News mentioned this saying that it would be available on-line tonight and published in
the Post tomorrow. I do not recall seeing a newspaper story announced on the nightly news before.

[Blue_In_AK]

4. I found that surprising, as well...

Do you think there's a possibility that Mr. Cheney is about to go DOWN?? Hoping against hope....

[MissWaverly]

6. Dunno, but I thought it very odd

Especially since they were boosting an article critical of Cheney, could this be an attempt to get ahead of the wave.
Is the dam going to break when Tony Blair leaves office. Are things going to be revealed at the highest levels of
the British government that will cause these scandals to bust wide open. Tony Blair leaves office on June 26th, Tuesday.
His successor is not a big fan of Bush or the Iraq War.

[Pirate Smile]

5. The MSNBC website posts the Washington Post's stories on their website.

There is some sort of mutual relationship between NBC/MSNBC and The Washington Post - similar to the relationship between MSNBC and Newsweek.

Newsweek's website is linked to on and part of the MSNBC website.

Many of the Newsweek and Wash Post columnists and reporters also frequently appear on MSNBC - Richard Wolfe, Jonathan Alter, Dana Milbank, Dana Priest, etc.

MSNBC also releases the new Newsweek polls, etc.

It will be helpful in this type of a story. It will get reported on and talked about on MSNBC as well as the NBC Nightly News.

The more coverage the better.

[MissWaverly]

7. Okay, but to announce a story the day before it's published

I thought extremely odd, esp. since the news usually consists of new/entertainment or human interest tips. Women who take
estrogen lower risk of heart attacks, or country still mourning Charleston firefighters.

[Pirate Smile]

8. Hopefully it is because they expect it to be a blockbuster series.

"Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. This article begins a four-part series that explores his methods and impact, drawing on interviews with more than 200 men and women who worked for, with or in opposition to Cheney's office. Many of those interviewed recounted events that have not been made public until now, sharing notes,e-mails, personal calendars and other records of their interaction with Cheney and his senior staff. The vice president declined to be interviewed.

Two articles, today and tomorrow, recount Cheney's campaign to magnify presidential war-making authority, arguably his most important legacy. Articles to follow will describe a span of influence that extends far beyond his well-known interests in energy and national defense."



The timing helps the Post too. Publishing this right as news breaks of how the VP has declared himself outside of the Executive Branch will certainly give the articles even more focus.

[MissWaverly]

11. I saw footage of him on the news

it showed him working alone yesterday, he got up and slammed the door shut and they show the footage
with a voice over. I think it is a milestone for them to put him in the glaring eye of public
scrutiny. Everyone knows he does best in the shadows.

[MissWaverly]

12. Yes, I agree, this story has legs

I see it discussed on different blogs in different ways, the man-size safe for daily correspondence, spying on the White House
cabinet, the secretive way he created the enemy combatant policy, it's everywhere in the blogosphere today.

[bleever]

2. Cheney's first thoughts on September 11, 2001:

In expanding presidential power, Cheney's foremost agent was David S. Addington, his formidable general counsel and legal adviser of many years. On the morning of Sept. 11, Addington was evacuated from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House and began to make his way toward his Virginia home on foot. As he neared the Arlington Memorial Bridge, someone in the White House reached him with a message: Turn around. The vice president needs you.

Down in the bunker, according to a colleague with firsthand knowledge, Cheney and Addington began contemplating the founding question of the legal revolution to come: What extraordinary powers will the president need for his response?

[Pirate Smile]

3. The headline from the article comes from a conversation with Dan Quayle.

'"I said, 'Dick, you know, you're going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you're going to be doing all this political fundraising . . . you'll be going to the funerals,' " Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. "I mean, this is what vice presidents do. I said, 'We've all done it.' "
Cheney "got that little smile," Quayle said, and replied, "I have a different understanding with the president."

"He had the understanding with President Bush that he would be -- I'm just going to use the word 'surrogate chief of staff,' " said Quayle, whose membership on the Defense Policy Board gave him regular occasion to see Cheney privately over the following four years.

-snip-
Cheney preferred, and Bush approved, a mandate that gave him access to "every table and every meeting," making his voice heard in "whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in," Bolten said.

Cheney has used that mandate with singular force of will. Other recent vice presidents have enjoyed a standing invitation to join the president at "policy time." But Cheney's interventions have also come in the president's absence, at Cabinet and sub-Cabinet levels where his predecessors were seldom seen. He found pressure points and changed the course of events by "reaching down," a phrase that recurs often in interviews with current and former aides."

[Pirate Smile]

9. Check this out - Cheney gets the daily intelligence briefing first, Bush only gets his with Cheney.

"A prodigious appetite for work, officials said, prepares Cheney to shape the president's conversations with others. His Secret Service detail sometimes reports that he is awake and reading at 4:30 a.m. He receives a private intelligence briefing between 6:30 and 7 a.m., often identifying issues to be called to Bush's attention, and then sits in on the president's daily briefing an hour later. Aides said that Cheney insists on joining Bush by secure video link, no matter how many time zones divide them.

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."'

[Pirate Smile]

10. kick

[The Sushi Bandit]

13. Dupe!!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x290338

[Pirate Smile]

14. LOL - I posted it 15 hours earlier.

I just checked the Washington Post website - waiting for the second article to go online. It isn't there yet.

Cheney is truly such an evil bastard it is :wow: