Vader Latest: Cheney now claims he's not part of the executive branch and thus is not subject to executive branch oversight. Having previously claimed that his 'executive privilege' made him not subject to congressional oversight, Cheney was sounding more and more like the Red Queen of Alice and Wonderland. The Washington Post has done a must-read four part expose of Cheney's secret manipulation of the government. Here is an excerpt of Hendrik Hertzberg's review of the series in The Nation:
"It's now official: for the past six years, Dick Cheney... has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."
More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country's moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America's armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild." (read "The Darksider")
Previously: "A White House official has stated to several Washington insiders that Cheney is planning to deploy an 'end run strategy' around the President... in what one intelligence official characterized as 'potentially criminal insubordination'". (story)