Shortly
after the first accused terrorists reached the
U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on
Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters
arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented
a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto
R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience
on the subject. Vice President Cheney's lawyer,
who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby.
The meeting marked "the first time that the
issue of interrogations comes up" among top-ranking
White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo,
who represented the Justice Department. "The
CIA guys said, 'We're going to have some real
difficulties getting actionable intelligence
from detainees'" if interrogators confined themselves
to humane techniques allowed by the Geneva Conventions.
From
that moment, well before previous accounts have
suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the
practical business of crushing a captive's will
to resist. The vice president's office played
a central role in shattering limits on coercion
in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending
legal opinions that the Bush administration
has since portrayed as the initiatives, months
later, of lower-ranking officials.
Cheney
and his allies, according to more than two dozen
current and former officials, pioneered a novel
distinction between forbidden "torture" and
permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading"
methods of questioning. They did not originate
every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law,
but fresh accounts from participants show that
they translated muscular theories, from Yoo
and others, into the operational language of
government.
A
backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of
abuse leaked out of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison
and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to
be sharp reversals in courts and Congress --
for both Cheney's claims of executive supremacy
and his unyielding defense of what he called
"robust interrogation."
But
a more careful look at the results suggests
that Cheney won far more than he lost. Many
of the harsh measures he championed, and some
of the broadest principles undergirding them,
have survived intact but out of public view.
The
vice president's unseen victories attest to
traits that are often ascribed to him but are
hard to demonstrate from the public record:
thoroughgoing secrecy, persistence of focus,
tactical flexibility in service of rigid aims
and close knowledge of the power map of government.
On critical decisions for more than six years,
Cheney has often controlled the pivot points
-- tipping the outcome when he could, engineering
stalemate when he could not and reopening debates
that rivals thought were resolved.
"Once
he's taken a position, I think that's it," said
James A. Baker III, who has shared a hunting
tent with Cheney more than once and worked with
him under three presidents. "He has been pretty
damn good at accumulating power, extraordinarily
effective and adept at exercising power."
'No
More Secret Opinions'
David
S. Addington, Cheney's general counsel, set
the new legal agenda in a blunt memorandum shortly
after the CIA delegation returned to Langley.
Geneva's "strict limits on questioning of enemy
prisoners," he wrote on Jan. 25, 2002, hobbled
efforts "to quickly obtain information from
captured terrorists."
No
longer was the vice president focused on procedural
rights, such as access to lawyers and courts.
The subject now was more elemental: How much
suffering could U.S. personnel inflict on an
enemy to make him talk? Cheney's lawyer feared
that future prosecutors, with motives "difficult
to predict," might bring criminal charges against
interrogators or Bush administration officials.
Geneva
rules forbade not only torture but also, in
equally categorical terms, the use of "violence,"
"cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading
treatment" against a detainee "at any time and
in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act
of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions
a U.S. felony [Read the act]. The best defense
against such a charge, Addington wrote, would
combine a broad presidential direction for humane
treatment, in general, with an assertion of
unrestricted authority to make exceptions.
The
vice president's counsel proposed that President
Bush issue a carefully ambiguous directive.
Detainees would be treated "humanely and, to
the extent appropriate and consistent with military
necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles
of" the Geneva Conventions. When Bush issued
his public decision two weeks later, on Feb.
7, 2002, he adopted Addington's formula -- with
all its room for maneuver -- verbatim.
In
a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We
don't torture." What he did not acknowledge,
according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then
as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel,
was that the new legal framework was designed
specifically to leave room for cruelty. In international
law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition
of severe physical or mental pain or suffering."
He added: "Torture is an extreme version of
cruelty."
How
extreme? Yoo was summoned again to the White
House in the early spring of 2002. This time
the question was urgent. The CIA had captured
Abu Zubaida, then believed to be a top al-Qaeda
operative, on March 28, 2002. Case officers
wanted to know "what the legal limits of interrogation
are," Yoo said.
This
previously unreported meeting sheds light on
the origins of one of the Bush administration's
most controversial claims. The Justice Department
delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002,
stating that the U.S. law against torture "prohibits
only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment" and therefore permits many others.
[Read the opinion] Distributed under the signature
of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee,
the opinion also narrowed the definition of
"torture" to mean only suffering "equivalent
in intensity" to the pain of "organ failure
..... or even death."
