Darth Cheney: The Convenient Bugbear
An article in today’s New York Times, puts the blame for the NSA’s post-9/11 surveillance practices squarely on Dick Cheney’s shoulders:
In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.
On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.
On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970′s and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.
I have no doubt that Cheney and his deputies were instrumental in getting this program going. Still, I’m suspicious: we’ve seen lots of articles like this recently, deflecting the blame for various governmental outrages toward the office of the Vice President. If we are to believe the anonymous sources that pepper these stories, Cheney is responsible for all the dark clouds of evil that have billowed out of this administration for the past six years. He’s like a black hole of malfeasance, a gravity well that swallows all misdeeds; that bends the weft of misdeed-space around him.
And really, he’s the perfect sop. His approval ratings are approaching negative levels anyway, and it’s clear that Bush has no plans to get rid of him. Why not blame everything on Cheney?
Don’t buy it. There are many, many players in this scandal: in the White House, in Congress, in the corporations that this government has all but merged with. Cheney is the most visible, and possibly the worst. But he’s not the only one. Not by a long shot.
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