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Cheney: A VP With Unprecedented Power : NPR
Insights from reporter Bart Gellman's book on Cheney as Vice President
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Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman, author of Angler, an extraordinary book on the Cheney vice presidency, reports that Cheney was a sponge for details and a skilled bureaucratic infighter. And, at least in the first term, he drove policy on the issues he cared about. In the second term, with a more experienced and wary President Bush, Cheney's influence waned but hardly ceased.
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"You had the FBI director, attorney general, the next five levels of officials — which is a couple of dozen people — in the Justice Department, the general counsel of the CIA and the FBI, were all going to resign, in principle because they believed this program was unlawful," Gellman said. "And George Bush didn't know it until an hour before it was going to happen."
Faced with a wholesale resignation that would have made the Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre" look like a picnic, the president relented, withdrew his authorization and told Comey to fix the program to make it legal. Had he not changed course, according to Gellman, some of Bush's top aides believe he very likely would have been impeached.
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Rove in civvies isn't such an ugly sight
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Fitzgerald, by not indicting Rove, may have saved the Democrats from getting too caught up in the politics of vengeance. There was always an analogy to Madame Defarge sitting by the guillotine knitting in the way that Bush haters reveled in every unreliable rumor about a Rove indictment.
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Vendettas may be emotionally satisfying, but they rarely provide a formula for winning elections. In fact, the best way to get back at Rove is not through criminal prosecution but by forcing him to read an Election Night speech conceding that the Democrats have won back Congress.
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Toobin: Bush 'playing chicken' with senators - CNN.com - Sep 15, 2006
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So even if the president gets his proposal through, it is not at all clear that the court will approve it, especially given one provision we didn't discuss much ... secret evidence. And this is something that Sen. Lindsey Graham has focused on a lot. And he said, "Look, there's no court in America, especially the Supreme Court, that is going to uphold executing somebody ... based on evidence he never saw."
One nation under law -- not Bush Salon.com
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The Bush doctrine views the rule of law as our enemy, and claims it is allied with terrorism. As the Pentagon's 2005 National Defense Strategy put it:
"Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism."
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Some members of Congress have specifically objected to the implications of the Court's reliance on Common Article 3, and have suggested that they might try to undo it. Sen. Graham has complained that the Court's ruling might make our soldiers liable for war crimes. But if American soldiers commit war crimes, they should be held responsible.
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One nation under law -- not Bush Salon.com
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the Court went on to find that Congress had also required military tribunals to conform to the law of war, and that the tribunals impermissibly violated a particular law of war -- Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that detainees be tried by a "regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
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Common Article 3 is denominated "common" because it appears in each of the four Geneva Conventions. It sets forth the basic human rights that apply to all persons detained in conflicts "not of an international character." The administration has long argued that because the struggle with al-Qaida is international, not domestic, Common Article 3 does not apply. The Court rejected that view, explaining that the phrase "not of an international character" was meant in its literal sense, to cover all conflicts not between nations, or "inter-national" in character. (Conflicts between nations are covered by other provisions of the Geneva Conventions.) Since the war with al-Qaida is a conflict between a nation and a nonstate force, the Court ruled, it is "not of an international character," and Common Article 3 applies.
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