When
news accounts unearthed that opinion nearly
two years later, the White House repudiated
its contents. Some officials described it as
hypothetical, without disclosing that the opinion
was written in response to specific questions
from the CIA. Administration officials attributed
authorship to Yoo, a Berkeley law professor
who had come to serve in the Office of Legal
Counsel.
But
the "torture memo," as it became widely known,
was not Yoo's work alone. In an interview, Yoo
said that Addington, as well as Gonzales and
deputy White House counsel Timothy E. Flanigan,
contributed to the analysis.
The
vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered
the memo's most radical claim: that the president
may authorize any interrogation method, even
if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and
treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit
torture," that passage stated, "do not apply"
to the commander in chief, because Congress
"may no more regulate the President's ability
to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than
it may regulate his ability to direct troop
movements on the battlefield."
That
same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a
second secret opinion, the contents of which
have never been made public. According to a
source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved
as lawful a long list of specific interrogation
techniques proposed by the CIA -- including
waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that
the U.S. government classified as a war crime
in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one
request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.
Yoo
said for the first time in an interview that
he verbally warned lawyers for the president,
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
that it would be dangerous as a matter of policy
to permit military interrogators to use the
harshest techniques, because the armed services,
vastly larger than the CIA, could overuse the
tools or exceed the limits. "I always thought
that only the CIA should do this, but people
at the White House and at DOD felt differently,"
Yoo said. The migration of those techniques
from the CIA to the military, and from Guantanamo
Bay to Abu Ghraib, aroused worldwide condemnation
when abuse by U.S. troops was exposed.
On
June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza
Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
learned of the two-year-old torture memo for
the first time from an article in The Washington
Post [Read the article]. According to a former
White House official with firsthand knowledge,
they confronted Gonzales together in his office.
Rice
"very angrily said there would be no more secret
opinions on international and national security
law," the official said, adding that she threatened
to take the matter to the president if Gonzales
kept them out of the loop again. Powell remarked
admiringly, as they emerged, that Rice dressed
down the president's lawyer "in full Nurse Ratched
mode," a reference to the ward chief of a mental
hospital in the 1975 film "One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest."
Neither
of them took their objections to Cheney, the
official said, a much more dangerous course.
'His
Client, the Vice President'
In
the summer and fall of 2002, some of the Bush
administration's leading lawyers began to warn
that Cheney and his Pentagon allies had set
the government on a path for defeat in court.
As the judicial branch took up challenges to
the president's assertion of wartime power,
Justice Department lawyers increasingly found
themselves defending what they believed to be
losing positions -- directed by the vice president
and his staff. One of the uneasy lawyers was
Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, a conservative
stalwart whose wife, Barbara, had been killed
less than a year before when the hijacked American
Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
Olson shared Cheney's robust view of executive
authority, but his job was to win cases. Two
that particularly worried him involved U.S.
citizens -- Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi
-- who had been declared enemy combatants and
denied access to lawyers.
Federal
courts, Olson argued, would not go along with
that. But the CIA opposed any outside contact,
fearing relief from the isolation and dependence
that interrogators relied upon to break the
will of suspected terrorists.
Flanigan
said that Addington's personal views leaned
more toward Olson than against him, but that
he beat back the proposal to grant detainees
access to lawyers, "because that was the position
of his client, the vice president."
Decision
time came in a heated meeting in Gonzales's
corner office on the West Wing's second floor,
according to four officials with direct knowledge,
none of whom agreed to be quoted by name about
confidential legal deliberations. Olson was
backed by associate White House counsel Bradford
A. Berenson, a former law clerk to Supreme Court
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
Berenson
told colleagues that the court's swing voter
would never accept absolute presidential discretion
to declare a U.S. citizen an enemy and lock
him up without giving him an opportunity to
be represented and heard. Another former Kennedy
clerk, White House lawyer Brett Kavanaugh, had
made the same argument earlier. Addington accused
Berenson of surrendering executive power on
a fool's prophecy about an inscrutable court.
Berenson accused Addington of "know-nothingness."
Gonzales
listened quietly as the Justice Department and
his own staff lined up against Addington. Then
he decided in favor of Cheney's lawyer.
