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Gold9472
12-16-2007, 10:20 PM
Cheney Rejects Broader Access To Terror Brief

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9406E7DA1538F933A15756C0A9649C8B 63

(Gold9472: I don't think I've ever posted this. This is nothing new to anyone, but I thought it would be a good article to have.)

By ALISON MITCHELL
Published: May 20, 2002

Vice President Dick Cheney said today that he would advise President Bush not to turn over to Congress the August intelligence briefing that warned that terrorists were interested in hijacking airplanes, and he insisted that the investigation into Sept. 11 should be handled by the Congressional intelligence committees, not an independent commission.

In appearances on several television news programs, Mr. Cheney said ''it would be a mistake'' to give broad Congressional access to the Aug. 6 memorandum to the president, which ignited a political uproar over whether the nation could have anticipated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

''That presidential daily brief is developed from some of our most secret operations and it has to be treated that way,'' Mr. Cheney said on ''Meet the Press'' on NBC. ''It's never been provided to the Congress before, to my knowledge.''

Mr. Cheney acknowledged a need for a Congressional inquiry to examine the workings of the intelligence agencies, saying, ''There are lessons to be learned'' from Sept. 11.

But in opposing a special commission or multiple investigations, the vice president said, ''most of what we need to talk about here should not be talked about in open hearings.''

Mr. Cheney did, however, leave open the possibility of some kind of ''conversation'' with senior members of the intelligence committees ''to satisfy their concerns'' about the details of the Aug. 6 memorandum to the president.

The debate over how to investigate Sept. 11 is unique because it involves secret intelligence and a devastating loss of life, and comes against a backdrop of further terror threats. Yet in some ways it is part of a broader battle being waged day by day between a Congress eager for oversight and an administration that believes that presidential authority and prerogatives have been eroded since the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

The struggle is on an array of fronts, including the dispute over whether Tom Ridge, the homeland security director, will testify before Congress, the lawsuit by the General Accounting Office to get information about Mr. Cheney's energy task force, and the latest threats by a Senate committee to subpoena the Bush administration for information about its contacts with Enron, the collapsed energy trading company.

At the same time, Mr. Bush has been aggressive about using his unilateral powers -- creating military tribunals, for example, through a presidential order rather than seeking legislation from Congress.

Some scholars see the conflict as a significant new chapter in the struggle over the balance of powers.

''I think this is another swing of the cycle,'' Robert Dallek, a presidential historian, said.

''After Watergate and after the end of the cold war, I think Congress reasserted itself,'' he said. ''I think that, in fact, Bill Clinton's impeachment will be remembered by historians as the high point of post-cold-war Congressional assertiveness. No elected president had ever been impeached.''

Some members of the administration are blunt about their view that Congress in recent decades has overstepped its bounds.

''There's no question that there's a recognition within the administration that the presidential authority has eroded over the years beyond the proper constitutional separation of powers,'' one senior administration official said. ''And this is a matter of principle for the presidency.''

Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, said in a recent interview that Mr. Bush was determined to make maximum use of presidential powers.

''The framers of the Constitution, I think, intended there to be a strong presidency in order to carry out certain functions,'' Mr. Gonzales said, ''and he feels an obligation to leave the office in better shape than when he came in.''

Congressional Democrats have bridled at assertions that the administration is protecting the institution of the presidency. They say the White House is trying to avoid scrutiny.

''Look, this administration, as I found in some of my other work in Congress, has a real penchant for secrecy,'' Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a sponsor of legislation to create an independent commission to examine Sept. 11, said today.

''I found that in the investigation my committee is doing of Enron, where I think we're asking for some very reasonable information,'' Mr. Lieberman said on the ABC News program ''This Week.'' ''And the White House has so far stonewalled us.'' He has threatened to subpoena the Bush administration about its contacts with the company.

The struggle over the balance of powers comes after a long period in which Congress -- in reaction to abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency, to the escalation of the Vietnam War and to Watergate -- became more fierce about its involvement in foreign policy, more aggressive about oversight and investigations, and more protective of its powers of the purse.

