Cheney's 'Dark Side' Is Showing

Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff write in Newsweek: "Last Tuesday, Senate Republicans were winding up their weekly luncheon in the Capitol when the vice president rose to speak. Staffers were quickly ordered out of the room -- what Cheney had to say was for senators only. Normally taciturn, Cheney was uncharacteristically impassioned, according to two GOP senators who did not want to be on the record about a private meeting. He was very upset over the Senate's overwhelming passage of an amendment that prohibits inhumane treatment of terrorist detainees. Cheney said the law would tie the president's hands and end up costing 'thousands of lives.' He dramatized the point, conjuring up a scenario in which a captured Qaeda operative, another Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, refuses to give his interrogators details about an imminent attack. 'We have to be able to do what is necessary,' the vice president said, according to one of the senators who was present. The lawmakers listened, but they weren't moved to act. Sen. John McCain, who authored the anti-torture amendment, spoke up. 'This is killing us around the world,' he said. The House, which will likely vote on the measure soon, is also expected to pass it by a large margin. . . .

"Congress, mindful of the public's turn against the war, is now openly defying his hard-line policies. Powerful figures -- within the West Wing, at the State Department and Pentagon -- who once deferred to him are now peeling away, worried that Cheney may have gone too far. . . .

"The vice president could be forgiven for retreating to his undisclosed location and waiting out the worst of it. Instead, his response has been pure Cheney. He's not budging. If anything -- as the Senate meeting shows -- the veep has become more convinced that he's right and his opponents are wrong."

And Cheney remains a formidable opponent, Klaidman and Isikoff write. "When Bush began his second term in 2004, a group of top administration officials, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, began a quiet campaign to back off some controversial detention and interrogation methods that were damaging U.S. credibility around the world."

But Cheney and top aide David Addington "used their influence afterward to kill the ideas."

More About Torture

Jane Mayer writes in the New Yorker that administration policies may preclude the prosecution of CIA agents who commit abuses or even kill detainees.

Mayer writes: "The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was 'breathtaking,' the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous 'enhanced' interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist. . . .

"For nearly a year, Democratic senators critical of alleged abuses have been demanding to see these memos. 'We need to know what was authorized,' Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, told me. . . . . Levin is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have an oversight role in relation to the C.I.A. 'The Administration is getting away with just saying no.' "

Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek: "We now have plenty of documents and testimonials that make plain that the administration created an atmosphere in which the interrogation of prisoners could lapse into torture. After 9/11, high up in the administration -- at the White House and the Pentagon -- officials and lawyers were asked to find ways to bend and stretch the traditional rules of war. Donald Rumsfeld publicly declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war against Al Qaeda. Whether or not these legalisms were correct, their most important effect was the message they sent down the chain of command: 'Push the envelope.' . . .

"[T]oday, what angers friends of America abroad is not that abuses like those at Abu Ghraib happened. Some lapses are probably an inevitable consequence of war, terrorism and insurgencies. What angers them is that no one beyond a few 'little people' have been punished, the system has not been overhauled, and even now, after all that has happened, the White House is spending time, effort and precious political capital in a strange, stubborn and surely futile quest to preserve the option to torture."

Cheney and Libby

It was just over a week ago that Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, was indicted in the CIA leak investigation. Is that the end of the story? Or just the beginning?

Here's Sam Donaldson on the "Chris Matthews Show" on NBC: