Vice (27 page)

In her official capacity, Liz Cheney has traveled to several Middle Eastern countries. On at least two occasions she has informed U.S. ambassadors that she was going to see the head of state alone—a complete violation of protocol. "The ambassador is our government's representative in the country," says Wilkerson. "No one meets a head of state without the ambassador." Except for the vice president's daughter.

On one occasion, Cheney's daughter told an ambassador to call Washington if he had a problem with the meeting she had scheduled. She went in solo, and the embarrassed head of state later called in the American ambassador to brief him on the closed, private meeting with Liz Cheney.

Liz Cheney resigned in the spring of 2006, though by summer, sources at State were saying her return was imminent. Once she departed, there was a definite policy shift away from military options and toward negotiation with Iran. "Probably a coincidence, but it would have been much more difficult with her in the building," says the former State Department employee. As Cheney announced her departure and summer arrived in the capital, discussions of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities quieted.
Secretary of State
Rice seemed to resume some of the State Department functions that had been seized by the OVP. With the vice president's
approval numbers
falling to 18 percent, it is altogether possible that Bush finally took charge and told his VP "No more war."

Not everyone is hopeful.

While David Welch did accompany Secretary of State Condi Rice to Israel in August 2006, as
Israel's bombing of Lebanon
spiraled out of control, he wasn't entirely on his own. Somewhat weakened by his forced cohabitation with the vice president's daughter, Welch was accompanied by a figure who might be described as his minder. Elliott Abrams also traveled with Rice for the duration of the Middle East mission, all the while in constant communication with Dick Cheney's office. Cheney and Abrams knew that Welch, if permitted, would try to use the stature he held as former ambassador to Egypt to move the United States closer to a mediator's position in Israel's conflict with the Arab world. That wasn't likely to happen with Abrams looking over Welch's shoulder. "The genius of Elliott Abrams is that he's Elliott Abrams," an unnamed administration official told
The New York Times.
"How can he be accused of not sufficiently supporting Israel?" Not only was Israel familiar territory for Abrams, the deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, he also had an Iranian backstory. Twenty years earlier, the administration of which Abrams was a part had a policy which included selling missiles to the Iranians as part of a three-way negotiation between the US, Iran, and Hezbollah. Cheney's support of Abrams in Iran-Contra was finally paying off.

"They are incapable of diplomacy," Larry Wilkerson says of the Cheney cabal within the White House. Not only incapable, but hostile to the notion of diplomacy, particularly in dealing with countries that have adversarial relations with the United States. In such cases, the Cheney cabal considers diplomacy the imposition of its will on a capitulating adversary. It's the same position Cheney described to a stunned Thomas Downey twenty years earlier, saying the Soviets would have to accept "all our terms" in arms talks. Downey's observation describes the marching orders Cheney handed Assistant Secretary of State
Jim Kelly
for his negotiations with the North Koreans. After Kelly confronted the North Koreans in 2003 with U.S. intelligence that proved the Koreans had a nuclear weapons program, Cheney impeded negotiations with Kim Jong Il's government. On two occasions, according to Wilkerson, Cheney changed the terms of negotiations after they had been established by all of the principals who decide American foreign policy.

"A script would be drafted for Jim [Kelly], what he could say and what he could not say, with points elucidated in the margins. And that script would be approved through the statutory process," Wilkerson says. That process involves the consensus of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security advisor, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On at least two occasions, Cheney rewrote the script after it had been through the statutory process. As Kelly departed for Pyongyang or Beijing, Cheney provided the State Department's negotiator a revised draft outlining a more rigid position. As Wilkerson describes it, the vice president "put handcuffs on our negotiator, so he could say little more than 'welcome and good-bye.' " U.S. negotiations with one of the most dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable nations in the world, which had just rolled out its nuclear arsenal, were defined by one man—Dick Cheney. His negotiating position was that there would be no negotiations.

Cheney's no-negotiation-with-evil position is not limited to North Korea and in fact is a corollary to the neocons' hegemonic foreign policy agenda. Wilkerson points to a critical moment, entirely ignored by the press, that further illustrates the administration's low regard for diplomacy:

In May 2003 the Iranian government approached the U.S. government with an urgent request to open up negotiations. There had been only one other official communication between Iran and the United States since Iranian radicals seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration. Now the initial U.S. success in Iraq had the Iranians coming to the bargaining table as supplicants.

