[Mb-civic] Cheney's Secret Powers - Dan Froomkin - Washington Post Blog

William Swiggard swiggard at comcast.net
Sat Feb 18 06:22:48 PST 2006


Cheney's Secret Powers

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, February 17, 2006; 12:24 PM

Toward the end of an interview that was primarily about his accidental 
shooting of a hunting buddy, Vice President Cheney on Wednesday made a 
blunt but possibly unjustified assertion about his power to declassify 
government secrets. Then he clammed up.

 From the transcript 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502005.html> 
of Cheney's interview with Fox News's Brit Hume:

Hume: "Let me ask you another question. Is it your view that a Vice 
President has the authority to declassify information?"

Cheney: "There is an executive order to that effect."

Hume: "There is."

Cheney: "Yes."

Hume: "Have you done it?"

Cheney: "Um, well, I've certainly advocated declassification and 
participated in declassification decisions. The executive order --"

Hume: " You ever done it unilaterally?"

Cheney blinked and paused. (Here's the video 
<http://www.foxnews.com/video2/player05.html?021506/021506_sr_cheney3&Special_Report&Breaking%20His%20Silence&acc&Special%20Report&152&col> 
of that part of the interview.)

Cheney: "Um, I don't want to get into that."

But if Cheney is so confident in his authority, why the hesitation to 
acknowledge that he has used it?

As Peter Baker 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/15/AR2006021502413.html> 
wrote in The Washington Post yesterday: "Cheney was referring to an 
executive order <http://www.fas.org/sgp/clinton/eo12958.html> on 
classification of information first signed by President Bill Clinton in 
1995. In March 2003, just days after ordering U.S. troops into Iraq, 
President Bush amended 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030325-11.html> [the] 
order to, among other things, give the vice president the same 
classification power as the president."

But classification power is not the same as declassification power.

Washington Post national security reporter Dana Priest 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/02/10/DI2006021001326.html> 
was asked about Cheney's assertion in a Live Online discussion yesterday:

"Washington, D.C.: To your knowledge, does the Vice President really 
have the authority to just declare material unclassified?

"Dana Priest: Lots of questions on this one so I turned to my 
classification guru, Steve Aftergood, at the Federation of American 
Scientists. Answer: 1) The VP can declassify anything that his office 
classified or generated initially. 2) The VP can declassify other 
executive branch information only if the president has given him 
implicit or explicit authority to do so, which is not self-evident in 
Executive Order 13292 of 3/25/03 3) Not even the president can 
declassify everything. . . . For more, go to www.fas.org/blog/secrecy 
<http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy>. A great site. So, the bottom line is, 
we'll probably have to get the president to answer whether he delegated 
this to the VP, and/or if the information in question was generated from 
the VP's office."

In fact, here's what Aftergood 
<http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2006/02/the_vice_presidents_declassifi.html> 
wrote in his blog yesterday: "[I]s the Vice President, like the 
President, 'a supervisory official' with respect to other executive 
branch agencies such as the CIA? Did the 2003 amendment to the executive 
order which elevated the Vice President's classification authority also 
grant him declassification authority comparable to the President's?

" 'The answer is not obvious,' said one executive branch expert on 
classification policy."

The Liberal Oasis 
<http://www.liberaloasis.com/archives/021206.htm#021606> blog, the 
Washington Note <http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001253.php> 
and Daily Kos <http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/2/16/104857/925> are 
all skeptical.

Hume's question, of course, came in the context of a Murray Waas 
<http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0209nj1.htm> 
report last week that Cheney's indicted former chief of staff, Scooter 
Libby, has claimed that his superiors authorized him to disclose 
classified information to journalists.

Kenneth R. Bazinet 
<http://www.nydailynews.com/02-17-2006/news/story/392104p-332555c.html> 
writes in the New York Daily News: "Vice President Cheney may be getting 
over one political headache to find he has got another, this time for 
asserting he has the authority to declassify government secrets.

"Critics suspect he may be relying on that power to protect himself from 
legal trouble."

Bazinet writes: "If Cheney claims he had declassified that information, 
it might help him, or anyone else allegedly involved, to avoid 
prosecution, legal experts surmised."

Byron York <http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200602160841.asp>, 
writing for the National Review, marvels at the "little-known but 
enormously consequential expansion of vice-presidential power that has 
come about as a result of the Bush administration's war on terror. . . .

"At the time, Bush's order received very little coverage in the press. . 
. . But as Cheney pointed out Wednesday, the Bush order . . . 
significantly increased the vice president's power. . . .

