It's getting serious: Conservative Calls for Impeachment of Cheney

A prominent conservative, Bruce Fein, calls for the impeachment of Cheney. He is an attorney with expertise in constitutional law. Here are his credentials.

Bruce Fein Biography

"Mr. Fein has been an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a resident scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a lecturer at the Bookings Institute, and an adjunct professor at George Washington University. He has also been executive editor of World Intelligence Review, a periodical devoted to national security and intelligence issues. He regularly lectures to foreign guests and dignitaries visiting the United States on behalf of the State Department."

Here is a sampling of what he argues:

"The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists. This lawlessness has been answered in Germany and Italy with criminal charges against CIA operatives or agents. The legal precedent set by Cheney would justify a decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to kidnap American tourists in Paris and to dispatch them to dungeons in Belarus if they were suspected of Chechen sympathies."

America was founded to prevent people like Cheney from gaining power. Why isn't our system working anymore?

The Puppet-Master and the Sock

Marty Lederman, one of the lawyer contributors to the legal blog Balkinization, dissects the organizational meaning of the series the Washington Post just completed on Angler, aka Dick Cheney. It comes back to the simple fact that Bush is so out of his league as POTUS that he has stepped back and allowed himself to be ruthlessly manipulated by Cheney and his office. In the process, the top levels of government have foregone the normal cross-functional reviews and debate that must be behind all major policy decisions with disastrous results in policy after policy. The inmates have literally taken over the asylum. I don't think we, the American people and certainly our supposed watchdogs the press, realize yet how much the very character of our nation has been damaged and even destroyed by these zealots.

This excerpt is long but its conclusions are inescapable:

As the Post's Becker/Gellman series continues to describe tomorrow with respect to Cheney's dominance of even environmental policymaking, for all practical purposes the OVP is the Bush Administration, and its views become the official views of the Administration, no matter what others in the Administration think. Call it the Unitary Shadow-Executive.

A couple of days ago, I asked the befuddling question left unanswered by Gellman and Becker: Why? After all, there are extremists and hard-liners in every Administration, and they are often at the table, and even influential. But the internal Executive branch process is designed to ensure that multiple perspectives are considered, and therefore the most extreme and most uncompromising positions rarely prevail. In this Administration, the OVP almost invariably wins. Indeed, the VP wins after cutting everyone else out of the loop altogether. And everyone else is incredulous at this radical departure from the ordinary modes of decision making. (I know from experience that this was so at OLC early in the Administration, and not only among us Clinton holdovers -- and we know from Becker/Gellman and others that it was also true at DoD, State, CIA, NSC, etc.) And yet the pattern continues apace, even to this very day, with David Addington apparently feeling free to simply ignore the ordinary methods by which an Administration typically arives at a legal interpretation.

Part of the explanation is, of course, that Addington and Cheney win because they are unrelenting. Everyone else in D.C., i.e., the other players in the Executive branch, have gotten to where they are today by learning to compromise and negotiate, to play the give and take of institutional decision making. These guys, however, don't give an inch, while everyone else is still in the reality-based community that they know and love. In most institutions, such stubborness and unwillingness to compromise would lead to marginalization. But in this one, the Vice President and Addington simply wear people out -- no one relishes the fight, and so they simply give up. Victory by attrition and intimidation. (It also helps, of course, that Rumsfeld, Cambone, Gonzales, Flannigan and Miers were complicit . . . .)

But a larger part of the explanation is simply that Cheney always wins because, for some reason, the President has decided that that is how it should be. Which only clarifies that the real question is why the President allows this to happen.

In a great series of posts, all linked here, Hilzoy concludes that the Becker/Gellman story can only be explained by a bunch of cabinet officials who are dysfunctional, allowing an "insane" process to continue unabated. She focuses on the astonishing fact that Colin Powell and Condi Rice only found out about the August 2002 Torture memo from newspaper accounts two years after the fact:
Stop and think about that for a moment. A memo making an absolutely radical, 180 degree change in US detention and interrogation policy in ways that will predictably have an enormous impact on our standing in the world is signed, and neither the Secretary of State nor the National Security Advisor finds out about it until two years later? From a newspaper article?

Similarly, Powell and Rice did not find out about the President's military commission order until after it was issued . . . as to which Hilzoy writes:
Again, a major policy decision is made, one that will have huge effects on our relations with other countries, and Powell and Rice find out about it after the fact, from CNN.

This is insane.

***

Here's a reflection that is not exactly rocket science: it's much, much better to find out what's wrong with an idea before you adopt it, not afterwards. The way you try to maximize the chance of finding out what's wrong with your ideas before you adopt them is to make sure that your policy proposals are vigorously debated beforehand. Sometimes you can do a long policy vetting process involving zillions of people and inter-agency confabs and all that; sometimes you only have time for a vigorous brainstorming session among principals; but you should never, never make decisions without serious debate if you can possibly avoid it.

* * * *

There is simply no way in which Dick Cheney could have operated as he did in an organization that was not utterly dysfunctional. None. And at least part of that dysfunction has to be put down to the astonishing passivity of his co-workers. . . .