"The Iranians came to us through the Swiss ambassador after they saw how fast we moved through Afghanistan and Iraq," Wilkerson says. "This was in 2003, right after [the invasion of] Iraq."
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
was not yet president and the moderates in charge in Iran wanted to deal.

The letter delivered by Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann offered concessions on Iran's nuclear program, Israel policy, and al-Qaeda. "Israel policy," of course, involved Tehran's support of Hezbollah. According to Wilkerson, the Iranians offered to exchange al-Qaeda prisoners they held for
Mujahedeen e Khalq
prisoners the United States had in custody. The MEK was a guerrilla group Saddam Hussein had used in his war against Iran. After the war they engaged in terrorist attacks against Iran and are designated terrorists by the U.S. State Department.

More than a hundred billion dollars, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, America's allies' unflagging opposition to the war, and a deeply divided public. Finally it was all paying off. One of the countries Bush had placed in the Axis of Evil was coming in out of the cold.

"We told them no," Wilkerson says in an interview at George Washington University. "Not only did we tell them no—we wrote a letter of protest to the Swiss for interfering in our foreign policy."

The entire diplomatic endeavor was immediately curtailed. Asked if he knows who made the decision to reject the Iranian
request for negotiations
, Larry Wilkerson didn't miss a beat.

"Yes, I know," he says. "It was the vice president of the United States."

In early 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell walked into the office of his chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. A scandal of major proportions was threatening to come to public light. By April, CBS News and
The New Yorker
would release photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at
Abu Ghraib prison
. "He was very concerned and he wanted to make sure State's role was clear, and he wanted to make sure also that we had some idea of the dimensions of the problem," Wilkerson remembers.

Powell told his subordinate: "Get the paperwork. Get everything you can get your hands on."

Wilkerson had worked for Powell for more than a decade, since the general was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War. He'd been a soldier for much longer. Not a lot surprised him, but looking at his boss, he quickly realized that Powell had no concept of how big this scandal was going to be nor how widespread it was. Over the coming months, working with the State Department's legal adviser,
William Taft TV
, and using both classified and unclassified documents, Wilkerson began to assemble the paper trail Powell requested. Eventually, he says, it would make a seven-foot pile of documents, divided into three stacks in Wilkerson's office. It would tell the story of how Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, despite their denials, had made
torture the policy
of the U.S. government. They had done so in the service of an all-powerful presidency the likes of which America has never seen—a vision that Dick Cheney and David Addington had nurtured for years.

The legal justification began as early as December 2001, with the image of the smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center still fresh enough to smell. By that time the United States had been at war in Afghanistan for almost two months. Army and CIA troops had captured hundreds of suspected
Taliban
and al-Qaeda fighters. More than anything, everybody in the upper levels of government feared another attack was in the offing. As higher-level captives became available, Bush and Cheney demanded any intelligence they might provide, regardless of what it took to produce it. The Pentagon wanted a place to keep the
detainees
, a tightly controlled, easily defended environment where interrogations could be conducted far from prying eyes or distractions. As Rumsfeld would say, Guantánamo Bay was "the least worst place."

Yet the War President and his Vice required more than a physical location; they needed a legal framework in which to operate. The administration had the man for the job already in place, a deputy attorney general in the
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)
in the Justice Department named
John Yoo
. Some have compared the OLC to a mini-Supreme Court. Its job is to provide legal interpretations for the executive, but only when asked. Alumni from the office, including
William Rehnquist
and, more recently,
Samuel Alito, Jr.
, have landed on the actual Supreme Court. While some see the OLC as a place that should be a neutral arbiter of what the executive can constitutionally do, more often than not it's been an aggressive advocate, "the president's law firm."

