No Checks, No Balances -- No Supervision?

"Cheney has used that mandate with singular force of will."

Another key to Cheney's method: Unusual secrecy. "Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped 'Treated As: Top Secret/SCI.' Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to 'sensitive compartmented information,' the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words 'treated as,' they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause 'exceptionally grave damage to national security.'"

Cheney and his aides are shown running roughshod over any staffers and Cabinet officials who disagree with them -- and turning the rest into willing tools. In one especially newsy revelation, Gellman and Becker write that a memo signed by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales was, like much else attributed to Gonzales on the issue, actually the work of David S. Addington, Cheney's formidable general counsel and legal adviser of many years. That particular memo was the one in which Gonzales referred to some provisions of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint."

In today's installment, Gellman and Becker trace to January 2002 the first time the issue of interrogations of terror suspects came up at the White House: "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. . . .

"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. . . .

"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."

Cheney's office also gets linked to another notorious document, the " torture memo," which narrowed the definition of "torture" to mean only suffering "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "organ failure . . . or even death."

And John C. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer hitherto widely considered the administration's most passionate advocate for torture, actually was trying to hold Cheney's office back at one point: "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."

And even Addington at one point apparently felt Cheney was going too far. Deputy White House counsel Timothy E. Flanigan told The Post that Addington personally felt detainees should be granted access to lawyers, but he beat back such a proposal "because that was the position of his client, the vice president."

Gellman and Becker also describe how Cheney managed to get little-noticed adjustments made in both the anti-torture amendment championed by Senator John McCain and the bill authorizing military commissions in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that had outlawed them. "For all the apparent setbacks, close observers said, Cheney has preserved his top-priority tools in the 'war on terror.'"

Some Initial Reaction

Doug Feaver looks through readers comments at washingtonpost.com and concludes: "Many of those who commented are angry not only about what the articles report but also about the fact that they did not come sooner, a reiteration of the charge that the so-called MSM (mainstream media) have missed the boat in reporting on this administration.