~snip~
Devoid of well-known names and faces, the OVP was nearly invisible to the public until last fall. That's when “Scooter” Libby was indicted for lying to federal investigators in the Valerie Plame case, focusing the media spotlight on the vice president's chief of staff and top national security adviser, who resigned immediately. Aside from Libby, however, virtually none of Cheney's current aides has endured any scrutiny. Outside the Washington cognoscenti, it's a safe bet that not one in a hundred Americans could name a single Cheney aide. Since 2001, the list has included David Addington, who replaced Libby; top national security advisers such as Eric Edelman and Victoria Nuland; radical-right Middle East specialists such as Hannah, William J. Luti, and David Wurmser; anti-China, geopolitical Asia hands like Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich; an assortment of conservative apparatchiks and technocrats, often neoconservative-connected, including C. Dean McGrath, Aaron Friedberg, Karen Knutson, and Carol Kuntz; lobbyists and domestic policy gurus, such as Nancy Dorn, Jonathan Burks, Nina Shokraiil Rees, Cesar Conda, and Candida Wolf -- and a host of communications directors, flacks, and spokespeople over the years, notably “Cheney's angels”: Mary Matalin, Juleanna Glover Weiss, Jennifer Millerwise, Catherine Martin, and Lee Anne McBride.
It is the latter, especially Cheney's press secretaries -- he has run through seven of them -- whose job is saying nothing, and saying it often. His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no -- nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president's office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. “We just don't give out that kind of information,” says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney's “angels.” She won't say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. “It's just not something we talk about.” The notoriously silent OVP staff rebuffs not just pesky reporters but even innocuous database researchers from companies like Carroll Publishing, which puts out the quarterly Federal Directory. “They're tight-lipped about the kind of information they put out,” says Albert Ruffin, senior editor at Carroll, who fumes that Cheney's office doesn't bother returning his calls when he's updating the limited information he manages to collect.
The OVP's enduring obsession with absolute secrecy first became obvious during the long court battle early in Bush's first term over the energy task force chaired by Cheney. Neither the coalition of watchdog and environmental groups that sued the ovp nor members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office discovered much about the workings of the task force. Addington, then Cheney's general counsel, enforced the say-nothing policy ultimately upheld by federal courts. “He engineered an extraordinary expansion of government power at the expense of accountability,” says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the conservative gadfly group that sued Cheney. “We got a terse letter back from Addington saying essentially, ‘Go jump in the lake.'”
Addington, 49, has spent almost exactly half of his life working for or working alongside Dick Cheney, from an impressionable youngster in his early 20s to the hard-nosed ideologue that he is today. They first met in the early 1980s, when Addington served as a counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Iran-Contra Committee, and then the House Intelligence Committee, when Cheney was a member of the committee. When Cheney became secretary of defense, Addington was his special assistant and then the Defense Department's general counsel. When Cheney toyed with running for president in the 1990s, Addington ran his political action committee. In the ovp, Addington has emerged as the single most militant advocate for the unfettered power of the presidency. “Early on, with the detainee issues, the torture issues, even before Abu Ghraib, people
that David Addington is the source of all this stuff,” says a senior national security lawyer in Washington. “This stuff” includes the spectrum of controversial counterterrorism powers, from military tribunals for captured terror suspects, to justifying torture of prisoners, to detention of alleged terrorists without access to courts or counsel, to the legal rationale for ignoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans. “He believes that in time of war, there is total authority for the president to waive any rules to carry out his objectives,” is how Congresswoman Jane Harman, the intelligence committee's ranking Democrat, described Addington to The Washington Post. “Those views have extremely dangerous implications.”
more:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=11401
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