WP, Dan Froomkin: Method to Cheney's Madness (He stopped filing reports in 2003.)

The Method to Cheney's Madness
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, June 22, 2007

Why, in 2003, did Vice President Cheney suddenly become so dead-set against reporting how his office handled government secrets?...(L)et's assume there's a method to his madness. Perhaps Cheney is rejecting this oversight because he doesn't want people to know what he and his aides have been doing with classified information. Or perhaps he believes in principle that he shouldn't be subject to constraints that apply to others in the executive branch. Maybe both. I'm betting on both.

Cheney's particular sensitivity to releasing information about his handling of government secrets is not exactly surprising. And while he apparently had no problem filing reports in 2001 and 2002, he stopped doing so in 2003 -- a game-changing year in a lot of ways.

As I wrote in my March 31, 2006, column, investigative reporter Murray Waas has developed a compelling case that the use and abuse of classified information has been key to the White House's success not only in contriving a bogus case for war in Iraq, but in keeping charges of deception from becoming a major issue in the 2004 election -- and, arguably, to this day. Time and time again, in a strategy that most likely owes its existence to Cheney, the White House has selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served its political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit it.

Also, starting in early 2003, Bush granted Cheney broad new powers to personally classify and declassify material, as I wrote in my Feb. 17, 2006 column. Bush's move, ironically, came in the very same order that Cheney is now in part resisting....In a Feb. 15, 2006, interview on Fox News, Cheney asserted that he had the authority to declassify government secrets, but refused to say whether he had ever done so....

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And let's not forget the elephant in the room. As Josh Meyer writes in the Los Angeles Times today: "According to documents released Thursday by a House committee, Cheney's staff has blocked efforts by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office to enforce a key component of the presidential order: a mandatory on-site inspection of the vice president's office. At least one of those inspections would have come at a particularly delicate time -- when Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, and other aides were under criminal investigation for their suspected roles in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/06/22/BL2007062201022.html?hpid=topnews

Elections, the truth, laws, wars, human suffering, or even decency are just trivial matters to Cheney.

No records = no problems

Cheney must be stopped.

He just doesn't want any oversight, either from Bush's lackeys or Congress, over his classification and declassification...

'Here's a guy who raises 'executive privilege' to historic levels to exempt himself from all rules and oversight, and now he says he's not part of the executive branch?' said Silverstein. 'Here we have a subordinate part of the executive branch asserting independent constitutional authority even against its own superior. It is flabbergasting.'"