John
D. Ashcroft, who was attorney general at the
time, declined to discuss details of the dispute
but said the vice president's views "carried
a great deal of weight. He was the E.F. Hutton
in the room. When he talked, everybody would
listen." Cheney, he said, "compelled people
to think carefully about whatever he mentioned."
When
a U.S. District Court ruled several months later
that Padilla had a right to counsel, Cheney's
office insisted on sending Olson's deputy, Paul
Clement, on what Justice Department lawyers
called "a suicide mission": to tell Judge Michael
B. Mukasey that he had erred so grossly that
he should retract his decision. Mukasey derided
the government's "pinched legalism" and added
acidly that his order was "not a suggestion
or request."
Cheney's
strategy fared worse in the Supreme Court, where
two cases arrived for oral argument alongside
Padilla's on April 28, 2004.
For
months, Olson and his Justice Department colleagues
had pleaded for modest shifts that would shore
up the government's position. Hamdi, the American,
had languished in a Navy brig without a hearing
or a lawyer for two and a half years. Shafiq
Rasul, a British citizen at Guantanamo Bay,
had been held even longer. Olson could make
Cheney's argument that courts had no jurisdiction,
but he wanted to "show them that you at least
have some system of due process in place" to
ensure against wrongful detention, according
to a senior Justice Department official who
closely followed the debates.
The
vice president's counsel fought and won again.
He argued that any declaration of binding rules
would restrict the freedom of future presidents
and open the door to further lawsuits. On June
28, 2004, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in
the Hamdi case that detainees must have a lawyer
and an opportunity to challenge their status
as enemy combatants before a "neutral decision
maker." The Rasul decision, the same day, held
6 to 3 that Guantanamo Bay is not beyond the
reach of federal law.
Eleven
days later, Olson stepped down as solicitor
general. His deputy succeeded him. What came
next was a reminder that it does not pay to
cross swords with the vice president.
Ashcroft,
with support from Gonzales, proposed a lawyer
named Patrick Philbin for deputy solicitor general.
Philbin was among the authors of the post-9/11
legal revolution, devising arguments to defend
Cheney's military commissions and the denial
of habeas corpus rights at Guantanamo Bay. But
he had tangled with the vice president's office
now and then, objecting to the private legal
channel between Addington and Yoo and raising
questions about domestic surveillance by the
National Security Agency.
Cheney's
lawyer passed word that Philbin was an unsatisfactory
choice. The attorney general and White House
counsel abandoned their candidate.
"OVP
plays hardball," said a high-ranking former
official who followed the episode, referring
to the office of the vice president. "No one
would defend Philbin."
'Unacceptable
to the Vice President's Office'
Rumsfeld,
Cheney's longtime friend and mentor, gathered
his senior subordinates at the Pentagon in the
summer of 2005. Rumsfeld warned them to steer
clear of Senate Republicans John McCain, John
W. Warner and Lindsay O. Graham, who were drafting
a bill to govern the handling of terrorism suspects.
"Rumsfeld
made clear, emphatically, that the vice president
had the lead on this issue," said a former Pentagon
official with direct knowledge.
Though
his fingerprints were not apparent, Cheney had
already staked out a categorical position for
the president. It came in a last-minute insert
to a "statement of administration policy" by
the Office of Management and Budget, where Nancy
Dorn, Cheney's former chief of legislative affairs,
was deputy director. Without normal staff clearance,
according to two Bush administration officials,
the vice president's lawyer added a paragraph
-- just before publication on July 21, 2005
-- to the OMB's authoritative guidance on the
2006 defense spending bill [Read the document].
"The
Administration strongly opposes" any amendment
to "regulate the detention, treatment or trial
of terrorists captured in the war on terror,"
the statement said. Before most Bush administration
officials even became aware that the subject
was under White House review, Addington wrote
that "the President's senior advisers would
recommend that he veto" any such bill.
Among
those taken unawares was Deputy Defense Secretary
Gordon R. England. More than a year had passed
since Bush expressed "deep disgust" over the
abuse photographed at Abu Ghraib, and England
told aides it was past time to issue clear rules
for U.S. troops.
In
late August 2005, England called a meeting of
nearly three dozen Pentagon officials, including
the vice chief and top uniformed lawyer for
each military branch. Matthew Waxman, the deputy
assistant secretary for detainee affairs, set
the agenda.
