CHENEY'S SHADOW LOOMS LARGE

As more and more evidence emerges about the unparalleled secrecy surrounding the office of vice president Dick Cheney, the one fact outweighing all others is that his shadow has loomed large over most of the Bush administration’s major policy issues.
Those issues have included the use of interrogation techniques that undercut the Geneva conventions, secret wiretaps, the vengeful leaking of the name of the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, and the shaping of most foreign policy decisions including the most controversial of all the war in Iraq.
A series on Cheney in the Washington Post, combined with other leaked anecdotes from insiders, portray Cheney’s office as a shadow government, all powerful in its ability to shape US policy on matters of war and peace and on economic issues that affect the oil industry for which Cheney has always been a crusader. Halliburton with which he is most closely associated because he was its CEO before talking office has earned billions out of Iraq and was paid $1.5 billion from Iraq’s oil reserves.
Cheney’s secret White House meetings with big oil company executives, most of whom agree with his oft-stated conviction that the Middle East is the great oil prize, have been classified by him and are not even available to Congress. Before going to war with Iraq, a war Cheney more than anyone in the Bush White House promoted with bogus intelligence, both he and the big oil corporations had their eyes on Iraq’s oil reserves. As far back as 2,000 when Cheney met them, they all knew that within two decades most of OPEC’s oil would peak. However, there would still be massive reserves under Iraq. But those would only be accessible if Saddam was removed from power. Cheney and his oil buddies made a serious miscalculation. They replaced Saddam with Shiites who have more in common with Iran than their US liberators. Cheney’s reaction has been to use the Saudis to secretly arm Sunni insurgents to weaken the Shiite hold on Iraq as well as Iranian influence in the region, especially in Lebanon. He has also gone behind the back of Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, to promote the Israeli desire to use military force rather than diplomacy to force regime change in Iran.
Dick Cheney has run the most powerful and secretive vice-presidential office in history. Anytime he has been keen to evade Congressional scrutiny, he has claimed he was never part of the Executive Branch. In some instances he has even said he was never part of the Legislative Branch but was part of both. Some members of Congress now wish to know which branch he belongs to. It was recently revealed that he refused to recognize a presidential order requiring him to provide a federal body with information about his use of classified papers.
All those who have studied Cheney see in him as a man with an insatiable appetite for power allied to an intricate knowledge of how to manipulate the system and how to wield influence. From the moment he entered the White House he began expanding the scope of his presidential office and staffing it with cronies, many of whom were neocons that had been linked with him to PNAC – Project for the New American Century. After the first Gulf War, PNA with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and many others who later featured prominently in the Bush administration in its ranks, called for the removal of Saddam Hussein and planned for that eventuality right up to the moment Cheney entered the White House. They called for a massive expansion of America’s military might, envisioning major conflicts across the globe. They had their sights not only on Iraq but also on Iran and Syria. Cheney has secretly and sometimes publicly continued to promote that agenda.
But like all people involved in excessive secrecy, there is a tipping point when too much secrecy encourages whistleblowers – people convinced that the secrecy is damaging the fabric of government. That is what has happened in recent months as more information emerges about Cheney’s so-called “shadow government.”
One of the major leaks has been about his prominent role in undermining the Geneva Conventions and how his White House lawyer and then White Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, argued that Geneva was too much of a limiting factor in interrogations and that cruel, degrading and inhuman methods of questioning could be applied. In Cheney’s view the president was within his rights to permit torture and Congress had no right to limit him on that issue just as it had no right to limit his decisions as Command-in-Chief.
After the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, when questions began to be asked about the policy decisions on this matter, Cheney’s office hid behind stories that lower level officials had been responsible for producing legal interpretations of torture that were not in keeping with White House policy. Some of those involved in discussions in Cheney’s office like Justice Department legal eagle, John Yoo, have begun to distance themselves from some of the more extreme views that emanated from Cheney’s inner circle. Yooe s ays says he warned Cheney and Rumsfeld of the risks of allowing the military to use interrogation techniques that could end up being overused and abused. Those were techniques that he admits found their way from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib and other interrogation centers. A document that undercut the Geneva Conventions was in Dick Cheney’s hands in 2002 but he did not tell Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice about it until 2004. Rice is alleged to have exploded in rage when she realized Cheney had been secretly developing policies that were holding the US up to ridicule across the globe and undermining the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was also Cheney who secretly ensured that even while the president was telling Congress that the US would honor Geneva that the CIA would not be bound by international conventions on torture in its secret interrogation centers. When those centers were closed down after their existence was publicly revealed Cheney secretly made it possible for others to be opened and for renditions to continue. Behind the scenes he has vigorously campaigned to keep Guantanamo operating even though the president has been under pressure from Condoleezza Rice and others to close it. Whatever Cheney wants he seems to get though the more his bunker-type world is penetrated the less effective he may become. On the other hand, while George Bush allows him to wield as much power as he likes he can still have a powerful influence on US foreign policy.