Vice

by Lou Dubose

  Cheney and Scooter Libby also shaped the intelligence to justify the Iraq War, and when the moment came to sell the conflict to a reluctant United Nations, the vice president's staff prepared the forty-eight-page backgrounder for Colin Powell's disastrous February 2002 speech to the Security Council. John Hannah wrote the material, and Scooter Libby massaged it. The background paper has not yet been declassified (and few expect to see it declassified any time soon). Wilkerson describes what was handed to Powell as a "movie script." Libby had called it a "Chinese smorgasbord." Powell looked at it, declared it "bullshit," and tossed the entire document. He and his staff turned instead to the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq as a foundation for the U.N. speech. Wilkerson has since come to believe Libby's smorgasbord was a setup, designed to direct Powell to the NIE—which was better sourced, but almost as flawed as the "bullshit" he had rejected. "These are facts, not allegations," Powell would tell the United Nations and the world. Yet before he announced he wasn't staying on for Bush's second term, each of the foundational "facts" he included in his Security Council speech had been disproved.

  "These guys planned to spend ninety days in Baghdad, then move on to Tehran," says a retired general who stays in contact with the Pentagon. "Then Rumsfeld's plan fell apart in Iraq."

  Wilkerson also suspects that generals breaking ranks and protocol in 2006 to speak openly against Rumsfeld's failed Iraq war plan had a great deal to do with a planned bombing campaign to take out Iran's nuclear research and development facilities. The generals knew the armed forces were overextended to the point of being broken in Iraq, yet the neocons were planning to move on to the neighboring country. So upon retirement, the generals broke with precedent and publicly criticized the conduct of the Iraq War. Iran was a subtext, and the notion that the United States would bomb rather than negotiate, a serious concern. Even if the administration's position was no more than saber-rattling and coercive diplomacy, which didn't seem likely in Washington in early 2006, the proposed bombing campaign represented a further overextension of the already worn-out military.

  "Everybody seems to believe that we'll be bombing Iran after the November elections," said a source at the State Department in April 2006. "It feels like the decision has been made."

  The existence of plans to bomb Iran were revealed by The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. Hersh reported that "the U.S. Strategic Command, supported by the Air Force, had been drawing up plans at the President's direction for a major bombing campaign in Iran." The White House even wanted a nuclear weapon in the mix, to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. Marine General Peter Pace, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked Bush and Cheney out of the nuclear option. Hersh's reporting also supports Wilkerson's thesis that the generals publicly challenging Bush and Cheney on Iraq in April were trying to slow the momentum for the campaign to bomb Iran. At the Pentagon the campaign was known as "the April Revolution," reports Hersh. By June, it appeared that the generals had stopped, at least for the moment, the administration's plans for preemptive attack on Iran.

  The plan to bomb Iran, the centerpiece for the coercive foreign policy that the Cheney cabal had in the works, was complemented by a specific project at the Department of State. The plan, run out of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, involved spending at least $85 million in 2006, much of it distributed to Iranian and Syrian dissidents in their countries and in exile. It bore similarities to the program to support Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress in the run-up to the war in Iraq. The program was widely perceived to be supported by the vice president because it was directed by thirty-nine-year-old Elizabeth Cheney.

  The older Cheney daughter is smart, competent, hard-working, and engaging, according to sources who have worked with her. She's also completely unqualified for the job she held: Principal Deputy Assistant for Near Eastern Affairs (known by the acronym PDAS). Liz Cheney was a political appointee to the PDAS position she held until the spring of 2006, just as she was a political appointee to a lower position in the bureau in 2002, when she arrived with a rather thin CV and no prior experience in Middle Eastern affairs. (Prior to hiring on at State, Liz Cheney turned her family name and her University of Chicago law degree into a $170,000-a-year position in the Washington office of the White & Case law firm. Her husband earned $53,000 at another law firm.)

  Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch was Liz Cheney's boss. "But she's the vice president's daughter," says a source who recently worked at State. "There was kind of a parallel universe over there, where David had his projects and Liz had hers. There were some things that David didn't touch." Before returning home to care for her five children, Liz Cheney leveraged her influence by bringing in her own people and changing the character of Near Eastern Affairs: "Until she came in, the NEA bureau always had a variety of people and a variety of perspectives. Under Powell, anyone could voice their opinion, make dissenting arguments, even if it wasn't the policy of the administration. That changed when Liz came to be PDAS. It's now understood that it does you no good to make your views known. In fact, it can hurt you professionally."

  The source continued, "She filled a big space here. There's always a fear of the DOD hawks associated with her father, and she's obviously talking to her father and his people."

  In her official capacity, Liz Cheney has traveled to several Middle Eastern countries. On at least two occasions she has informed U.S. ambassadors that she was going to see the head of state alone—a complete violation of protocol. "The ambassador is our government's representative in the country," says Wilkerson. "No one meets a head of state without the ambassador." Except for the vice president's daughter.