"In the last several years, there has been much talk about the powerful 
role Dick Cheney plays in the Bush White House. Some of that talk has 
been based on anecdotal evidence, and some on entirely fanciful 
speculation. But Executive Order 13292 is real evidence of real power in 
the vice president's office."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann spoke with Newsweek's Richard Wolffe last night 
about the reality of declassification in the Bush White House.

Wolffe: "They declassify when they feel like it. I've been with senior 
administration officials who have just decided to declassify something 
in front of me because it's bolstering their argument."

At the time that Libby was leaking information from the CIA's National 
Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, "Saddam was no longer in power. And I 
think people felt emboldened to leak information, to declassify stuff, 
because the regime was no longer there," Wolffe said. "They were also 
feeling very insecure, because the case [for war] was falling apart, and 
they felt the pressure. . . ."

Olbermann: "I'm just picturing that experience in my mind. Is there a 
puff of smoke? Is it akin to alchemy when they declassify something?

Wolffe: "There was a sort of frowning, a reaching into a locked cabinet, 
a filing cabinet, and the sort of, you know, 'Should we declassify this? 
Oh, yeah, let's go do it. Not a very formal process.' "

And what senior officials could Wolffe be talking about? Earlier, he 
told Olbermann: "What I know from my own reporting is that in this 
period, a couple of months after Saddam is toppled from power, really 
it's only the vice president's office that is exercised --- excessively 
exercised -- about the holes that are being picked in the case for war, 
specifically about weapons of mass destruction."

About That Hunting Accident

As for that hunting accident Cheney was involved in, Bush took 
reporter's questions for the first time this week and here 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060216-4.html> is 
what he had to say:

"I thought the Vice President handled the issue just fine. He went 
through -- and I thought his explanation yesterday was a powerful 
explanation. This is a man who likes the outdoors and he likes to hunt. 
And he heard a bird flush and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw 
his friend get wounded. And it was a deeply traumatic moment for him, 
and obviously for the -- it was a tragic moment for Harry Whittington.

"And so I thought his explanation yesterday was a very strong and 
powerful explanation, and I'm satisfied with the explanation he gave. . . .

"Q But are you satisfied about the timing?

"PRESIDENT BUSH: I'm satisfied with the explanation he gave."

As Brian Williams 
<http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?f=00&g=3d959e5a-d511-48c3-aca8-32be587eed48> 
put it on the NBC Nightly News: "The White House made it very clear 
today, in their view, this story is over."

But, he said: "The questions that continue tonight have to do mostly 
with the damage this bizarre accident has caused."

Kelly O'Donnell then raised the alcohol issue: "Whittington called it an 
accident and told investigators, 'foremost there was no alcohol during 
the hunt.' The report makes no other reference to any drinking or that 
any blood alcohol tests were ever done. The vice president did say in 
his Fox TV interview that he had a beer at lunch, noting that was hours 
before the shooting."

She also noted: "Observers say the whole ordeal has weakened Mr. 
Cheney's influence."

But Was Cheney Reckless?

I amassed a slew of unanswered questions about the shooting in 
yesterday's column 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/02/16/BL2006021601183.html>.

Sheriff Ramon Salinas III of tiny Kenedy County, Texas, released a 
sketchy report 
<http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0216061cheney1.html> on the 
incident yesterday. But it raised more questions than answers.

Tom Brune 
<http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usbush0217,0,3154069.story?coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines> 
writes in Newsday: "Vice President Dick Cheney turned around in nearly a 
complete circle to follow a flushed quail before accidentally shooting 
his companion, the local sheriff's office indicated in a report closing 
its investigation Thursday.

"That scenario, which raises the question of whether Cheney was firing 
outside of a 'safety zone,' is one of many details in the five-page 
report by the Kenedy County Sheriff's office in Texas, the only agency 
to probe Cheney's wounding of Harry Whittington Saturday."

Cheney told Hume on Wednesday that when the shooting took place, he was 
on the "far right" of the hunting party, which at that point included 
Swiss Ambassador Pamela Willeford and a guide mounted on horseback. But 
here's what Cheney apparently told Chief Deputy Gilberto San Miguel: 
"There was a single bird that flew behind him and he followed the bird 
by line of sight in a counter clockwise direction."

If he was indeed to the right of Willeford and the guide, and he swung 
his gun counter clockwise, then he's lucky he didn't shoot them, too.

As James Pinkerton 
<http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3666111.html> writes in the 
Houston Chronicle: "The report seemed to contradict Cheney's televised 
account of the shooting in which he said he turned to his right to shoot 
the rising bird. . . .

"In the report, the vice president is described as turning 
counterclockwise, to the west, to fire at the bird. . . .

"Attempts to contact Chief Deputy Gilberto San Miguel about the seeming 
contradiction were unsuccessful."

