Airing Out the Vice Presidential Bunker (Engelhardt / Nation)

[struggle4progress]

Tom Engelhardt

The US government and military have undergone a series of jolting expansions in the Bush years. We got, for instance, a second Defense Department called the Department of Homeland Security. We got a military command for North America called United States Northern Command. More than anything else, however, while we already had an "imperial presidency," we also got an add-on--an imperial vice-presidency, a new form of shadow government in the United States, a startlingly unbound, constitutionally unmandated new institutional power.

On taking office, Dick Cheney promptly began to set up a vice-presidential office that essentially mimicked, and then to some extent replaced, the National Security Council (NSC). Just as promptly, his office plunged itself into utter, blinding secrecy--as journalist Robert Dreyfuss discovered when he simply tried to chart out who was working in this new center of power. No information, it turned out, could be revealed to a curious reporter, not even the names and positions of those who worked for the Vice President, those who, theoretically, were working for us. Cheney's office would not even publicly acknowledge its own employees, no less let them be interviewed.

From that office (and allied posts elsewhere in the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy), the Vice President and his various right-hand men like I Lewis "Scooter" Libby and present Chief of Staff David Addington, both fierce believers in the so-called unitary executive theory of government (in which a "wartime" commander-in-chief president is said to have unfettered power to command just about anything), elbowed the State Department, the NSC, and the Intelligence Community. With the President's ear, and in league with Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon (among others), they spearheaded a series of mis- and disinformation operations that led to Iraq and beyond. (Reporter Jim Lobe wrote about this at Tomdispatch in August 2005, "Dating Cheney's Nuclear Drumbeat.")

Now shorn of Rumsfeld, Cheney and his men, increasingly beleaguered, are nonetheless pushing on as the Vice President secretively travels the world, warning and scheming. Only this week, in "The Redirection," a New Yorker piece as chilling as any you might ever want to read, our premier journalist of this era (as well as the Vietnam one), Seymour Hersh reports that, two years ago, old hands from the Iran-Contra fiasco of the Reagan era, well-seeded into the Bush administration, had an informal meeting led by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Their conclusions: "As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: ‘One, you can't trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can't trust the uniformed military, and four, it's got to be run out of the Vice-President's office." ...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=170390

[CrazyOrangeCat]

1. K&R

chilling, insane stuff.

[peacetalksforall]

2. What does 'you can't trust the uniformed military' mean? I'm

struggling.

[struggle4progress]

3. Here's Hersch's "The Redirection":

THE REDIRECTION
Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2007-03-05
Posted 2007-02-25
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070305fa_fact_hersh

You can read the Elliott Abrams quote there, if you like.

But here is how I understand it:

A competent White House, fighting a necessary war, would naturally be interested in careful options and plans provided by experienced military professionals.

Our uniformed military swears allegiance not to a fuhrer but to a political system with checks and balances, described by the Constitution. The military, moreover, as the soldiers who will be in the actual field, taking actual fire, cannot really enjoy the luxury of dogmatic thinking. The military will want good intelligence (rather than phony intelligence serving political ends on the home front). And they will want an effective mission that can planned coherently and communicated clearly. The American military may not reliably show enthusiasm for the idea, that soldiers will be fielded to fight and die, without a clear objective, other than that (say) Karl Rove can help W ride the warhorse to re-election. The military will want a better defined mission, together with adequate equipment and personnel -- and since lives are at stake, the military can be persistent in explaining its views to Congress, if the White House doesn't listen.

This, however, does not match not the view of Abrams and the other Nixon/Reagan/Bush era thugs now serving the Bush White House. Their view is the view that Nixon's lawyers explicitly argued before the Supreme Court, namely, that the President is an absolute monarch. They are comfortable with this notion of politics, because they are self-satisfied and dogmatic in their thinking: it does not occur to them that they might be wrong; and when events do not conform to their fixed ideas, they search not for their own errors but for mythical traitors who have stabbed them in the back.

From the viewpoint of Abrams and the other rightwing assholes (including notably Rumsfield) it would be entirely unacceptable for the military to have much input -- because their job is just to go die when so told.

Naturally, that creates some tension and resentment.

[peacetalksforall]

5. Thanks. I think your explanation is precise. These words

are the scariest - we've already seen proof and there are departed souls to prove it.

"....it does not occur to them that they might be wrong; and when events do not conform to their fixed ideas, they search not for their own errors but for mythical traitors who have stabbed them in the back."

How could such a small per cent of citizens of this countries destroy it and make som many people miserable while they enjoy their successes, temporary as I hope they are?

[Vidar]

4. K&R.