FRONTLINE'S SEASON PREMIERE INVESTIGATES CHENEY'S EFFORTS TO EXPAND THE POWER OF THE PRESIDENCY
FRONTLINE presents
CHENEY'S LAW
Tuesday, October 16, 2007, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
www.pbs.org/frontline/cheney
For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review.
Now, as the White House appears ready to ignore subpoenas in the wiretapping and U.S. attorneys' cases, FRONTLINE's season premiere, Cheney's Law, airing Oct. 16, 2007, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), examines the battle over the power of the presidency and Cheney's way of looking at the Constitution.
"The vice president believes that Congress has very few powers to actually constrain the president and the executive branch," former Justice Department attorney Marty Lederman tells FRONTLINE. "He believes the president should have the final word, indeed the only word on all matters within the executive branch."
After Sept. 11, Cheney and Addington were determined to implement their vision -- in secret. The vice president and his counsel found an ally in John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department's extraordinarily powerful Office of Legal Counsel. In concert with Addington, Yoo wrote memoranda authorizing the president to act with unparalleled authority.
"Through interviews with key administration figures, Cheney's Law documents the bruising bureaucratic battles between a group of conservative Justice Department lawyers and the Office of the Vice President over the legal foundation for the most closely guarded programs in the war on terror," says FRONTLINE producer/director/writer Michael Kirk. This is Kirk's tenth documentary about the Bush administration's policies since 9/11 (Rumsfeld's War, The Torture Question, The Dark Side, The Lost Year in Iraq, Endgame).
In his most extensive television interview since leaving the Justice Department, former Assistant Attorney General Jack L. Goldsmith describes his initial days at the Department of Justice in the fall of 2003 as he learned about the government's most secret and controversial covert operations. Goldsmith was shocked by the administration's secret assertion of unlimited power.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/
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