Cheney Lost -- But How Much?

As the media digs deeper into the White House's surprise announcements Wednesday regarding the treatment of detainees, two somewhat conflicting stories emerge.

One is that Vice President Cheney and his fellow hardliners lost the battle for Bush's ear to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her allies.

But the other is that there's still a lot in the White House proposals that should make Cheney happy.

Cheney v. Rice

Dafna Linzer and Glenn Kessler write in The Washington Post that the new proposals were "the result of nearly two years of debate within the Bush White House" -- a debate that "divided the president's key advisers and kept open the CIA's 'black sites' until President Bush himself, under the advice of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, ordered the facilities emptied for now, and possibly for good."

They write that Rice's position was bolstered "when the Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that detainees must be put under the protections of the Geneva Conventions, in effect declaring the CIA's program illegal. . . .

"[T]he White House counsel had made no contingency plans for a loss and was stunned by the decision."

At a climactic meeting of senior policymakers at the end of August, Rice "made her final pitch for a change in policy. In front of her colleagues, according to several who attended, she said that it was important for the United States to bring the issue to closure, both on foreign policy grounds and moral grounds. She noted that the secret sites were having a corrosive effect on the nation's ability to win cooperation on a range of intelligence issues. Rice urged the president to resolve the issue rather than hand it off to his successor.

"The president agreed.

"'This is a paradigm shift for the administration,' said one senior official who was involved."

Linzer and Kessler even raise the possibility that Bush's assurance that the black sites theoretically could be used again was just a sop to Cheney.

"'It's true the program could continue, but it will never occur in the same manner that it operated before,' said one influential official."

Kate Zernike writes in the New York Times that a committee established by Bush in January and "run by J. D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, held more than 20 meetings in secret at the White House and a half-dozen higher-level sessions with Mr. Bush's national security team, which included Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte. . . .