Nina Totenberg absolutely lays into him
Listen and read here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99422633Nothing better defines Cheney's influence than his domination of policy on the war on terror, setting up Guantanamo, getting waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques authorized, and circumventing established laws on domestic surveillance.
"It all boiled down to two things, fundamentally," Gellman said. "It was: How do you spy on people who you think may be terrorists, and what can you do to them once you catch them?"
To do any of these things, he needed legal authority. So, he established a back channel to John Yoo, the No. 2 man in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Little known to the public, that office tells the president and his subordinates what they can and can't do under existing law. And with guidance from Cheney and his chief counsel, David Addington, Yoo wrote legal opinions that authorized everything from waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics previously considered torture, to domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency without first getting permission from the court set up to approve such surveillance.
snip
Later, the secret domestic surveillance program would become the subject of a threatened massive resignation from the top ranks of the Justice Department. By then, there was a new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, who examined many of John Yoo's opinions and found them, in his words, deeply flawed. The torture authorization was finally revoked.
And the domestic surveillance authorization had big problems. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Deputy Attorney General James Comey and others agreed that the president was exceeding his constitutional authority, and with Ashcroft critically ill in the hospital, Acting Attorney General Comey refused to reauthorize the program. That led to the now famous hospital scene with top White House officials pressuring a resistant Ashcroft to overrule Comey.
Keeping Bush In The Dark
In his book, Gellman describes how, before this face-off, Cheney kept President Bush in the dark for three months so that the president was unaware that his Justice Department believed the program was illegal. When Comey finally went to the White House after the hospital scene, both he and Bush were in for a rude shock.
"The president says to the acting attorney general, 'I just wish you weren't bringing this objection at the last minute,' " Gellman said.
Then Comey told the president it wasn't just he who was objecting, but the top ranks at Justice, and even the FBI director was about to resign. When Robert Mueller confirmed that in a meeting with the president, Bush reversed course.
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