Waxman
said that the president's broadly stated order
of Feb. 7, 2002 -- which called for humane treatment,
"subject to military necessity" -- had left
U.S. forces unsure about how to behave. The
Defense Department, he said, should clarify
its bedrock legal requirements with a directive
incorporating the language of Geneva's Common
Article 3 [Read Common Article 3]. That was
exactly the language -- prohibiting cruel, violent,
humiliating and degrading treatment -- that
Cheney had spent three years expunging from
U.S. policy.
"Every
vice chief came out strongly in favor, as did
every JAG," or judge advocate general, recalled
Mora, who was Navy general counsel at the time.
William
J. Haynes II, a close friend of Addington's
who served as Rumsfeld's general counsel, was
one of two holdouts in the room. The other was
Stephen A. Cambone, Rumsfeld's undersecretary
for intelligence.
Waxman,
believing his opponents isolated, circulated
a draft of DOD Directive 2310. Within a few
days, Addington and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
Cheney's chief of staff, invited Waxman for
a visit.
According
to Mora, Waxman returned from the meeting with
the message that his draft was "unacceptable
to the vice president's office." Another defense
official, who made notes of Waxman's report,
said Cheney's lawyer ridiculed the vagueness
of the Geneva ban on "outrages upon personal
dignity," saying it would leave U.S. troops
timid in the face of unpredictable legal risk.
When Waxman replied that the official White
House policy was far more opaque, according
to the report, Addington accused him of trying
to replace the president's decision with his
own.
"The
impact of that meeting is that Directive 2310
died," Mora said.
'Total
Indifference to Public Opinion'
Over
the next 12 months, Congress and the Supreme
Court imposed many of the restrictions that
Cheney had squelched.
"The
irony with the Cheney crowd pushing the envelope
on presidential power is that the president
has now ended up with lesser powers than he
would have had if they had made less extravagant,
monarchical claims," said Bruce Fein, an associate
deputy attorney general under President Ronald
Reagan. Flanigan, a founding member of that
crowd, said he still believes that Addington
and Yoo were right in their "application of
generally accepted constitutional principles."
But he acknowledged that many battles ended
badly. "The Supreme Court," Flanigan said, "decided
to change the rules." Even so, Cheney's losses
were not always as they appeared.
On
Oct. 5, 2005, the Senate voted 90 to 9 in favor
of McCain's Detainee Treatment Act, which included
the Geneva language [Read the bill]. It was,
by any measure, a rebuke to Cheney. Bush signed
the bill into law. "Well, I don't win all the
arguments," Cheney told the Wall Street Journal.
Yet
Cheney and Addington found a roundabout path
to the exceptions they sought for the CIA, as
allies in Congress made little-noticed adjustments
to the bill.
The
final measure confined only the Defense Department
to the list of interrogation techniques specified
in a new Army field manual. No techniques were
specified for CIA officers, who were forbidden
only in general terms to employ "cruel" or "inhuman"
methods. Crucially, the new law said those words
would be interpreted in light of U.S. constitutional
law. That made a big difference to Cheney.
The
Supreme Court has defined cruelty as an act
that "shocks the conscience" under the circumstances.
Addington suggested, according to another government
lawyer, that harsh methods would be far less
shocking under circumstances involving a mass-casualty
terrorist threat. Cheney may have alluded to
that advice in an interview with ABC's "Nightline"
on Dec. 18, 2005, saying that "what shocks the
conscience" is to some extent "in the eye of
the beholder."
Eager
to put detainee scandals behind them, Bush's
advisers spent days composing a statement in
which the president would declare support for
the veto-proof bill on detainee treatment. Hours
before Bush signed it into law on Dec. 30, 2005,
Cheney's lawyer intercepted the accompanying
statement "and just literally takes his red
pen all the way through it," according to an
official with firsthand knowledge.
Addington
substituted a single sentence. Bush, he wrote,
would interpret the law "in a manner consistent
with the constitutional authority of the President
to supervise the unitary executive branch and
as Commander in Chief."
Cheney's
office had used that technique often. Like his
boss, Addington disdained what he called "interagency
treaties," one official said. He had no qualms
about discarding language "agreed between Cabinet
secretaries," the official said.