  On one occasion, Cheney's daughter told an ambassador to call Washington if he had a problem with the meeting she had scheduled. She went in solo, and the embarrassed head of state later called in the American ambassador to brief him on the closed, private meeting with Liz Cheney.

  Liz Cheney resigned in the spring of 2006, though by summer, sources at State were saying her return was imminent. Once she departed, there was a definite policy shift away from military options and toward negotiation with Iran. "Probably a coincidence, but it would have been much more difficult with her in the building," says the former State Department employee. As Cheney announced her departure and summer arrived in the capital, discussions of bombing Iran's nuclear facilities quieted. Secretary of State Rice seemed to resume some of the State Department functions that had been seized by the OVP. With the vice president's approval numbers falling to 18 percent, it is altogether possible that Bush finally took charge and told his VP "No more war."

  Not everyone is hopeful.

  While David Welch did accompany Secretary of State Condi Rice to Israel in August 2006, as Israel's bombing of Lebanon spiraled out of control, he wasn't entirely on his own. Somewhat weakened by his forced cohabitation with the vice president's daughter, Welch was accompanied by a figure who might be described as his minder. Elliott Abrams also traveled with Rice for the duration of the Middle East mission, all the while in constant communication with Dick Cheney's office. Cheney and Abrams knew that Welch, if permitted, would try to use the stature he held as former ambassador to Egypt to move the United States closer to a mediator's position in Israel's conflict with the Arab world. That wasn't likely to happen with Abrams looking over Welch's shoulder. "The genius of Elliott Abrams is that he's Elliott Abrams," an unnamed administration official told The New York Times. "How can he be accused of not sufficiently supporting Israel?" Not only was Israel familiar territory for Abrams, the deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, he also had an Iranian backstory. Twenty years earlier, the administration of which Abrams was a part had a policy which included selling missiles to the Iranians as part of a three-way negotiation between the US, Iran, and Hezbollah. Cheney's support of Abrams in Iran-Contra was finally paying off.

  "They are incapable of diplomac
y," Larry Wilkerson says of the Cheney cabal within the White House. Not only incapable, but hostile to the notion of diplomacy, particularly in dealing with countries that have adversarial relations with the United States. In such cases, the Cheney cabal considers diplomacy the imposition of its will on a capitulating adversary. It's the same position Cheney described to a stunned Thomas Downey twenty years earlier, saying the Soviets would have to accept "all our terms" in arms talks. Downey's observation describes the marching orders Cheney handed Assistant Secretary of State Jim Kelly for his negotiations with the North Koreans. After Kelly confronted the North Koreans in 2003 with U.S. intelligence that proved the Koreans had a nuclear weapons program, Cheney impeded negotiations with Kim Jong Il's government. On two occasions, according to Wilkerson, Cheney changed the terms of negotiations after they had been established by all of the principals who decide American foreign policy.

  "A script would be drafted for Jim [Kelly], what he could say and what he could not say, with points elucidated in the margins. And that script would be approved through the statutory process," Wilkerson says. That process involves the consensus of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security advisor, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On at least two occasions, Cheney rewrote the script after it had been through the statutory process. As Kelly departed for Pyongyang or Beijing, Cheney provided the State Department's negotiator a revised draft outlining a more rigid position. As Wilkerson describes it, the vice president "put handcuffs on our negotiator, so he could say little more than 'welcome and good-bye.' " U.S. negotiations with one of the most dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable nations in the world, which had just rolled out its nuclear arsenal, were defined by one man—Dick Cheney. His negotiating position was that there would be no negotiations.

  Cheney's no-negotiation-with-evil position is not limited to North Korea and in fact is a corollary to the neocons' hegemonic foreign policy agenda. Wilkerson points to a critical moment, entirely ignored by the press, that further illustrates the administration's low regard for diplomacy:

  In May 2003 the Iranian government approached the U.S. government with an urgent request to open up negotiations. There had been only one other official communication between Iran and the United States since Iranian radicals seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration. Now the initial U.S. success in Iraq had the Iranians coming to the bargaining table as supplicants.

  "The Iranians came to us through the Swiss ambassador after they saw how fast we moved through Afghanistan and Iraq," Wilkerson says. "This was in 2003, right after [the invasion of] Iraq." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not yet president and the moderates in charge in Iran wanted to deal.

  The letter delivered by Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann offered concessions on Iran's nuclear program, Israel policy, and al-Qaeda. "Israel policy," of course, involved Tehran's support of Hezbollah. According to Wilkerson, the Iranians offered to exchange al-Qaeda prisoners they held for Mujahedeen e Khalq prisoners the United States had in custody. The MEK was a guerrilla group Saddam Hussein had used in his war against Iran. After the war they engaged in terrorist attacks against Iran and are designated terrorists by the U.S. State Department.

  More than a hundred billion dollars, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, America's allies' unflagging opposition to the war, and a deeply divided public. Finally it was all paying off. One of the countries Bush had placed in the Axis of Evil was coming in out of the cold.

