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 Editorials | Issues | August 2007 
Dick Cheney, A Controversial Vice-President
 Philippe Gélie - Le Figaro
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 |  | In the eyes of outside observers, Cheney is the political equivalent of a black hole, which exerts a powerful but invisible force and emits neither light nor heat that could explain the decision process.
- David Ignatius, Washington Post |  | |
After the resignation of the president's main adviser, Karl Rove, pressure is growing in Washington against the Executive branch's powerful Number Two. A year before the presidential election, the sulfurous record of 66-year-old Richard Cheney embarrasses the Republicans and stimulates the Democrats. Will the 46th Vice-President of the United States complete his term by George W. Bush's side?
July 10th, the American Senate's budget committee took an unprecedented decision: it refused to allocate the 4.8 million dollars proposed to cover the expenses of the vice-president's functions for the coming year. Unless there is a compromise before the fall, Dick Cheney could lose his official residence at Washington's Naval Observatory, his armored limousines, his bodyguards, and his collaborators, the exact number of whom no one in the United States knows.
The Senate's gesture of displeasure is a riposte to the last skirmish between George W. Bush's "éminence grise" and the Congress. In his morbid obsession with secrecy, Cheney has refused to submit to the decree that obliges administration members to archive the confidential documents that pass through their hands. To justify his auto-exemption, the vice-president advanced an unexpected argument: in a letter to the House of Representatives' oversight committee, he explained that he was "not part of the Executive branch." Certainly, the American Constitution makes him President pro tem of the Senate, but he nonetheless remains first in the order of succession, with offices in the West Wing of the White House, where the President of the United States is headquartered. The ploy is all the more blatant in that Dick Cheney has, in the past, frequently invoked "executive privilege" in order to refuse to communicate information to congressmen.
But Cheney rarely bothers himself with the law when it comes to covering up his activities. In 2002, the IRS meted out 8 million dollars in fines for having transmitted his report on the donations and identities of contributors to the "Vote Recount Fund" that allowed Bush to take the Florida election eighteen months late. By happy coincidence, the tax authorities decreed an amnesty just in time. Last September, in response to a request from a citizens' association that wanted to know which religious officials the vice-president had received in his official residence, he ordered the Secret Service to completely destroy his visitor logbook. Neither has he ever responded to requests for information about his movements. And when the National Archives insisted on accessing his confidential documents, he proposed straight out to do away with the institution in question.
"Above the Law"
While the composition of the presidential team constitutes public information, the "Veep" (vice-president) has refused for six years to say how many collaborators he employs and a fortiori who they are. The result is that people only know the poster-boys, like David Addington, one of the most discreet and influential jurists in the White House, who succeeded Lewis Libby as Chief-of-Staff. "The vice-president considers himself to be above the law," accuses California Democratic Representative Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. "That's proof of arrogance and bad judgment."
In the beginning, it was believed that Richard B. Cheney would be an ideal partner for George W. Bush. Mandated during the 2000 campaign to find Bush a vice-president, he elaborated a definition of the post that dovetailed perfectly to himself. Experienced, unabashedly conservative, this Bush senior former collaborator (he was Secretary of Defense during the first Gulf War), well-versed in the workings of Washington, would surely keep a newly-elected president suspected of not being quite up to the job from making any gaffes. Today, the record is very dark: Dick Cheney can do whatever he likes to erase his tracks; his paw is identifiable behind all this presidency's strokes of force and all its fiascoes.
What was supposed to have been his strength - the absence of political ambition and no desire to succeed his boss - has transformed itself into a handicap: with no designated heir, the White House chief is marginalized by his own Party, already launched into the 2008 presidential race. After the failure of his immigration reform in June, one commentator on CBS declared that Bush had passed from the status of "lame duck" to "dead-duck." His vice-president has become a ball and chain to him: at a nadir in the polls, with a 13% favorable opinion, Cheney is frequently designated as 'the worst vice-president in the history' of the United States. In a recent column, Sally Quinn, wife of Ben Bradlee who was the Washington Post's editor during the Watergate era, emphasized: "The big question today among Republicans is how to get rid of Dick Cheney. He is perceived as toxic."
