Vice (31 page)

Speaking from the bench in the stark, cavernous courthouse, the judge also spelled out what the case is not about:

"I'm not willing to let this case end up to be a judicial resolution on the war or the statements the president made."

Yet when the trial begins in January, the court of public opinion will be focused on the issue Judge Walton promises not to put on trial. The subtext has become the text. It is evident that Dick Cheney was made aware of Wilson's findings in Niger. Yet he and others at the CIA and on the White House staff allowed the president to utter those sixteen words— which were put to the lie by Joe Wilson's fifteen-hundred words in
The New York Times.

When the criminal case is done with, Scooter Libby will again be compelled to answer the same questions Fitzgerald is asking. In July, Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame filed suit, naming Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and ten unnamed defendants in a suit that makes the same charges Fitzgerald did. Fitzgerald, in fact, had done much of the leg-work for Wilson and Plame, providing through his criminal investigation pretrial "discovery" that would have cost Wilson and Plame hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their suit was filed in the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse on Judiciary Square in Washington.

Scooter Libby can be pardoned. The president can plead ignorance. Dick Cheney cannot. He knew when he decided to take the country into war that there was no real evidence Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. As secretary of defense in the first Gulf War, he presided over the bombing of all the suspected nuclear weapons facilities in Iraq, each one identified with precise targeting coordinates. He knew that U.N. inspectors had been all over the country. He knew that German and French intelligence services had concluded there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. And he knew that the CIA had concluded there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. Yet he sent American soldiers into what has turned out to be a prolonged, failed, and unpopular war, with a cost that will exceed $300 billion and the death or disfigurement of tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis.

His justification for doing so was a handful of forged documents that he knew were bullshit.

In a hotel restaurant at Pentagon City, a retired general wears a grimace on his face as he speaks. "The Army is broken," he says. "It will take decades to fix." He had seen the first Gulf War up close, watching Dick Cheney and Colin Powell ensure that there were adequate forces deployed before they commenced hostilities. He knew the vice president when Cheney was secretary of defense.

"It was different then," he says. "The staffs were apolitical. And the military was taken care of. If we made a mistake, we did no irreparable harm. Cheney now seems oblivious to what the military needs. That's because he trusts Rumsfeld. . . .

"So we have an army that is broken. The DOD is broken. And the process is broken. Rumsfeld has left us with the smallest army since 1941. First time in the history of the country that we haven't surged up the Army in time of war. We have
never
not surged up the Army in time of war. They can't recruit. So we redeploy, and redeploy, and redeploy, and break down the Army.

"They're not surging up, and they're burning through equipment in Iraq." Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have done, he says, "irreparable harm" to the Army.

Across the river in Foggy Bottom, Larry Wilkerson makes a similar argument. "They have gone through so much equipment in Iraq," Wilkerson says. He argues that the real test the military faces will not be on a foreign battlefield, but in Washington. "The first challenge," he says, "is going to be the reconstitution bill that will confront the next president. I mean bringing the ground forces, and to a certain extent the Air Force, back to levels pre-Iraq. They have burned up Abrams tanks, Humvees, wheeled vehicles, five-tons, eight-tons, Apache helicopters, Chinook helicopters, all very expensive hardware, at a rate which is astronomical." This will all be left for the next Congress to repair. Wilkerson also believes recruiting an army after this war is going to be very difficult.

Another institution that will be
in need of repair
when Dick Cheney and George W. Bush return to the private sector is the CIA. The vice president's visits to the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters in the run-up to the Iraq War, accompanied by his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and others from the OVP, will adversely affect the agency's ability to provide accurate intelligence for decades.

Former CIA analyst Mel Goodman, who spent twenty-five years at the agency, says the damage is lasting, if not permanent. "The CIA is a brittle bureaucracy, fragile as any other," he says. "It's now broken."

"In the history of the agency, I've never heard of a vice president making specific demands of analysts," says a former deputy director of the agency. "It's never occurred. It's without precedent." It will, he says, change the way the CIA functions. Analysts and supervisors are bureaucrats, sensitive to the complaint that bureaucracies are unresponsive.

He shares Goodman's concerns. "The mere fact that [Cheney and Libby] were out there will generate in the bureaucracy—and the CIA is a bureaucracy—a sort of thinking that says 'Gee, can we make them happy, can we continue to satisfy them?' That's not the sort of thinking you want in any intelligence agency."

The agency, he says, already had morale and organizational problems. The damage didn't end with the visits to Langley, but continued through the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and the appointment of Porter Goss as director of the agency.

An impaired intelligence agency and an impaired military are the contradictory legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration. Contradictory if only because Bush described himself as a "war president" who would fix the intelligence system that failed the nation on September 11, 2001. Yet the problems are identifiable, and they can be fixed—if a president and a Congress can summon the political courage and imagination to address them.

Over coffee at the University Club a few blocks from the White House, constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein has a lot to say about the assault under way on the safeguards America's founders created to keep the nation free. Fein has been around the block a few times in Washington. He has argued cases before the Supreme Court, so he understands the importance of saying all that needs to be said while the clock is running. On this particular morning he is speaking at a Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque pace, trope after pressurized trope, delivering a magisterial defense of a Constitution under attack by Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Dick Cheney exercises all the powers of the presidency," Fein says. "He has great contempt for Congress. You can get pretty cynical about Congress. Some of these people are yahoos. But that's not the point. You don't have to be brilliant to provide the checks and balances. You just need the constant questioning, the restraint."

