[Kabar-indonesia] The New Yorker: The Hidden Power: Cheney’s Cheney

[Joyo at aol.com]

[Joyo note: The New Yorker's cover story -- 'The Hidden
Power: A Secret Architect of the War on Terror' -- is
not available online. An interview with the author
about the article appears below]

The New Yorker Magazine 
issue cover dated July 7, 2006

Q&A

Cheney's Cheney

This week in the magazine, Jane Mayer profiles David
Addington, the Vice-President's chief of staff and
longtime legal adviser. Here, with Blake Eskin, Mayer
discusses Addington's unorthodox reading of the
Constitution and how it has shaped the
Administration's approach to the war on terror.

BLAKE ESKIN: Most people have never heard of David
Addington. Why is he important enough to be the
subject of such an in-depth piece?

JANE MAYER: Addington has been the single most
influential legal thinker, according to other
Administration lawyers, in shaping the Bush
Administration's legal response to the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. He has left almost no
paper trail, and has avoided all public scrutiny—as
far as I know, he's granted no interviews to
reporters, and he even avoids having his photo taken
by the press. It seemed important to me to hold the
creator of these policies accountable, so that the
public could understand better who is behind them and
how he thinks.

How did David Addington get to know Vice-President
Cheney, and how long have they worked together?

They met on Capitol Hill in the mid-eighties, when
Cheney was a Republican congressman from Wyoming and
Addington was a young staff lawyer working for the
House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. So
they have worked together for about two decades. Their
partnership was cemented when they worked together on
the Minority Report on the Iran-Contra affair. Both
Addington and Cheney took the idiosyncratic position
that it was Congress, not President Reagan, that was
in the wrong. This view reflected the opinion, held by
both men, that the executive branch should run foreign
policy, to a great extent unimpeded by Congress. It's
a recurring theme—pushing the limits of executive
power and sidestepping Congress—in their partnership.
One example is their position that the President, as
Commander-in-Chief in times of war, had the inherent
authority to ignore the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which Congress passed in an effort
to make sure that Presidents don't violate citizens'
right to privacy by spying on them without warrants.

After meeting and working together in Congress, Cheney
and Addington continued their partnership at the
Pentagon, where, during the Presidency of George H. W.
Bush, Cheney was Secretary of Defense and Addington
was his special assistant and, later, general counsel.
There, Addington was known as a powerhouse, a stickler
who controlled access to Cheney and marked up others'
memos in red felt-tipped pen, returning the memos for
rewrites that would make them sharper—and more
protective of executive power.

At the Pentagon, the two exhibited a similar pessimism
about world affairs, in particular about the
possibility that Mikhail Gorbachev represented true
change, and also an unusually deep interest in
"continuity of government" planning—how the government
survives in the event of a doomsday attack. Addington
kept the constitutional provisions for Presidential
succession in his pocket at all times, a colleague
told me.

Yet you write that some people—including some
conservative Republicans—question whether Addington
really respects the Constitution.

Some constitutional scholars have questioned whether
Addington, in his eagerness to expand the powers of
the Presidency, which he and Cheney see as having been
unduly diminished since Watergate, gives enough weight
to the legislative and judicial branches of the
federal government. Some have suggested that he has
aggrandized the powers of the President in such a way
that the executive branch ignores the system of checks
and balances set up by the Founding Fathers, so that
its actions are unchecked and unaccountable. Bruce
Fein, a Republican legal activist, told me that he
regards Addington as an adequate lawyer but an
inadequate student of American history, because he
believes that Addington has failed to understand that
the Founders designed the U.S. government specifically
to insure that the executive would not have unlimited
power. Fein suggests that the Founders, unlike
Addington, understood the perils of concentrated
power. They had seen in George III, among others, what
tyranny meant.

What is the New Paradigm?

