Few Americans have heard of David Addington, Vice-President Cheney’s long-time legal advisor, and his chief of staff since the demise of Scooter Libby. Yet Addington, more than any other individual, is responsible for the authoritarian and increasingly dictatorial course the Bush administration has pursued over the past five and a half years.
Cheney’s influence on the president is famous, and a common topic of political conversation in and out of Washington. But Addington’s influence over the vice-president, though less notorious, has been just as, if not more important in the birth and implementation of key administration policies: the use of torture, the incarceration of uncharged terror suspects, illegal wiretapping of American citizens, and particularly the practice of amending legislation with presidential “signing statements,” in which the chief executive frequently declares his intention to ignore provisions of bills he has signed.
Sometimes referred to by Washington insiders as “Cheney’s Cheney” or “Cheney’s hit man,” Addington is this administration’s best-kept secret because he is obsessively private. He never speaks to reporters and doesn’t allow photographs to be taken for news stories. The door to his office is always locked, and he has left no public paper trail. Although he has worked in government his entire professional career, he has never run for elective office.
But now Addington has become the subject of two high-profile articles in nationally-influential publications, and informed observers are rapidly becoming better aware of his role in the shaping the Bush administration’s radical and sometimes bizarre assertions of presidential power. Jane Mayer’s article “Hidden Power” appears in the July third New Yorker, and draws on a wealth of named and unnamed governmental sources, several of whom are former members of the current administration, to describe Addington’s pivotal role in creating the Bush team’s legal strategy for the war on terror, which they have dubbed “The New Paradigm.”
For example, she quotes Bruce Fein, a “Republican legal activist,” Bush supporter, and a deputy attorney general in Reagan’s Justice Department, who says the current administration has “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’ ”
Mayer’s New Yorker piece closely followed the appearance of Elizabeth Drew’s “Power Grab” in the June 22 New York Review of Books. Concentrating mainly on Bush’s use of “signing statements” as a means of usurping Congress’s lawmaking authority, Drew notes that this practice “received little attention” since Bush’s assumption of office in 2001 “because it has been carried out largely in obscurity. The press took little notice until Bush, on January 5 of this year, after signing a bill containing the McCain amendment, which placed prohibitions on torture, quietly filed a separate pronouncement, a ‘signing statement,’ that he would interpret the bill as he wished.”
But these “signing statements” are not a new development. Bush has claimed the right to ignore more than 750 laws since he took office. His supposed right to do so is based on two legal justifications, according to Drew: “One is the claim of the ‘inherent’ power of the commander in chief; second is a heretofore obscure doctrine called the unitary executive, which gives the president power over Congress and the courts. The concept of a unitary executive holds that the executive branch can overrule the courts and Congress on the basis of the president's own interpretations of the Constitution.”
And who might be the inventive legal mind who authored these expansive theories of constitutionally mandated, unlimited executive power? Drew’s article answers that question too: “Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, formerly his counsel, are understood by most informed observers to be mainly responsible for the expansive interpretations of the president's powers, as well as the unprecedented secrecy with which the administration conducts public affairs.”
Mayer, quoting a Boston Globe article on Addington’s influence, asserts that “Addington has been the ‘leading architect’ of these signing statements, which have been added to more than seven hundred and fifty laws. He reportedly scrutinizes every bill before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power.”
In addition to being the principal author of the theory of the “unitary executive,” which supposedly legitimates these signing statements, Addington has worked tirelessly to implement the “New Paradigm” with its nearly unlimited view of the president’s powers as commander in chief, not just of the armed forces but of the entire nation during wartime. He is the author of Office of Legal Counsel memos claiming that there is no valid legal prohibition against the inhumane treatment of foreign prisoners held by the C.I.A. outside the U.S. He secretly drafted the memoranda which set up the military commissions to try these foreign prisoners, so that the executive order of November 13, 2001 which established them took many members of the administration totally by surprise, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice among them.
It was also Addington and Cheney who secretly, without even alerting the top Pentagon lawyer in charge of supervising the National Security Agency’s legal advisers, held meetings with the N.S.A.’s legal staff in Cheney’s office and advised them that the president as commander in chief had the constitutional authority to override F.I.S.A. and engage in warrantless domestic electronic surveillance.
Taken altogether, the Bush administration’s record, under the direction of its most important legal advisor, David Addington, has been one of unprecedented assault on the U.S. Constitution with its system of governmental checks and balances. And as Elizabeth Drew points out, “(T)he Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history. And because of the complaisance of Congress, it has largely succeeded in its efforts.”
This rush toward dictatorship and the imposition of a police state went largely unimpeded for the Bush administration’s first few years, especially in the wake of 9/11, but lately the other branches of the federal government have shown some first stirrings of resistance against the rising tide of executive encroachment. On June 29, by a five-to-three vote, the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s military tribunals which Addington had engineered to try the terror suspects (or “illegal combatants”) held at Guantanamo, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
More recently, on July 11, one of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives, Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra, harshly criticized the Bush White House for its failure to inform Congress about “significant activity” involving secret intelligence programs.
“It is not optional for this president or any president or people in the executive community not to keep the intelligence committees fully informed of what they are doing,” Hoekstra said.
However, whether such squeaky protests will help restore constitutional government in this country remains to be seen. Drew concludes her New York Review of Books article with a quote from Madison, author of The Federalist No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” All the more so, one might add, when such concentrated power is exercised in secret star chambers by secretive individuals who issue secret orders, possibly because they know that what they’re doing won’t stand the light of day.
Sources:
Jane Mayer’s “Hidden Power,” from the July 3 New Yorker, is available online at the magazine's website.
Elizabeth Drew’s “Power Grab” from the June 22 New York Review of Books is available at that publication's internet address.
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