[Rice and Powell] are the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State. . . . [T]hey should have gone to the President the first time something like this happened and said: we refuse to work in an environment in which we have to find out about things like this from the newspapers. Trust us or we're out of here.

* * * *

These articles should be assigned to management classes as studies in what not to do. They describe the exact sort of decision-making process that reliably leads to disaster, and the kinds of personal dynamics that enable it. It's a model of complete organizational breakdown, and it should be studied for generations to come, so that it is never repeated

I agree with much of this. But as today's Post story explains, resignation doesn't ususally have much of an effect, other than to strengthen the VP's hand, and his portfolio. Christine Todd Whitman did resign, because she was unable to convince the President to reject Cheney's extreme views on environmental issues. That was the right thing to do -- but notice that it barely caused a blip in the Imperial Vice Presidency.

Hilzoy's co-blogger Publius offers an even more comprehensive indictment -- of all of us: "The reason Cheney’s Office got to dominate the executive branch is because we -- America -- elected a neophyte who lacked the experience, knowledge, and judgment to be president. . . . Our nation’s political machinery elevated a grossly inexperienced and ignorant man to the Oval Office. The entirely predictable result is that he would be forced to rely on someone else to make the decisions he wasn’t able or willing to make."

I'm not sure about this. Even if Bush didn't have the chops to make decisions himself -- and in that respect, he wouldn't be alone among Presidents -- what explains his constant deference to Cheney, and his refusal to listen to any of his other trusted advisers? Publius surmises that Bush was simply rolled by Cheney and Rumsfeld, because they were more savvy than their competitors for the President's approval. I don't know, but it's a point worth considering:
It’s pretty simple. When you elect someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, you’re essentially electing someone else to be president. Kerry and Gore had their flaws, but they would have been the Deciders. They certainly would not have tolerated a lawless, out-of-control operation such as Cheney’s Office. At the very least, they would have, you know, been aware of the debates and had some pre-existing knowledge to inform their judgment. Bush, by contrast, was simply no match for Cheney and Rumsfeld’s decades of experience. Thus, the failure that is Cheney is not merely an individual failure on the part of Bush. Cheney is an institutional failure -- a failure of our political system. That’s the key to understand. The rise of Cheney is itself an indictment of our political institutions and culture.

In Case You Haven't Noticed...

In case you haven't noticed, several sites have pointed out that the description of the insurgents in Iraq has morphed. They are all, it seems, Al Quada now, which is, of course, ridiculous. The credulous press dutifully copies down the name-change claims from the military spokespersons and Bushies though. This is in the face of the by now well-known and often cited confusion in the minds of the American puble about Iraqi involvement in 9/11.; most Americans still incorrectly make the connection. Glenn summarizes and calls bullshit:

That the Bush administration, and specifically its military commanders, decided to begin using the term "Al Qaeda" to designate "anyone and everyeone we fight against or kill in Iraq" is obvious. All of a sudden, every time one of the top military commanders describes our latest operations or quantifies how many we killed, the enemy is referred to, almost exclusively now, as "Al Qaeda."
But what is even more notable is that the establishment press has followed right along, just as enthusiastically. I don't think the New York Times has published a story about Iraq in the last two weeks without stating that we are killing "Al Qaeda fighters," capturing "Al Qaeda leaders," and every new operation is against "Al Qaeda."

What is so amazing about this new rhetorical development -- not only from our military, but also from our "journalists" -- is that, for years, it was too shameless and false even for the Bush administration to use. Even at the height of their propaganda offensives about the war, the furthest Bush officials were willing to go was to use the generic term "terrorists" for everyone we are fighting in Iraq, as in: "we cannot surrender to the terrorists by withdrawing" and "we must stay on the offensive against terrorists."

Why can't the press, even the NYT, get this right? It's important and clearly the result of just another concerted PR effort from the Bushies (or is it Cheneys). Aren't the titans and experts of the MSM tired and ashamed of being manipulated and being made fools? And if not, why not?

Crooks, Crooks, Crooks

If anyone still has any doubt as the the integrity and honor of the current administration, read this. No one should ever again vote for anyone associated with these sleazy, power-mongering, manipulative people. this proves beyond a doubt they will use any ruse, loophole, or obfuscation to aggrandize their power and control. They are fascists, pure and simple.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) revealed today that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had once again bypassed the Senate and used an obscure Patriot Act provision to appoint an interim U.S. attorney in California. The authority Gonzales used was at the heart of the U.S. attorney scandal, and was banned in a bill that passed both chambers of Congress with strong bipartisan support earlier this year. The legislation was sent to the President for his signature on June 4.

He delayed signing the bill, knowing it was the obvious intent of the representatives of the people, to use the provision one more time.

Go Get'em Paul

Paul Krugman almost always hits the nail on the head and does it again in yesterday's column. I copy the whole piece here because of the NYT firewall. Note especially his sharp point about how the mainstream press seems to have learned nothing about wrongfully focusing on presidential horse race and personality issues at the expense of reasoned and factual reporting on the substance of issues. The bolds are mine.

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.

For if there’s one thing I hope we’ve learned from the calamity of the last six and a half years, it’s that it matters who becomes president — and that listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush’s tax lies, not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern.

And I don’t know if this country can survive another four years of Bush-quality leadership.