It's a shorthand term that comes from a memo signed by
Alberto Gonzales but believed to have been written in
part by Addington, in which the authors articulated
that the attacks of 9/11 required a legal response
beyond the confines of ordinary criminal law and
ordinary military law. Instead, they said, a "new
paradigm" was called for, allowing the government to
emphasize detection and prevention of crime, at the
expense of more traditional notions of due process.
Their aim was to stop terrorist attacks before they
were perpetrated. To do so, they felt they needed to
interrogate, detain, and try terrorist suspects in
ways that would not be permissible under U.S. or
international law. The New Paradigm has come to refer
to all of the novel legal policies that the Bush
Administration has forged in its approach to the
global war on terrorism.

Following the September 11th attacks, the Bush
Administration released memos asserting the
President's right to decide, among other things, how
to wage war and treat prisoners. How much of this came
from Addington?

Some lawyers in the Administration believe that, as
one told me, "It's all Addington." While Addington, of
course, could not have written every memo, his
"fingerprints," as Lawrence Wilkerson, the former
assistant to Colin Powell, put it, were all over these
policies.

Addington was merely the legal counsel to the
Vice-President until last fall, so it is curious that
he exercised so much influence. But, according to
other lawyers who deal with national-security issues
in the Administration, Addington exercised enormous
influence in part because he was seen as Cheney's
representative, and Cheney was the epicenter of power
on these matters.

Addington also had a forceful, aggressive, and, some
say, bullying style that allowed him to dominate legal
debates. In interviews, other lawyers told me how he
dismissed their views, mocked their softness if they
championed international law, and worked secretively
and, one of them said, viciously, to outmaneuver
critics.

Another reason Addington gained so much influence
after 9/11 was that, unlike many other top
Administration officials, he was not only a lawyer but
also an expert on national-security law.

You argue that the September 11th attacks did not
change Cheney and Addington's expansive views of the
power of the executive branch so much as allow them to
implement their long-held views. What led you to this
conclusion?

At least fifty sources were interviewed for this
story. And those who knew Cheney and Addington during
the Vietnam War and Watergate told me that, ever since
then, both men have wanted to correct what they saw as
a weakening of the Presidency. Cheney has participated
in the writing of two reports reflecting this view,
and he talked about it in a recent press conference.
In many ways, 9/11 gave Addington and Cheney the
chance to implement their views on the need for a
stronger Presidency, since in times of war the
President's powers are greatly augmented.

Other Presidents have taken extraordinary legal
measures during wartime—the suspension of habeas
corpus under Lincoln, the internment of
Japanese-Americans under F.D.R. Is there anything
different about the Bush Administration's assertion of
executive power?

All Presidents, it is said, overreach during wartime,
but, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom I had
the pleasure of interviewing for my article, the Bush
White House has done this differently. While earlier
Presidents have, as you say, suspended ordinary laws,
he suggests that earlier Presidents did not assert
that this was their inherent constitutional right. In
contrast, Schlesinger says, the Bush White House has
taken these infamous aberrations and woven them
together into a doctrine of Presidential power.

Last week, the U.S. Army recovered the bodies of two
American soldiers who had been tortured. How does the
Administration's position on torture affect its
ability to respond to such brutality?

Torture and abuse are perennial problems in all wars,
but one could argue that, because the Bush
Administration has blurred the lines concerning what
sort of treatment of captured enemies is permissible,
they have forfeited some of the moral high ground that
the country could ordinarily occupy on this issue.
It's harder to condemn the outrageous treatment of our
soldiers now that we are accused of treating detainees
deplorably.

David Addington doesn't speak to reporters, and he
refused your interview requests. After speaking to
many people about Addington, what would you like to
ask him now?

I'd like to ask him whether, in his view, there is
anything that the President cannot legally do in the
service of national security. Bruce Fein, the
Republican legal activist, suggests that, in
Addington's view, the President could kill someone in
a public park if he deemed the person to be an enemy
combatant. I'd like to hear Addington's thinking about
why such an extreme view might be justified, and also
why it is that, according to colleagues, he sees no
political downside to these extreme views. For
instance, he has repeatedly argued that there have
been no political costs associated with Guantánamo
Bay. Yet even President Bush has acknowledged that the
Defense Department's camps there have hurt the image
of the U.S. abroad. It would be interesting to hear
why Addington doesn't agree with the President on
this.

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