Threats of Impeachment
Some Democrats are ready to oblige. In May, Dennis Kucinich, Ohio Representative and candidate for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, filed a resolution to open an impeachment procedure against the vice-president in the House of Representatives. In three articles, he accuses Cheney of having "manipulated intelligence to invent the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction," with having "misled citizens about an unproven relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda" and with "openly threatening Iran with aggression without any real threat to the United States." A half-dozen Representatives have associated themselves to his measure, including California Representative Maxine Waters, who opened the first "Impeachment Headquarters" in Los Angeles at the beginning of July. Some left-leaning editorialists have taken up the pen to support their cause. According to Cenk Uygur in Politico, "the mere threat of impeachment could force him to resign."
Never Caught Red-Handed
That's doubtful, but the case against Cheney keeps getting thicker. At the end of June, the Washington Post published a long series exploring the role the vice-president has played in the shadows to influence the nation's affairs. There, people learned in detail how he has worked to authorize wiretapping of citizens since September 11, 2001; the role he has played in the choice of "muscular" interrogation methods applied in Guantanamo; how he succeeded in hiding their existence from everyone for two years, even from the then-Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the National Security Adviser, Condi Rice; how he intervened in the choice of Supreme Court judges, in fiscal policy, and even in NASA's space program.
Nothing categorically illegal, and that's the problem his adversaries have: often suspected of having manipulated the intelligence services' data in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Cheney has never been caught red-handed. Certainly he went numerous times to CIA headquarters to, many believe, pressure the spies; certainly, people have lost count of his erroneous allegations about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's unproven links with al-Qaeda. But no senior CIA official or agent has yet denounced him, proof in hand, for a lie or deliberate manipulation. While many scientists, for example, complain of the constant pressure and censorship exercised by the Republican Administration, the spies keep quiet.
Loss of Influence
For lack of anything better, it's the "Veep's" "furtive" methods that are singled out. Cheney acts in the shadows, without leaving any fingerprints. He puts his papers in a safe every night and has invented a new secret classification "SCI," for "sensitive compartmentalized intelligence." The Libby affair is typical of his method: deputed to destroy the credibility of an Iraq war critic, his Chief-of-Staff found himself convicted of false testimony and obstruction of justice. Condemned to thirty months in prison, Lewis Libby was pardoned by George W. Bush at the beginning of July, at the end of an opaque procedure radio-controlled by the vice-president. "In the eyes of outside observers," notes the Washington Post's David Ignatius, "Cheney is the political equivalent of a black hole, which exerts a powerful but invisible force and emits neither light nor heat that could explain the decision process."
George Bush's second term bodes less well for this great manipulator's maneuvers. With the departures of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz from the Pentagon, John Bolton from the UN, and Libby's downfall, Cheney's henchmen in the Administration are less numerous.
Condoleezza Rice's rise in power at the State Department and Robert Gates' at Defense limit his field of influence still further. It's enough to see Washington's changes in attitude with respect to international cooperation, dialogue with North Korea, the peace process in the Middle East or the fight against climate change: by the evidence, Cheney is winning fewer battles. But he continues to take them on and his influence on the Iran case, notably, is the object of anxious speculation.
"He is the enemy within," deems Newsweek. "He has privatized the function of the vice-president," deplores the New York Times. "The irony," emphasizes former Reagan Administration official Bruce Fein, "is that the president finds himself with less power than he would have had, had he and Cheney not had such extravagant and monarchical pretensions." Logic suggests that this fuse short-circuit: to resuscitate his presidency, conservatives are suggesting that Bush replace Cheney with a candidate for his succession, for example Fred Thompson. It is most unlikely that would happen: without his mentor, would Bush even be capable of governing America?
Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher. |
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