Vice (28 page)

Hastert succeeded in placing party over principle.

The vice president further cemented his influence by being attentive to the one thing that matters to congressmen above all: campaign cash. No one in the administration headlines more fundraisers for individual GOP members of Congress than Cheney. Strategically, this is understandable, but it's also tactically smart. Cheney knows better than anyone else the peril an emboldened Democratic Congress represents for a Republican administration. It boils down to two words: subpoena power. A Democratic Senate or House would allow Democratic committee chairs to subpoena documents (and individuals) that would reveal the workings of the Bush-Cheney administration. Every
fundraising
event Cheney attends not only helps keep Congress under GOP control, it's an individual chit waiting to be called by the vice president at the appropriate moment. Still, despite Cheney's considerable pull in Congress, when it came to the issue of torture, in 2005 the vice president finally hit a wall of immovable moral authority even he couldn't push through head-on.

As the pictures from Abu Ghraib and other details of detainee abuse filtered out, Arizona Republican senator John McCain experienced an almost visceral reaction. Shot down over Vietnam in 1967, McCain spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war, most of it in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison camp. When his captors discovered that he was the son of the admiral in charge of the Pacific Command at the time, the North Vietnamese offered him freedom if he would cooperate in their propaganda efforts. McCain refused and was repeatedly tortured, leaving him physically incapacitated for life.

The senator knows from experience that torture doesn't work. At one point during his captivity, the North Vietnamese tortured McCain for the names of the members of his flight squadron. Under the physical abuse he "confessed" and gave them the Green Bay Packers' offensive line instead. McCain also understands how devastatingly corrosive government-sponsored torture is to the standing and authority of the United States government both at home and abroad. He would write in an article for
Newsweek:
"What I do mourn is what we lose when by official policy or official neglect we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget that best sense of ourselves, that which is our greatest strength—that we are different and better than our enemies, that we fight for an idea, not a tribe, not a land, not a king, not a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion, but for an idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights."

In the summer of 2005, McCain offered several bills to prohibit torture by U.S. forces. For the next six months, Dick Cheney would tenaciously fight to defeat them. Cheney started his campaign with two meetings in July, including a thirty-minute nighttime session with the most powerful Republican members of the Armed Services Committee: McCain, Senator
Lindsey Graham
of South Carolina, and the chairman, Senator
John Warner
of Virginia. The vice president was explicit in making the case that if McCain's amendments passed, they would encroach on the authority of the president and make America more vulnerable to attacks by terrorists. His arguments failed to convince. A steady, sickening barrage of evidence of abuses spoke louder.

On October 5,
McCain attached an anti-torture amendment
to a $440 billion defense appropriations bill. The amendment prohibited cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners held in detention by the U.S. government. It also decreed that the
Army Field Manual
would be the uniform standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees. The field manual was at that time going through revisions, and Pentagon sources had said that it would include a section on the importance of following the Geneva Conventions in the treatment of prisoners.

On the floor of the Senate, McCain read a letter from the now retired Colin Powell. Under Powell, the State Department had fought Cheney on torture. As with most of his battles against the vice president, Powell had lost. "Our troops need to hear from Congress," he wrote. "The world will note that America is making a clear statement with respect to the expected future behavior of our soldiers."

The Senate passed McCain's amendment by a vote of 90 to 9.

But it wasn't to be that clear. Cheney wouldn't give up. The White House threatened to veto the bill, which would have been Bush's first veto ever. The vice president reportedly circulated pro-torture talking points to friendly Republicans on the Hill. A few weeks after the Senate vote, Cheney approached McCain again, this time with the hapless new CIA director
Porter Goss
in tow. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Goss had refused Democratic pleas to hold hearings on the Valerie Plame case. His appointment to head the CIA set off an exodus of talented senior staff officers who recognized they had far better prospects in the private sector than in an agency that was beginning to suffer from institutional battered-spouse syndrome. By the end of his tenure in 2006, Goss was spending more time at his farm in Virginia than in the office at Langley as he waited for his inevitable departure. At the meeting with Cheney, the CIA Director asked McCain to exempt agency personnel from his anti-torture amendment when the president believed such procedures were necessary. McCain refused.

In what should be ranked as one of the more distinguished moments in American journalism since Bush and Cheney took power, editorial writers from Anchorage to Miami condemned in the strongest possible terms the administration's practice of torture. Public opinion began to have an effect even on the ostrichlike Republican House. On November 4, the House leadership postponed a vote on a resolution endorsing McCain's amendment after they realized the measure would pass overwhelmingly.

A few days earlier, Cheney had taken a last run at Senate Republicans. During the Tuesday meeting, he had Senate staffers leave the room before giving what was described to reporters as an impassioned plea to let the CIA torture when necessary. The president needed the flexibility. If the Senate moved forward on the amendment, it could result in the loss of "thousands of lives," he said. As part of his argument, Cheney pointed to the capture of al-Qaeda leader
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
. Aggressive interrogations of Mohammed had led to important disclosures, he insisted.

Cheney didn't tell the senators anything about Mohammed's wife—or his son and daughter, ages seven and nine. They were also in custody and interrogators had told Mohammed they would be harmed if he didn't talk. Cheney didn't convey to the senators that rather than make Mohammed more talkative, the threats and the torture seemed to harden the terrorist. He likely didn't tell the senators about
Abu Zubaydah
and Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, two midlevel al-Qaeda leaders who gave false and misleading information under torture. (They started torturing Zubaydah, who suffered from split personality disorder, in May 2002. Made to think he was going to be killed, he reeled off lists of targets—supermarkets, banks, shopping malls, apartment buildings—with each new disclosure sending the U.S. government scurrying in fear to safeguard sites that defied protection.)