Top
officials from the CIA, Justice, State and Defense
departments unanimously opposed the substitution,
according to two officials. The ranking national
security lawyer at the White House, John B.
Bellinger III, warned that Congress would view
Addington's statement as a "stick in the eye"
after weeks of consensus-building by national
security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.
None
of that mattered. With Cheney's weight behind
it, White House counsel Harriet E. Miers sent
Addington's version to Bush for his signature.
"The only person in Washington who cares less
about his public image than David Addington
is Dick Cheney," said a former White House ally.
"What both of them miss is that ..... in times
of war, a prerequisite for success is people
having confidence in their leadership. This
is the great failure of the administration --
a complete and total indifference to public
opinion."
Not
'Exactly as the Vice President Would Have Wanted'
On
June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court struck its
sharpest blow to the house that Cheney built,
ruling 5 to 3 that the president had no lawful
power to try alleged terrorists in military
commissions [Read the opinion]. The tribunal
order that Cheney brought to Bush's private
dining room, and the game plan Cheney's lawyer
wrote to defend it, fetched condemnation on
disparate legal grounds. The majority relied,
as Addington's critics foresaw, on Justice Kennedy's
vote. Not only did the court leave the president
beholden to Congress for the authority to charge
and punish terrorists, but it rejected a claim
of implicit legislative consent that Bush was
using elsewhere to justify electronic surveillance
without a warrant. And not only did it find
that Geneva's Common Article 3 protects "unlawful
enemy combatants," but it said that those protections
-- including humane treatment and the right
to a trial by "a regularly constituted court"
-- were enforceable by federal judges in the
United States.
The
court's decision, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, was
widely seen as a calamity for Cheney's war plan
against al-Qaeda. As the Bush administration
formed its response, the vice president's position
appeared to decline further still. White House
strategists agreed that they had to submit legislation
to undo the damage of the Hamdan case. Cheney
and Addington, according to a former official
with firsthand knowledge, favored a one-page
bill. Their proposal would simply have stated
that the Geneva Conventions confer no right
of access to U.S. courts, stripped U.S. courts
of jurisdiction over foreign nationals declared
to be enemy combatants and affirmed the president's
authority to create military commissions exactly
as he had already done. Bush chose to spend
the fall of 2006 negotiating a much more complex
bill that became the Military Commissions Act.
The White House proposal, said Bolten, the chief
of staff, "did not come out exactly as the vice
president would have wanted."
In
another reversal for Cheney, Bush acknowledged
publicly on Sept. 6 that the CIA maintained
secret prisons overseas for senior al-Qaeda
detainees, a subject on which he had held his
silence since The Post disclosed them late in
2005. The president announced a plan to empty
the "black sites" and bring their prisoners
to Guantanamo Bay to be tried.
The
same day, almost exactly a year after the vice
president's office shelved Waxman's Pentagon
plan, Waxman's successor dusted it off. DOD
Directive 2310.01E, the Department of Defense
Detainee Program, included the verbatim text
of Geneva's Common Article 3 and described it,
as Waxman had, as "a minimum standard for the
care and treatment of all detainees." [Read
the directive] The new Army field manual, published
the next day, said that interrogators were forbidden
to employ a long list of techniques that had
been used against suspected terrorists since
Sept. 11, 2001 -- including stripping, hooding,
inflicting pain and forcing the performance
of sex acts.
For
all the apparent setbacks, close observers said,
Cheney has preserved his top-priority tools
in the "war on terror." After a private meeting
with Cheney, one of them said, Bush decided
not to promise that there would be no more black
sites -- and seven months later, the White House
acknowledged that secret detention had resumed.
The Military Commissions Act, passed by strong
majorities of the Senate and House on Sept.
28 and 29, 2006, gave "the office of the vice
president almost everything it wanted," said
Yoo, who maintained his contact with Addington
after returning to a tenured position at Berkeley.
The
new law withstood its first Supreme Court challenge
on April 2. It exempts CIA case officers and
other government employees from prosecution
for past war crimes or torture. Once again,
an apparently technical provision held great
importance to Cheney and his allies.
Without
repealing the War Crimes Act, which imposes
criminal penalties for grave breaches of Geneva's
humane-treatment standards, Congress said the
president, not the Supreme Court, has final
authority to decide what the standards mean
-- and whether they even apply.
