He remade our world (books review)

What did the third member of the triumvirate, Vice President Cheney—who had known about the conflict for weeks—say at this moment? Did he profess to share the disbelief of the president and his chief of staff? Or did he, as so often, say nothing at all? President Bush does not say but as we read his account—a remarkable two-and-a-half-page aria on what the president knew, what he didn’t, and, even as the crisis that threatened his administration was breaking all around him, what he still doesn’t—the president’s painfully protracted series of discoveries makes sense only if we assume Dick Cheney’s persistent and stubborn silence.

Bush knows he has a crisis on his hands—confronting him with a “decision point,” as the title of his memoirs has it. By his account, before flying off to deliver a speech in Cleveland, the president orders Card and his White House counsel Alberto Gonzales “to work with” the attorney general “to solve the problem.” On his return, however, he finds that “little progress had been made.”

“Where the hell is Ashcroft?” I asked.

“He’s in the hospital,” Andy replied.

That was news to me.

The second revelation: John Ashcroft has been in intensive care for nearly a week. Though Ashcroft is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States—and though it is the attorney general’s signature that is required to recertify Stellar Wind—no one seems to have thought it relevant to tell the commander in chief. No matter; Bush telephones intensive care, insists on speaking to the heavily sedated Ashcroft, and tells him he is sending over his chief of staff and White House counsel “to talk to him about an urgent matter.” What follows is the famous Hospital Room Showdown, the great melodramatic set piece of the Bush administration, which features, as Barton Gellman describes it in the superb Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, “men in their forties and fifties, stamping on the brakes, abandoning double-parked vehicles, and running up a hospital stairwell as fast as their legs could pump.”

The White House men were clutching the paper they were determined to persuade the attorney general to sign, and the Justice Department lawyers, led by James Comey, Ashcroft’s deputy, were determined to prevent him from signing it. They converged in a hospital room around the IV-festooned body of the ailing attorney general, who “looked half dead.” Nonetheless, Gellman tells us, in the midst of this coven of lawyers, like some unvanquishable horror movie character, Ashcroft “raised himself up stiffly” off the bed.

…

It is an astute point, all the more so for seeming obvious: the unique policies put into effect by Bush and Cheney were not consequences of the September 11 attacks but calculated responses to them. There was nothing fated about Stellar Wind, or “black sites” and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were practiced in them, or Guantánamo and military commissions; these and the other distinctive post–September 11 policies that still cast their shadows over us were born of choices made by government officials and, in the event, by a vanishingly small number of them. Cheney, Gellman writes, “freed Bush to fight the ‘war on terror’ as he saw fit, driven by a shared belief that the government had to shake off old habits of self-restraint.” As noted, some of these “habits” Cheney, as President Ford’s chief of staff, had seen inscribed in law during the post-Vietnam revolution of the 1970s, when government misdeeds, not only those by the White House but by the FBI, CIA, and NSA, were exposed, and Congress acted to restrain those institutions, and the president’s power to make use of them, with new legislation. September 11 offered the opportunity for a counterrevolution, which Gellman neatly summarizes:

With Bush’s consent, Cheney unleashed foreign intelligence agencies to spy at home. He gave them legal cover to conduct what he called “robust interrogation” of captured enemies, using calculated cruelty to break their will. At Cheney’s initiative, the United States stripped terror suspects of long-established rights under domestic and international law, building a new legal edifice under exclusive White House ownership. Everything from capture and confinement to questioning, trial, and punishment would proceed by rules invented on the fly.

The depth of this transformation is truly breathtaking and its surface signs are still visible all around us, if we take the trouble to look: in the detainees still languishing at Guantánamo, in the unpiloted drones tracking and killing thousands of people, and indeed in the sweeping up of our telephone and Internet metadata by the four programs that have been the successors of Stellar Wind. These revolutionary changes in our government’s policies toward holding prisoners, toward waging war, and toward surveilling its citizens could never have been effected without the imagination, experience, and audacity of Dick Cheney.