How Dick Cheney's Zeal for Warrantless Spying Nearly Brought Down Bush Presidency

Juan Gonzalez: The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit Thursday against the National Security Agency, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, challenging the legality of the administration's electronic surveillance program. The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of all residential AT&T customers and alleges that the NSA is conducting mass surveillance on U.S. residents, in violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

A new book by award-winning journalist Barton Gellman reveals that the Vice President played a crucial role in maintaining this program of warrantless spying, even after Justice department officials began to doubt its legality in 2004. The book is called Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

Amy Goodman: According to Gellman, there's quite a bit we've all been kept in the dark about, right from the decision to select Cheney as Bush's running mate, to winning congressional approval for war on Iraq and the administration's illegal wiretapping program.

Gellman writes, "The history of the Bush administration cannot be written without close attention to the moments when Cheney took the helm -- sometimes at Bush's direction, sometimes with his tacit consent, and sometimes without the president's apparent awareness." Cheney's "indifference to public opinion," Gellman writes, "verged on contempt."

Barton Gellman, the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, joins us here in our firehouse studio. He's special projects reporter for the Washington Post. His series on Cheney for the Post, written with partner Jo Becker, won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

Barton Gellman: Thanks for having me.

AG: Let's go back to the current vice president and how he was chosen. Wasn't he in charge of the vice-presidential pick for George Bush?

BG: Yeah, well, everyone knows that Bush asked Dick Cheney to manage and oversee the vice-presidential selection process, and there have been jokes for years about how he selected himself. And honestly, that's not true. Bush did choose him.

But the process made for an interesting contrast to Sarah Palin's. Dick Cheney oversaw the most probing, most intrusive vetting of potential vice presidents that I think there's ever been. He had, for sure, the longest questionnaire, questions that went to as bald as: Is there something that could be used to blackmail you, and if so, what? But he was looking for direct access. He insisted that the candidates sign waivers allowing him complete access to their medical and psychiatric records, FBI files, financial files, IRS returns, and so on.

Now, to a substantial degree, that's appropriate. You don't want to have a blackmailable vice president and potential commander-in-chief. The tricky thing is that when they pulled the switch and when Dick Cheney became the President's choice or the candidate's choice, he did not go through the same vetting process. He did not fill out his own questionnaire, which is contrary to what the campaign said at the time. He did not turn over even most of his public documents, old speeches and testimony and so forth. Halliburton would not cooperate with financial inquiries. And the cardiac surgeon, an eminent, famous surgeon, who was brought out by the campaign to vouch for Cheney's heart health, says in an on-the-record interview in the book that he never actually met Cheney or reviewed his medical records.

JG: And it is amazing, as you point out, that even for top security clearance most people are only required to go back about seven years in their history; he wanted an entire life -- every speech that any potential vice-presidential candidate had made, anything they had said. And yet, he doesn't do it for himself.