Pinkerton spoke to ranch matriarch Anne Armstrong. "I promise you there 
is no cover-up," she told Pinkerton. But she also told him that the 
ranch employees who guided Cheney's hunting party, and presumably saw 
everything, will not be making any comments.

How Close Were They?

One big question: Was Cheney actually considerably closer to Whittington 
than he and his witnesses have indicated?

Elisabeth Bumiller and Ralph Blumenthal 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/politics/17cheney.html?hp&ex=1140152400&en=ae1f373f8fc9fc89&ei=5094&partner=homepage> 
write in the New York Times: "Some leading medical examiners, veteran 
hunters and shooting experts said on Thursday that the shooting might 
have been at much closer range than cited in the accounts, based on 
reports of Mr. Whittington's medical condition.

"Dr. Michael M. Baden, director of the Medico-Legal Investigations Unit 
of the New York State Police, estimated that Mr. Whittington was 15 
yards from Mr. Cheney when he was shot. 'Witnesses' estimates of 
distances are notoriously off in such accidents,' Dr. Baden said.

"But Duncan MacPherson, author of the book 'Bullet Penetration,' said it 
was plausible that Mr. Whittington was 30 yards away. 'The difference 
between 20 yards and 30 yards would be too small to probably tell any 
difference,' he said."

John Pomfret 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021601454.html> 
writes in The Washington Post: "Other hunters questioned why Cheney was 
shooting down at a flying bird. 'The idea behind quail hunting is that 
you have to hit the quail when it's about five to 10 feet in the air,' 
said Wade Wilson, a South Texas hunting guide. 'Quail don't fly very 
high. But nobody should be shooting down.' "

Cheney was also shooting right into a setting sun.

No Safety Courses

Jennifer McKee 
<http://www.helenair.com/articles/2006/02/14/national/a06021406_04.txt> 
writes in the Helena, Mont., Independent Record: "Vice President Dick 
Cheney, who shot his companion in a Texas hunting accident over the 
weekend, has not taken state-offered hunter's safety education courses 
in either his home state of Wyoming or Texas, records show."

Secret Service Stays Mum

Agence France Presse 
<http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060216/pl_afp/uspoliticscheney_060216191935> 
reports: "Vice President Dick Cheney's official Secret Service 
bodyguards do not expect to conduct a formal investigation into his 
weekend shooting incident, a spokesman for the agency said.

" 'It wasn't necessarily a security incident,' US Secret Service 
spokesman Eric Zahner told AFP by telephone. 'We don't feel that the 
vice president was ever in any danger.' . . .

"Asked whether that meant that there would be a formal secret service 
investigation in Saturday's shooting, Zahner replied: 'I would say "no." ' "

Dump Cheney Watch

Surprise. The rumors are back.

Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan 
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007972> kicked 
things into high gear yesterday in the Wall Street Journal: "I suspect 
what they're thinking and not saying [at the Bush White House] is, If 
Dick Cheney weren't vice president, who'd be a good vice president? 
They're thinking, At some time down the road we may wind up thinking 
about a new plan. And one night over drinks at a barbecue in McLean one 
top guy will turn to another top guy and say, 'Under the never permeable 
and never porous Dome of Silence, tell me . . . wouldn't you like to 
replace Cheney?'"

John J. Miller 
<http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200602170818.asp> wonders in 
the National Review: "If Cheney were to leave the vice presidency, for 
health reasons or something else, who should President Bush choose as 
his replacement?"

Jackie Calmes and Greg Hitt 
<http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114012506594076243-3d2i2xqQTWIriyas85F0zMx4zdY_20070217.html?mod=blogs> 
write in the Wall Street Journal: "Republicans face a perplexing 
question: Is Dick Cheney a political asset or liability?"

Who Paid?

 From MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews last night:

Matthews: "Do we know who paid for this trip?"

New York Times reporter Anne E. Kornblut: "Oh that's a -- not Jack 
Abramoff. That's not what you're suggesting."

Matthews: "We don't know who paid for the trip."

Kornblut: "I don't. I don't."

Matthews: "I don't know. Do you, Jim, who paid for this hunting trip?"

Washington Post reporter Jim VandeHei: "Some taxpayers picked up a big 
part of it. I mean, he travels with a big contingency of Secret Service, 
obviously uses government plans, and also has a medical staff that the 
government."

Matthews: "Yes, the reason I ask that is on behalf of every member of 
the House and the Senate who are told they can't take 50 bucks from any 
lobbyist, and here the guy is, the guest of some big shot down there. 
Isn't there any limit on how hospitality he can accept?"

Kornblut: "Good question."

