Cheney's Shocking Admissions on How Close He Came to Nearly Destroying the Country

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted December 24, 2008.

“Now, those are all steps we took that I believe the President was fully authorized in taking, and provided invaluable intelligence, which has been the key to our ability to defeat al-Qaeda over these last seven years.”

Cheney also argued that the President’s wartime powers trump laws passed by Congress.

“The Congress has -- clearly has the ability to write statutes and has certain constitutional authorities granted in the Constitution,” Cheney said. “But I would argue that they do not have the right by statute to alter presidential constitutional power. In other words, you can't override his constitutional authorities and responsibilities with a statute.”

Cheney’s chief regret appeared to be that the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly rejected the administration’s argument that these presidential powers allowed Bush to ignore fundamental individual rights incorporated in the Constitution, such as the writ of habeas corpus, an ancient legal principle requiring a government to show cause for imprisoning a person.

“I think that, frankly, the basic decision they [the Supreme Court justices] made was wrong,” Cheney said. “But it's their authority. The vote was 5-4.”

In other words, Cheney was suggesting that the replacement of one more justice from the court’s moderate wing by the likes of John Roberts or Samuel Alito -- Bush’s two appointees -- would have swung the Supreme Court into a historic reinterpretation of the Constitution.

Essentially, such a Supreme Court would have made the President all powerful and eliminated the founding U.S. principle of “unalienable rights” for individuals, protected by a government based on checks and balances.

Under that new paradigm -- of an endless “war on terror” and an Executive who decides whether someone is or is not an “enemy combatant” -- the key pillars of the American Republic would have been in ruins.

Instead of a Republic in which citizens possessed fundamental liberties enshrined in the Constitution -- as the Founders envisioned -- Americans would become, in effect, subjects to a monarchical President, who would apportion -- or deny -- freedoms as he would see fit.

Congressional Blessings

Beyond his legal arguments, Cheney noted that after 9/11, this new paradigm of presidential power was favored by most Americans and embraced by many members of Congress, at least in private.

“Go back and look at how eager the country was to have us work in the aftermath of 9/11 to make certain that that never happened again,” Cheney told Wallace.

The Vice President also disclosed that many congressional leaders, including some who have publicly criticized his expansive views on presidential power, privately went along with the administration’s actions, such as the warrantless surveillance program.

Cheney: “Well, let me tell you a story about the ‘terror surveillance program.’ We did brief the Congress and we brought in –“

Wallace: “A few members.”

Cheney: “We brought in the Chairman and the Ranking Member, House and Senate [Intelligence Committees], and briefed them a number of times up until -- this would be from late '01 up until '04, when there was additional controversy concerning the program.

“At that point, we brought what I describe as the ‘Big 9’ -- not only the Intel [Committee] people, but also the Speaker, the Majority and Minority Leaders of the House and Senate, and brought them into the Situation Room in the basement of the White House.

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Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

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