The Cheney Notes
The New York Times spends attention to notes Dick Cheney wrote back in 1975:
RETURNING to the White House after the Memorial Day weekend in 1975, the young aide Dick Cheney found himself handling a First Amendment showdown. The New York Times had published an article by Seymour M. Hersh about an espionage program, and the White House chief of staff, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was demanding action.
Out came the yellow legal pad, and in his distinctively neat, deliberate hand, Mr. Cheney laid out the “problem,â€? “goalsâ€? while addressing it, and “options.â€?…
Mr. Cheney’s notes, now in the Gerald R. Ford presidential library, collected and synthesized the views of lawyers, diplomats, spies and military officials, but his own views shine through…
Fast forward three decades and that same handwriting appears on a copy of the Op-Ed article in The Times that set in motion events that led to the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff.
Kathryn S. Olmsted, history professor at the University of California commented that Dick Cheney “had the same idea for the past 30 years”…
“His philosophy is that the president and the vice president and the people around the president decide what’s secret and what’s not. They thought they had to aggressively go after the press and Congress to reclaim the powers the president lost in Watergate.”
Some of the goals Cheney listed:
1- To enforce the law which prohibits such disclosure
2- To discourage the NYT and other publications from similar action
3- To find + prosecute the individual in government who provided the information
4- To discourage others from leaking such information in the future
5- To demonstrate the dangers to national security which develop when investigations exceed the bounds of propriety
6- To create an environment in which the ongoing investigations of the intelligence community are conducted w/o [harming our intelligence capabilities]
Under alternatives Cheney wrote:
1- FBI investigation of NYT, Hersh +/or possible government sources
2- Grand Jury – seek immediate indictments of NYT + Hersh
3- Search warrant – to go after Hersh papers in his apt.
4- Discuss informally w/ NYT
5- Do nothing
It truly is – for me at least – fascinating to read these notes. The way Cheney dealt very systematically with this problem. In short, it provides a fascinating glance into how Cheney operates, and… what he thinks about certain matters. As Adam Liptak points out, Cheney isn’t exactly sympathetic towards the press… or to Congress and he is “insistent on the prerogatives of the executive branch and adamant about the importance of national security secrets.”
In short: he seems to favor – as everybody knows – an aggressive approach towards this kind of thing. Prosecuting, search warrants, etc. are steps Cheney was and is not afraid to take. As The Carpetbagger Report points out, “when it comes to his authoritarian impulses, he’s entirely consistent.”
More at Laura Rozen’s War and Piece.
5 Responses to “The Cheney Notes”
The Cheney Notes…
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History in the making!
A free press can act as a good check on the power of those we elect. It’s similar to the rules guding the stock exchange that demand a fair ‘playing-field’ of infomration that allows investors to make their decicions based on the same information. Of course that rule if often broken in the world of investing and insider information is often quite tough to define. But their is no question that a more open Government is a more honest Governemnt, a more responsible Government and one that can be held accountable.
It’s obvious that the Bush administration wants to carry out behavior and tactics that are legally questionable. The best way to do this is to hide those actions. These are men who can’t operate in the bright light of exposure. They must conceal their motive, and the longer you do that the more paranoid and likely you are to grow the list of ‘secret’ things, until the American people are the last people to know what their Government is doing. Cheney has turned the US Government into the Kremlin of th Soviet years. A secret organization that makes deisions away from public debate and then uses it’s mouth pieces to destory those who might speak out against it.
The part that amazes me, is how little these so called traditional, conservatives actually value Democracy and freedom (the things they claim to be fighting for all the time). What little faith they have in our ideals. To believe that in order for freedom to win out we have to go into third world countries and wipe out people. How little they believe in the value of honest debate and how they must fear those who seek to let the public know what the governemnt is actually doing.
Cheney is a dangerous man who thinks he alone should decide what the people in this country can know, should know. As this type of thinking festers, he becomes more and more delusional, more likely to hide even seemingly innocent things under ‘national security’ and paranoia. All the while he sacrifices the ideals that this country was founded on.
The Government should answer to the people who run the country. And Cheney just doesn’t believe that. He greed for power and his history of being around power are not reassuring.
Is there a note about seeing the optometrist before his next hunting trip? Just asking.
Other Veeps have sworn their allegiance to the Constitution; Cheney swore his to the CEO’s of Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, KBR,Texaco etc.