"The OLC is calculated to defend as robustly as possible presidential authority, that's what it's all about," says Bruce Fein, who worked in the office during the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Dick Cheney learned from a master how the OLC could defend executive privilege against an activist Congress during the Ford administration, when Antonin Scalia ran the office. Cheney knew what he was getting when he placed Yoo, a thirty-five-year-old law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, inside the Bush-Cheney OLC. In March 1996, Yoo had published a book-length article in the
California Law Review
that tried to make the case that the Constitution gave wider authority to the president in war-making than had been previously understood. The only role Congress had, Yoo argued, was the power of the purse and impeachment. The federal courts were excluded entirely. When Cheney and Addington had made the call for a similarly strong executive during Iran-Contra, Yoo had been just an undergraduate at Harvard. He went on to Yale Law School and then to clerk for Justice
Clarence Thomas
at the U.S. Supreme Court, where he worked on issues of national security and separation of powers.

Within weeks of 9/11, Addington and Yoo had started to create the legal architecture for an all-powerful wartime commander in chief. Cheney knew the ruling he wanted—he just needed to ask the OLC the right question. "You have asked for our opinion as to the scope of the President's authority to take military action in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001," wrote Yoo in a memo to the president on September 25, 2001.

It would come as no surprise to the vice president and his legal counsel, David Addington, mat Yoo determined the scope was practically unlimited.

"The President may deploy military forces preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11," wrote Yoo in the memo. Given that criterion, Bush and Cheney don't need congressional approval to attack Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, or
Syria
—all identified as state sponsors of terror by the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the State Department. Throw in "terrorist safe havens"—logically, given how permissive this legal interpretation is—
and the war powers
extend to Venezuela, Yemen, and the Mediterranean, among other locales. But they had no intention of stopping with states. Yoo determined that the president's powers in the never-ending war on "terror" extended to people and organizations as well.

This wasn't a statutory right. Yoo claimed that Congress, when it passed its resolution authorizing the use of military force against terrorists a week after 9/11, only gave the president what he already had—in fact, just a sliver of the nearly unlimited power the wartime president possessed. "The President's broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the Nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to preempt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters."

Two days later, Yoo wrote another memo, this time with
Patrick Philbin
, a fellow deputy attorney general. (Philbin would later have second thoughts about Addington and Cheney's executive power grab. As a result, although Alberto Gonzales, by then the attorney general, had tapped Philbin for the job of deputy solicitor general, Addington blocked the appointment.) The December 28 memo argued that non-U.S.-citizen detainees at Guantánamo would not have access to that most basic of American rights, habeas corpus, the right of an individual to appear before a judge after detention. Almost two weeks later, Yoo coauthored a memo with Office of Legal Counsel attorney
Robert J. Delahunty
, concluding that the
Geneva Conventions
and other international agreements against torture "do not protect members of the al Qaeda organization, which as a non-State actor cannot be a party to the international agreements governing war." Furthermore, if Congress acted to "restrict presidential authority" by legislating that the U.S. armed forces had to obey the Geneva Conventions, it "would represent a possible infringement on presidential discretion to direct the military." It didn't matter that Congress had ratified the Geneva Conventions; executive power superseded that authority. White House chief counsel Alberto Gonzales—whose legal experience as a transactional lawyer and short tenure on the Texas Supreme Court had not exactly prepared him for national security law—wrote a memorandum upholding Yoo's conclusions. (The Justice Department won't release the memo, but a draft copy is public.)

The State Department had tried to rein the White House back into the international human rights standards that had been accepted for almost half a century. State Department counsel William Taft argued to Gonzales that if the United States used torture, then when American troops were captured, they could expect the same in return. Furthermore, torture would inflame
anti-Americanism
in the Muslim world. Addington was working overtime to marginalize or bully any lawyer at Justice or the National Security Council who might disagree with this new approach, but enough dissent existed for Gonzales to write Bush the memo on January 25 laying out the various arguments for and against whether the Geneva Conventions should apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban
prisoners
. On the side of the ledger against adhering to the Conventions, Gonzales added the federal
War Crimes Act of 1996
. The act provides for strict sanctions, including the death penalty, for American officials convicted of serious war crimes as defined by the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales argued that if they dispensed with the Geneva Conventions, technically there would be no war crimes.

In February, Bush decided to split the baby. In a memo on February 7, he wrote, "I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time." While declaring that al-Qaeda detainees did not qualify as prisoners of war under Geneva, he allowed that "as a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."

And yet, some time after the West Wing meeting that produced that memo, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld agreed to ignore the part about humane treatment. "In going back and looking at the deliberations, it was clear to me that what the president had decided was one thing and what was implemented was quite another thing," says Wilkerson. The policy would be implemented as Cheney had "briefed it" to the president.

