Access for Sale

Very real threat? As Josh Tyrangiel writes for Time: "Were the consequences of underestimating terrorists neither so grave nor so fresh, it would be tempting to look at the seven men indicted on conspiracy charges for plotting to blow up the Sears Tower and laugh. Not so much at the suspects -- five American citizens, a legal immigrant from Haiti and an illegal Haitian national, all of whose hardscrabble bios make them seem more sad than sinister -- but at those who considered them a real threat to wage, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales put it, 'a full ground war against the United States.' "

Responding to Cheney

Sunday talk-show hosts asked two Democratic senators to respond to this clip from Cheney's recent CNN interview, in which he said: "The worst possible thing we could do is what the Democrats are suggesting. And no matter how you carve it, you can call it anything you want, but basically it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

Here's how Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin responded to NBC's Tim Russert : "The worst thing we could possibly do is what Vice President Cheney and President Bush did, which was take us into an unnecessary war that had nothing to do with 9/11 on false pretenses. They have done the worst thing that's ever been done in this regard. The question is, do we just keep making the same mistake over and over again? Do we just stay in Iraq so that Cheney and Bush can say that, that they were right?"

Here's Wolf Blitzer talking to Joseph Biden of Delaware:

"BLITZER: All right. You want to respond to the vice president, Senator Biden?

"BIDEN: No, I don't want to respond to him. He's at 20 percent in the polls. No one listens to him. He has no credibility. It's ridiculous."

Mayer on Addington

In this week's New Yorker (not available online), Jane Mayer profiles David S. Addington, Cheney's chief of staff and longtime legal adviser, who has "played a central role in shaping the Administration's legal strategy for the war on terror.

"Known as the New Paradigm, this strategy rests on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars share -- namely, that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it. Under this framework, statutes prohibiting torture, secret detention, and warrantless surveillance have been set aside."

She writes: "Conventional wisdom holds that September 11th changed everything, including the thinking of Cheney and Addington. . . . But a close look at the nearly twenty-year collaboration . . . suggests that in fact their ideology has not changed much. It seems clear that Addington was able to promote vast executive powers after September 11th in part because he and Cheney had been laying the political groundwork for years."

Mayer notes that former secretary of state Colin Powell recently told friends that Addington "doesn't care about the Constitution."

In a short Q and A on the New Yorker Web site, Mayer explains: "It seemed important to me to hold the creator of these policies accountable, so that the public could understand better who is behind them and how he thinks."

And what would Mayer ask Addington, if the notoriously secretive official let her? "I'd like to ask him whether, in his view, there is anything that the President cannot legally do in the service of national security."