The White House and the Media

Steven Thomma 
<http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/nation/13890733.htm> 
writes for Knight Ridder Newspapers: "To many on the outside, it looked 
like a mistake when Vice President Dick Cheney failed to notify the 
White House press corps first of his shooting accident. But in the White 
House, it reflected a strategy of marginalizing the press.

"More than ever, the Bush White House ignores traditional news media and 
presents its message through friendly alternatives, such as talk-show 
hosts Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

"And when a reporter appears belligerent in a televised confrontation 
with the White House spokesman, as NBC's David Gregory did this week, 
the imagery helps the administration turn the story into one about the 
press, which energizes a Republican base that hates the media anyway."

Frank James 
<http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2006/02/why_we_fought_f.html> 
writes in the Chicago Tribune's blog, the Swamp: "Vice President Cheney 
and some commenters to the Swamp have opined that perhaps the reason the 
Washington press corps reacted the way we did to not being informed 
sooner of the vice president's hunting accident was due to jealousy that 
a small newspaper in Corpus Christi, Tex. broke the story.

"I can't speak for the entire Washington press corps but I think I can 
speak for many of us in saying that the vice president and commenters 
are wrong. Jealousy had nothing to do with our reaction."

As Mike Allen 
<http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1159864,00.html> pointed 
out for Time, the "normal method" of alerting the press to a major story 
takes about five minutes. "A Bush communications official picks up the 
phone anywhere in the world and says to the White House operator, 'I 
need to make a wire call.' A few minutes later, the operator calls back 
with Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg reporters on the line, 
ready to flash the news around the world."

No Oversight Watch

Charles Babington and Carol D. Leonnig 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021602155.html> 
write in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration helped derail a 
Senate bid to investigate a warrantless eavesdropping program yesterday 
after signaling it would reject Congress's request to have former 
attorney general John D. Ashcroft and other officials testify about the 
program's legality. The actions underscored a dramatic and possibly 
permanent drop in momentum for a congressional inquiry, which had seemed 
likely two months ago."

Meanwhile, Eric Lichtblau and Sheryl Gay Stolberg 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/politics/17nsa.html?_r=1&oref=slogin> 
write in the New York Times: "Leaders of the House Intelligence 
Committee said Thursday that they had agreed to open a Congressional 
inquiry prompted by the Bush administration's domestic surveillance 
program. But a dispute immediately broke out among committee Republicans 
over the scope of the inquiry."

Uranium Watch

Bob Drogin and Tom Hamburger 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-niger17feb17,0,2310215,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage> 
write in the Los Angeles Times that even though unconfirmed reports that 
Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Niger kept getting knocked down 
by experienced intelligence officers, they were embraced by the White House.

"A review by the Los Angeles Times of those seemingly independent 
intelligence reports leads to the conclusion that they were based on 
information contained in forged documents that an Italian ex-spy was 
trying to sell to Western intelligence agencies in 2001 and 2002.

"The story refused to die for several reasons, including a strong 
appetite in the Pentagon and the White House for information that 
supported a case for war, and a widely recognized phenomenon in the 
intelligence field in which bad information, when repeated by multiple 
sources, appears to be corroborated."

Personnel Watch

Al Kamen 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021602013.html> 
writes in The Washington Post: "White House deputy press secretary Trent 
Duffy is calling it quits. Duffy, a highly regarded communications 
veteran -- House Ways and Means Committee, Republican National 
Committee, and the Office of Management and Budget-- is said to be going 
private, likely to his own consulting operation. Anything to be read 
into the timing of this departure? 'The reasons I am leaving are simple: 
My wife is pregnant and my checkbook isn't,' he said."

According to my handy White House salary list 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/administration/whbriefing/2005stafflistb.html>, 
Duffy was making $133,000 a year.

Why Did He Resign?

Claude Allen <http://www.whitehouse.gov/ask/question.html>, Bush's chief 
domestic policy adviser, is doing his very last "Ask the White House" 
this afternoon. And yes, I've already submitted the obvious question: 
Why did you resign 
<http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2006/02/safety_net.html>? 
Was it in protest of Pentagon policies 
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060209-115736-9463r.htm> you 
consider too restrictive of religious expression at the service academies?

Heckuva Job Watch

What does Bush think of the man responsible for the botched rollout of 
the Medicare prescription plan?

Here he is at an event yesterday 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060216-3.html> at the 
Department of Health and Human Services, making reference to its secretary:

"THE PRESIDENT: Thanks, Mike Leavitt -- where are you, Michael? Surely, 
he's here? (Laughter.) . . . Oh, he's in Florida. Okay. Surfing. 
(Laughter.) Actually, I saw him this morning -- don't make excuses for 
him. He's doing a heck of a job, he really is. . . . "


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/02/17/BL2006021701060.html?nav=hcmodule
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