  "We told them no," Wilkerson says in an interview at George Washington University. "Not only did we tell them no—we wrote a letter of protest to the Swiss for interfering in our foreign policy."

  The entire diplomatic endeavor was immediately curtailed. Asked if he knows who made the decision to reject the Iranian request for negotiations, Larry Wilkerson didn't miss a beat.

  "Yes, I know," he says. "It was the vice president of the United States."

  ELEVEN

  The Torture Presidency

  In early 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell walked into the office of his chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. A scandal of major proportions was threatening to come to public light. By April, CBS News and The New Yorker would release photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. "He was very concerned and he wanted to make sure State's role was clear, and he wanted to make sure also that we had some idea of the dimensions of the problem," Wilkerson remembers.

  Powell told his subordinate: "Get the paperwork. Get everything you can get your hands on."

  Wilkerson had worked for Powell for more than a decade, since the general was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War. He'd been a soldier for much longer. Not a lot surprised him, but looking at his boss, he quickly realized that Powell had no concept of how big this scandal was going to be nor how widespread it was. Over the coming months, working with the State Department's legal adviser, William Taft TV, and using both classified and unclassified documents, Wilkerson began to assemble the paper trail Powell requested. Eventually, he says, it would make a seven-foot pile of documents, divided into three stacks in Wilkerson's office. It would tell the story of how Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, despite their denials, had made torture the policy of the U.S. government. They had done so in the service of an all-powerful presidency the likes of which America has never seen—a vision that Dick Cheney and David Addington had nurtured for years.

  The legal justification began as early as December 2001, with the image of the smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center still fresh enough to smell. By that time the United States had been at war in Afghanistan for almost two months. Army and CIA troops had captured hundreds of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. More than anything, everybody in the upper levels of government feared another attack was in the offing. As higher-level captives became available, Bush and Cheney demanded any intelligence they might provide, regardless of what it took to produce it. The Pentagon wanted a place to keep the detainees, a tightly controlled, easily defended environment where interrogations could be conducted far from prying eyes or distractions. As Rumsfeld would say, Guantánamo Bay was "the least worst place."

  Yet the War President and his Vice required more than a physical location; they needed a legal framework in which to operate. The administration had the man for the job already in place, a deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Justice Department named John Yoo. Some have compared the OLC to a mini-Supreme Court. Its job is to provide legal interpretations for the executive, but only when asked. Alumni from the office, including William Rehnquist and, more recently, Samuel Alito, Jr., have landed on the actual Supreme Court. While some see the OLC as a place that should be a neutral arbiter of what the executive can constitutionally do, more often than not it's been an aggressive advocate, "the president's law firm."

  "The OLC is calculated to defend as robustly as possible presidential authority, that's what it's all about," says Bruce Fein, who worked in the office during the Nixon and Ford administrations.

  Dick Cheney learned from a master how the OLC could defend executive privilege against an activist Congress during the Ford administration, when Antonin Scalia ran the office. Cheney knew what he was getting when he placed Yoo, a thirty-five-year-old law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, inside the Bush-Cheney OLC. In March 1996, Yoo had published a book-length article in the California Law Review that tried to make the case that the Constitution gave wider authority to the president in war-making than had been previously understood. The only role Congress had, Yoo argued, was the power of the purse and impeachment. The federal courts were excluded entirely. When Cheney and Addington had made the call for a similarly strong executive during Iran-Contra, Yoo had been just an undergraduate at Harvard. He went on to Yale Law School and then to clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas at the U.S. Supreme Court, where he worked on issues of national security and
separation of powers.

  Within weeks of 9/11, Addington and Yoo had started to create the legal architecture for an all-powerful wartime commander in chief. Cheney knew the ruling he wanted—he just needed to ask the OLC the right question. "You have asked for our opinion as to the scope of the President's authority to take military action in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001," wrote Yoo in a memo to the president on September 25, 2001.

  It would come as no surprise to the vice president and his legal counsel, David Addington, mat Yoo determined the scope was practically unlimited.

  "The President may deploy military forces preemptively against terrorist organizations or the States that harbor or support them, whether or not they can be linked to the specific terrorist incidents of September 11," wrote Yoo in the memo. Given that criterion, Bush and Cheney don't need congressional approval to attack Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria—all identified as state sponsors of terror by the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the State Department. Throw in "terrorist safe havens"—logically, given how permissive this legal interpretation is—and the war powers extend to Venezuela, Yemen, and the Mediterranean, among other locales. But they had no intention of stopping with states. Yoo determined that the president's powers in the never-ending war on "terror" extended to people and organizations as well.

  This wasn't a statutory right. Yoo claimed that Congress, when it passed its resolution authorizing the use of military force against terrorists a week after 9/11, only gave the president what he already had—in fact, just a sliver of the nearly unlimited power the wartime president possessed. "The President's broad constitutional power to use military force to defend the Nation, recognized by the Joint Resolution itself, would allow the President to take whatever actions he deems appropriate to preempt or respond to terrorist threats from new quarters."