Cheney's Cheney

By David Ignatius

Friday, January 6, 2006; Page A19

Who is David Addington? The simple answer is that he's Vice President Cheney's former legal counsel and, since the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby in October, Cheney's chief of staff. But behind the scenes, the polite but implacable Addington has been a chief advocate for the interrogation and surveillance policies that have created a legal crisis for the Bush administration.

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His influence rests on two pillars: his unyielding conviction that the powers of the president cannot be abridged in wartime, and the total support he receives from Cheney.

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What drives Addington is a belief that the president's wartime powers are, essentially, unfettered, argues Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee who has attended highly classified briefings with him on detention and surveillance issues. "He believes that in time of war, there is total authority for the president to waive any rules to carry out his objectives. Those views have extremely dangerous implications." Harman's efforts to negotiate compromises with Addington on interrogation issues were rebuffed, she says, by his insistence that "it's dangerous to tie the president's hands in any way."

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Addington's role has been the hard man -- the ideological enforcer. Most mornings during the first term, he would join the staff meeting in the White House counsel's office -- and take potshots at anyone he regarded as insufficiently committed to the president's agenda. "It was very surprising if anyone took a position more conservative than David, and this was a very conservative office," recalls one former colleague. "He was the hardest of the hard-core."

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Even people who describe themselves as friends of Addington believe that he has damaged President Bush politically by pressing anti-terrorism policies to the legal breaking point. And for many Republicans who bear scars from Addington, his story raises the ultimate question about the Bush White House: Who's in charge here?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/05/AR2006010501902.html

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So even Ch*ney is not an individual thinker. Hmmm...

Rumsfeld-to-Cheney-to-Addington-to-Torture
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, told NPR November 3, 2005, that "he had uncovered a 'visible audit trail' tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers directly back to Vice President Cheney's office," Dan Froomkin reported November 4, 2005.

According to Wilkerson: "What happened was that the secretary of Defense , under the cover of the vice president's office, began to create an environment -- and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the president having put out this memo, they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we've seen."

Unitary Executive Theory

Addington "believes in the Unitary Executive theory. If you guessed that this meant the power of one CEO who decides liberty and justice for all, you wouldn't be far off," Jan Frel wrote in the October 28, 2005, AlterNet Blog. "It's not too far from King of Everything, really."

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Profiles

"Addington worked as assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1981 to 1984. From 1984 to 1987, he was counsel for the House committees on intelligence and foreign affairs. He served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan for one year in 1987 before becoming Reagan’s deputy assistant. From 1989 to 1992, Addington served as special assistant to the secretary and deputy secretary of Defense, before becoming the department’s general counsel in 1992, a post he held until 1993.

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_S._Addington

What a pantload.