At the meeting, McCain challenged Cheney, saying, "This is killing us around the world."

By the middle of November, Cheney stepped away from trying to negotiate with McCain. Bush tapped National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley to continue discussions with the senator in Cheney's place. On December 15, the House passed its resolution in support of McCain's amendment 308 to 122. The next day, Bush met with McCain in the Oval Office. Cheney was not there. In a startling reversal, Bush endorsed the McCain amendment. In exchange, the senator agreed to language that would allow intelligence officers to present a defense that a "reasonable" person could conclude they were following a lawful order. The media billed it as a major setback for the vice president.

Three days later, an unbowed vice president gave a startling interview to
Nightline's
Terry Moran
. When asked where the president drew the line on torture, Cheney said the rule, according to court decisions, was "whether or not it shocks the conscience."

Here was how Cheney could say with a straight face that America didn't torture: "Now you can get into a debate about what shocks the conscience and what is cruel and inhuman. And to some extent, I suppose, that's in the eye of the beholder."

There he was, Dick Cheney, nakedly amoral, and driven by fear: "We think it's important to remember that we are in a war against a group of individuals, a terrorist organization that did in fact slaughter three thousand innocent Americans on 9/11; that it's important for us to be able to have effective interrogation of these people when we capture them," Cheney continued.

Unspoken was the concern that 9/11 was just a beginning, a prelude to much more terrifying attacks—a dirty bomb, poison gas in a subway, the release of a biological agent—in which as many as half a million could die. Future attacks could visit a degree of death on America not seen since the Civil War. It wasn't a matter of
if
as much as
when.
The fear of the big attack gave birth to a new doctrine.
Ron Suskind, in his remarkably insightful book
The One Percent Doctrine,
describes the epiphany Cheney experienced: "If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction—and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time—the United States must now act as if it was a certainty." It was prevention based on suspicion, dealt with by the application of overwhelming blunt force. The end justified any means necessary. It didn't matter how effective torture was as long as it provided even a remote chance that it might save American lives.

"That one percent drove Cheney and Bush nuts," says Wilkerson. "In certain respects, they became paranoids, willing to sacrifice every element of our civil liberties, even our republic, to save the republic."

A lifetime of experience had influenced the development of Cheney's new doctrine, not just the events of 9/11. Dick Cheney had thought about worst-case scenarios for almost half a century. What else would make a young man who supported the Vietnam War seek five deferments to avoid it, other than a fear of a personal worst-case scenario? Cheney's first heart attack at thirty-seven brought him face to face with his own mortality. As vice president, he lives with it ever)
⁷
day. A device implanted near his heart keeps him from sudden death. An ambulance trails him wherever he goes, as does a team of the most sophisticated armed guards on the planet. He travels with a bioterrorism suit in case of an attack and spends time in undisclosed locations deep underground, practicing for Armageddon.

Cheney is one of the few people alive who has prepared for the possibility of a nuclear attack on the United States. In fact, he regularly simulated the experience during the 1980s. The highly classified program went by the nondescript title of "the National Program Office," but it had a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. About once a year, Cheney would make his way to Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of the night. There he joined forty to sixty federal officials and a member of Reagan's cabinet on one of three teams that would fly or drive to secret bunkers. Lead-lined trucks with sophisticated communications hardware followed. For three or four days they would pretend that nuclear catastrophe with the Soviets had occurred. What they wanted was speed of decisionmaking. Rather then follow federal law and the constitutional order of presidential succession, they planned for a different future. The former chiefs of staff, a very short list that included Cheney and Rumsfeld, would provide experience to the cabinet member-leader, who owing to circumstances would most likely be a figurehead at the start. They discussed what to do about Congress, according to
James Mann
, then a writer at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was the first to write extensively about the program. "One of the awkward questions we faced," Mann quoted one participant, "was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." They also failed to involve Congress in these post-doomsday plans, making no effort to keep the constitutional framework intact.

After the trauma of 9/11, the Bush administration ramped up the government exercises in which Cheney had been involved under Reagan. The specifics of the government's current doomsday plans are some of its most tightly held secrets. For the first time, high-level officials including the vice president participated in the exercises. Millions of dollars went into renovating secure living quarters and updating communication capabilities. For many members of the administration, and particularly for Cheney, the nightmare scenario is ever present, and it warps their thinking.

During the Ford administration, Cheney told an interviewer about how best to serve a president. It was essential "to see to it that the president has the information he needs to make an intelligent decision so that he doesn't have a blind center," Cheney said. The blind center was that crucial factor you couldn't see but absolutely needed to know.

Fear has become Dick Cheney's blind center, although maybe it always was. And now, all the adults who throughout his career helped keep his darker impulses in check—Gerald Ford, Ed Levi, Tip O'Neill, Jim Baker, George H. W. Bush—are gone. Cheney is in charge, with the highly effective David Addington, his super-id. cracking heads to force compliance.

Cheney could afford to be cavalier about McCain's amendment. In the end, it proved largely meaningless. The vice president retreated back into the shadows, the place where he has always operated most effectively. The Army Field Manual that would spell out the principle that U.S. forces do not torture would be delayed if not outright suppressed. By early July 2006, the Pentagon still had not produced the manual. In classic Cheney-Addington form, torture advocates wanted a classified appendix that would include more savage interrogation techniques. Even Army commanders opposed that idea, as did McCain and the other Senate leaders on the Armed Services Committee. Cheney was getting increasing flak from within the administration as public disclosure led to stronger resistance; but he and Addington were ready. For decades, they had closely studied the mechanisms for increasing executive power.