Fein dismisses Cheney's argument that Congress overreached when it requested the names of participants in his energy task force meetings. "Bogus" and "Specious," he says. He's equally dismissive of the administration's defense of its warrantless wiretapping. "This is a crime," Fein states flatly. "FISA says if you operate or undertake electronic surveillance on American citizens, it's illegal. They don't need to do this to spy on al-Qaeda outside the country. It's not necessary. . . . The president could have asked for changes in FISA. They've amended it five times. . . . The important thing is to get the constitutional issues right. These are crimes against the constitutional architecture."

Fein doesn't expect Congress to set things right. "Congress is too philosophically ignorant to know how much of their power is being usurped," he says. He also sees the current congressional majority as accommodating the president because they belong to the same party. "They don't think about the future. The destiny of the nation is too long-term for them." After spending almost half of the last century in the minority, the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress reached a tacit agreement with the executive branch: Congress surrendered much of its constitutional authority to the president in exchange for partisan political dominance. It's particularly unfortunate that they did so on the eve of a terrorist attack that has made fear a political campaign tool.

Waiving away the waiter, Fein continues to describe the larger and more lasting structural damage done by the vice president—damage to the Constitution and the system of government it has defined for two hundred and thirty years. In the decade that followed Watergate, the Congress reasserted the authority vested in it by the Framers and redefined constitutional limits for an executive branch that refused to recognize them. It did so in response to a very evident constitutional crisis. What the vice president refers to as "the post-9/11 world" has delivered the country into another, although still largely invisible, constitutional crisis—in this case, an executive branch that has very low regard for the Bill of Rights, or for the Congress.

Whether the Democrats can take control of Congress, and, should they do so, whether they would somehow find the vision and political courage to confront the current constitutional crisis, are questions that, unfortunately, address our last best hope. The account of Ben Franklin emerging from the Pennsylvania State House after the ratification of the Constitution has been told so many times it is now a part of our received historical wisdom. As the story has it, a woman in the crowd gathered on the Philadelphia street shouted out to Franklin: "What sort of government have you given us?"

Franklin's reply was brief:

"A republic, if you can keep it."

The intersection of Dick Cheney, a supine Republican Congress, and four commercial jetliners transformed into terrorist weapons give Ben Franklin's response a currency it has not had since the Civil War.

1. Why was your energy task force reviewing maps of Iraqi oilfields in 2001, two years prior to the Iraq War, while Iraq oil was embargoed?

2. After the initial military success in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003, the Iranian government offered to negotiate with the United States regarding al-Qaeda, relations with Israel, and the Iranian nuclear energy and weapons program. Why did you kill the negotiations before they began?

3. Do you believe that in wartime there are any limits on the powers of the commander in chief, and if so, what are they?

4. What was the extent of your participation in the awarding of the no-bid single source contracts the Army Corps of Engineers awarded to Halliburton?

5. What were your intentions when you scribbled in the margins of
The New York Times
on July 6, 2003, "did his wife send him on a junket?"

6. At what point were you aware that Niger was not providing large quantities of uranium "yellow cake" to Iraq?

7. Exactly how many times did you visit CIA headquarters prior to the Iraq War, and what did you ask of the CIA analysts with whom you met?

8. How do you explain the complete reversal of your position on invading and occupying Iraq, a course of action you unequivocally opposed as George H. W. Bush's secretary of defense?

9. How do you justify ignoring CIA pleas for more U.S. forces when American and Northern Alliance forces had Osama bin Laden trapped in a cave complex in Tora Bora?

10. Was it your expectation leading up to the Iraq War that Ahmed Chalabi would replace Saddam Hussein, and did you or your staff discuss the organization of a provisional or future government of Iraq with Chalabi?

11. Considering that American and European intelligence sources were discounting the idea at the time, where did you get the information on which you based your claim that the Iraqi government was developing nuclear weapons in 2002?

12. What foreign policy instructions did you convey to your daughter Elizabeth while she was in the number two spot at the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs of the State Department?

13. Considering the North Korean missile tests in June 2006 and North Korea's development of nuclear weapons, how do you justify the constraints you personally imposed on a negotiation agenda that had been drafted and approved by the president and secretary of state in 2004?

14. Do you believe that human-caused global warming is a reality? If so, do you believe the U. S. government has an obligation to do something about it?

15. Why doesn't the public have a right to know who serves on the vice president's staff and the size and details of the staff budget office and how many documents it has classified?

16. How long do you envision continuing warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, surveillance of their financial and telephone records, and other extraordinary domestic measures your administration has put in place to fight the "global war against terror"?

17. If there were to be a major attack on the United States involving weapons of mass destruction, what plans are in place for continuity of government, and will they comply with the constitutional statutory line of succession?

18. Do you believe the administration's signing statements take precedence over congressional statutes? How have these signing statements been put into effect in executive branch actions?

19. What was your involvement, either independently or through David Addington, in the drafting of the Yoo and Bybee memos justifying torture?

20. Are you still receiving any compensation of any kind from Halliburton, and would you provide an account of all Halliburton compensation you have received since you became George Bush's vice presidential nominee?

21. What request did Ken Lay make of you regarding Enron and the California electricity markets in 2001?

22. Did you have any discussions with Jack Stanley about bribing Nigerian officials while you were CEO at Halliburton?

23. Will you release the full list of names of the donors to the 2000 Presidential Transition Foundation and the amounts they gave?

24. Is the public subsidizing in any way your frequent travel to and attendance at fundraising events for congressional candidates?

25. Why won't you release your complete medical history and list of medications you take?