Mr. Cheney recently spoke of 30 years of ''continual encroachment by Congress in the executive branch, a weakening of the presidency.''

Today, he brought up celebrated Congressional investigations into C.I.A. abuses and into the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan years, as he pressed for the investigation of Sept. 11 to be conducted with discretion in regard to security.

Mr. Bush's drive to assert executive authority has intellectual roots stretching back several administrations. His father came into office after former President Ronald Reagan turned over to Congress and a special prosecutor thousands of documents concerning covert arms sales to Nicaraguan rebels, and allowed lawmakers investigating the Iran-contra affair to examine certain entries in his personal diaries.

C. Boyden Gray, who was White House counsel to President Bush's father, said that the first President Bush told him that he ''wanted to leave the office a little more powerful when I left it,'' and he said the current administration felt the same way.

Mr. Cheney's views could be seen emerging as far back as 1987, in the minority report of the Congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra affair.

While the majority of the committee accused the Reagan administration of ''secrecy, deception and disdain for law,'' Mr. Cheney and other Republican dissenters instead criticized the administration as letting Congress exert control over Central America policy, banning weapons sales to Nicaraguan rebels.

The effort to draw a new line with Congress is being waged by an administration that has in its ranks staff members who once worked for the Congressional committees and independent counsel investigations that chased Bill Clinton across his presidency. That too has drawn skepticism from Democrats.

''Some of these staffers when they worked on the Hill had no concern about asking about the private conversations of President Clinton and his staff or his attorney general and her staff,'' said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California.

Yet these officials have not been loath to take on former allies. The administration had a confrontation with one of the Republican committee chairmen who most relentlessly pursued Mr. Clinton -- Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana.

Mr. Bush asserted executive privilege when Mr. Burton's committee last year subpoenaed internal Justice Department documents, most of them concerning decisions on whether to prosecute in three decade-old organized crime cases in New England in which the false testimony of an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent four men to prison.

Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said in an interview that such deliberative material on whether or not to prosecute ''is one of the most fundamental executive functions under the Constitution.''

Eventually, the administration let Mr. Burton's staff members scrutinize some of the New England documents.

The struggles look likely to intensify. In a signal that the administration may be willing to take the fight to the Supreme Court, the office of Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson is in the battle over what the accounting office, the investigative arm of Congress, can learn about Mr. Cheney's energy task force.

''What we are doing,'' Mr. Olson said in an interview, ''is defending the prerogative of the president and vice president to receive advice in order to develop their own notions of what they might propose to Congress, and the importance to the president and to the vice president to be able to have those sources of information without having to disclose every conversation they ever had or every book they have ever read that helps generate ideas about what would be the best governmental policy.''

This week, Mr. Burton's committee plans to open a new front -- a dispute over an executive order issued by President Bush last November to grant a sitting president, former president and family members an expansive privilege to block the release of past presidential records.

The committee is scheduled to vote on legislation sponsored by Representative Steve Horn, Republican of California which would largely rescind Mr. Bush's order.

Mr. Horn and other House members say it undercuts the post-Watergate-era Presidential Records Act of 1978, which created a presumption that unclassified records of former presidents belong to the public.

Mr. Cheney today made clear that the administration would oppose any effort to expand an investigation of Sept. 11 beyond the intelligence committees. ''I think there's a trade-off here, frankly,'' he said, ''between safeguarding the national interest, which is very much at stake here, and satisfying what sometimes becomes a search for headlines on Capitol Hill.''

simuvac
12-16-2007, 11:27 PM
In retrospect, these guys resist transparency so often I'm not sure if they always have something to hide, or if they just think it's always a good idea to err on the side of secrecy.

Gold9472
12-16-2007, 11:36 PM
We've proven that they've got a lot to hide with regard to 9/11. I was thinking about that earlier that someone could say that they're always secretive about everything, so why should we think their secrecy regarding 9/11 is "suspect."