The message filtered down, and it was unmistakable to everyone from Army reservists to highly trained CIA interrogators. The results at Abu Ghraib were murder, rape, and a menu of sadistic acts that ranged from sexual humiliation to physical maiming. For CIA interrogators, it included, among other
torture
tactics
, "waterboarding," a simulated drowning of the victim that is essentially a mock execution.

"The complicity of everyone down the line was mind-boggling to me, including the commander in the field,
Rick Sanchez
," says Wilkerson. "In some cases, Rumsfeld would protect himself very carefully. For example, I have his memo with appendixes and annexes where he goes from A to double D, telling them what they can do. When you read this, you read for example, that dogs can be used but they have to be muzzled. Well, I'm a soldier. I know what that means to an E-6 [noncommissioned officer] that is trying to question a guy and he's got a German shepherd with a muzzle on there. If that doesn't work, the muzzle comes off. If that doesn't work, you kind of let the dog leap at the guy and maybe every now and then take a bite out of him. It's a very careful crafting of a memo that would probably never get [Rumsfeld] in a court of law or get him convicted at the International Criminal Court, but it's damn sure apparent to me that things were different, things had changed. And I can't imagine Rumsfeld doing that without at least having his head covered by the vice president."

In other words, Cheney not only had to know, he had to make it clear this was his and the president's policy.

Six months after Bush's memo about humane treatment, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee, wrote what has become known as "the torture memo." Bybee today sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit as a Bush appointee. How much input Cheney and Adding-ton had into the document is unknown, but they would certainly have been aware of and had veto power over its contents.

In order for it to qualify as torture, the memo said, "Where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure."

Short of homicide, everything was fair game.

Shrouded behind his antipathy toward congressional prerogatives is a little-known fact about Dick Cheney. When it comes to lobbying the Hill, he is one of the Bush administration's most effective weapons. Consistently, it is Cheney, as negotiator in chief, who has taken the lead role in binding GOP legislators to the White House. Even as this administration has drifted away from long-standing conservative principles like deficit reduction and limited government, the Republican Congress has meekly followed.

As vice president, Cheney serves as the president of the Senate. While his main constitutional responsibility is to break tie votes, he has used his position to quietly insinuate himself into the very fabric of Senate deliberations and leadership. Cheney is a regular participant in the Senate GOP Tuesday meetings, where he mostly sits quietly and observes. When the White House refused to support Senate majority leader Trent Lott after he made a racist comment in 2002, Cheney didn't rise to the defense of his former House rival. Incoming Tennessee senator Bill Frist would be an infinitely more pliable leader for the White House, and thanks to the vice presidential search, Cheney already knew every skeleton that hung in Frist's closet. Yet Cheney's reach extends beyond S-214, his traditional ceremonial office in the Senate, and into areas of Congress where no vice president in American history has ever dared to tread.

The Founding Fathers were quite explicit on the matter of how independent each branch of government should be from the other. Members of Congress cannot be employed by or receive benefit from the executive branch. While the vice president has a role in the Senate, there is no comparable position for a member of the executive in the House of Representatives. This is because the House was modeled after the British House of Commons, where the monarch has been unwelcome for four centuries.

But shortly before President Bush's inauguration in January 2001, Speaker
Dennis Hastert
quietly, and without public notice, chucked aside 212 years of American tradition. He offered Vice President Dick Cheney a
second office in the U.S. Capitol
, on the House side. In the cramped domed building, workspace exists at a premium that would make even space-conscious New Yorkers wince. (In Manhattan, the average cost of real estate is more than a thousand dollars a square foot.) To make room for the vice president, Hastert ejected Representative
Bill Thomas
, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, from part of his suite of committee offices just steps from the House chamber. Now, even in their own wing of the Capitol, when House members negotiate with Cheney, legislators come to him, and not the other way around. "Offering
office space
to the vice president represented more than a breach in the symbolism concerning the powers and autonomy of the House of Representatives," notes
Scott Lilly
, a former House Appropriations Committee clerk. "Hastert's plan was to convert the House into a compliant and subservient role player inside the White Flouse political organization."