'I'd
Like to Close Guantanamo'
Air
Force Two touched down in Sydney this past Feb.
24. Cheney had come to discuss Iraq. Prime Minister
John Howard brought the conversation around
to an Australian citizen who had unexpectedly
become a political threat. Under pressure at
home, Howard said he told Cheney that there
must be a trial "with no further delay" for
David Hicks, 31, who was beginning his sixth
year at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo
Bay. Five days later, Hicks was indicted as
a war criminal. On March 26, he pleaded guilty
to providing "material support" for terrorism.
At every stage since his capture, in a taxi
bound for the Afghan-Pakistan border, Hicks
had crossed a legal landscape that Cheney did
more than anyone to reshape. He was Detainee
002 at Guantanamo Bay, arriving on opening day
at an asserted no man's land beyond the reach
of sovereign law. Interrogators questioned him
under guidelines that gave legal cover to the
infliction of pain and fear -- and, according
to an affidavit filed by British lawyer Steven
Grosz, Hicks was subjected to beatings, sodomy
with a foreign object, sensory deprivation,
disorienting drugs and prolonged shackling in
painful positions.
The
U.S. government denied those claims, and before
accepting Hicks's guilty plea it required him
to affirm that he had "never been illegally
treated." But the tribunal's rules, written
under principles Cheney advanced, would have
allowed the Australian's conviction with evidence
obtained entirely by "cruel, inhuman or degrading"
techniques.
Shortly
after Cheney returned from Australia, the Hicks
case died with a whimper. The U.S. government
abruptly shifted its stance in plea negotiations,
dropping the sentence it offered from 20 years
in prison to nine months if Hicks would say
that he was guilty.
Only
the dramatic shift to lenience, said Joshua
Dratel, one of three defense lawyers, resolved
the case in time to return Hicks to Australia
before Howard faces reelection late this year.
The deal, negotiated without the knowledge of
the chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris
Davis, was supervised by Susan J. Crawford,
the senior authority over military commissions.
Crawford received her three previous government
jobs from then-Defense Secretary Cheney -- appointed
as his special adviser, Pentagon inspector general
and then judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Armed Forces.
Yet
the tactical retreat on Hicks, according to
Bush administration officials, diverted attention
from the continuity of U.S. policy on detainees.
A
year after Bush announced at a news conference
that "I'd like to close Guantanamo," plans to
expand it are proceeding. Senior officials said
Cheney, standing nearly alone, has turned back
strong efforts -- by Rice, England, new Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates and former Bush speechwriter
Mike Gerson, among others -- to give the president
what he said he wants.
Cheney
and his aides "didn't circumvent the process,"
one participant said. "They were just very effective
in using it."
'His
Great Virtue and His Weakness'
More
than a year after Congress passed McCain-sponsored
restrictions on the questioning of suspected
terrorists, the Bush administration is still
debating how far the CIA's interrogators may
go in their effort to break down resistant detainees.
Two officials said the vice president has deadlocked
the debate.
Bush
said last September that he would "work with"
Congress to review "an alternative set of procedures"
for "tough" -- but, he said, lawful -- interrogation.
He did not promise to submit legislation or
to report particulars to any oversight committee,
and he has not done so.
Two
questions remain, officials said. One involves
techniques to be authorized now. The other is
whether any technique should be explicitly forbidden.
According to participants in the debate, the
vice president stands by the view that Bush
need not honor any of the new judicial and legislative
restrictions. His lawyer, they said, has recently
restated Cheney's argument that when courts
and Congress "purport to" limit the commander
in chief's warmaking authority, he has the constitutional
prerogative to disregard them.
If
Cheney advocates a return to waterboarding,
they said, they have not heard him say so. But
his office has fought fiercely against an executive
order or CIA directive that would make the technique
illegal.
"That's
just the vice president," said Gerson, Bush's
longtime chief speechwriter, referring to Cheney's
October remark that "a dunk in the water" for
terrorists -- a radio interviewer's term --
is "a no-brainer for me."
Gerson
added: "It's principled. He's deeply conscious
that this is a dangerous world, and he wants
this president and future presidents to be able
to deal with that. He feels very strongly about
these things, and it's his great virtue and
his weakness."
Staff
researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
[Series continues on next page.]
