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Here's another mainstream journalist to whom we owe thanks for going where most of her peers fear to report: Jane Mayer, whose
"The Hidden Power" story in the July 3, 2006 issue of The New Yorker takes the lid off the secrecy surrounding the
power of David Addington.
If you're asking, "David who?", so much more the reason to read this story.
David Addington is Dick Cheney's in-house lawyer. So what? you might ask. After all, in a normal administration teeming
with attorneys familiar with checks and balances, the Vice President's lawyer has about as much power as the White House groundskeeper.
But in the George W. Bush Administration, where Cheney largely handles the deeper policy issues and where there is nary an
attorney (and no one conversant in constitutional law) at the very top, Addington's credentials and his dictatorial style
have given his radical legal agenda virtually unlimited sway in the White House.
This is the man to whom Colin Powell attributed the Bush Administration's extreme positions on presidential power, according
to reporter Mayer, thusly: "It's Addington. He doesn't care about the Constitution."
Addington is the man, Mayer tells us, who a former Pentagon deputy general counsel for intelligence called "an unopposable
force."
This is the man whose overriding influence prompted a former top Administration lawyer to tell Mayer that the Bush White
House's legal positions were "all Addington."
Want to know who is the legal brain behind the seemingly surreal imperial stance of this Administration on the President's
right to authorize domestic and international spying, to sanction torture, to ignore the Geneva Conventions, and to wage war?
Forget the figurehead Attorney General and Bush pal Alberto Gonzales, who Mayer tells us has little constitutional knowledge
and even less authority over policy. As a mind-boggling procession of named and unnamed high-ranking sources reveals in her
article, in the top-level strategy meetings where legal rationales are decided, it's all Addington, all the time.
Mayer unearths the history of how this came to be. Addington, as she reports, is a crusading reactionary who, ever since
Watergate and the subsequent legal constraints on the presidency, has made it his personal quest to try to reinvest the Oval
Office with what he sees as its lost power and glory. He reportedly carries a copy of the Constitution in his pocket, and
he believes that it grants the President virtually unchecked powers to do as he wishes. During the mid-1980s Addington joined
forces with Dick Cheney, who was of like mind (Cheney ultimately brought Addington into the Bush I Administration in 1989).
The two have been a dynamic despotic duo ever since. In their current partnership, Vice President Cheney outlines the objectives,
and attorney/enforcer Addington suitably bulldozes the legal and procedural terrain. He is ideologically fanatical and bureaucratically
ruthless. He undercuts or drives out those who oppose him. Peers and underlings speak of him, in Mayer's article, with a mixture
of awe and fear.
Through it all, Addington has maintained an aura of invisibility. He gives no interviews (he refused to speak to Mayer)
and he forbids the press to photograph him. He avoids public appearances, and the Administration never outwardly mentions
his name. Most Americans have no idea who he is.
The implications of this are frightening. In effect, we have an unseen, unelected behind-the-scenes Washington operative
who is laying the groundwork for something very much like a fascist regime.
If all of this sounds hard to believe, read Mayer's story in The New Yorker and decide for yourself. Then tell others
to do the same.
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While we're on the subject of must-reads, three other articles come to mind.
Historian Edwin G. Burrows' op-ed piece in the July 3, 2006 New York Times tells the astonishingly forgotten story of
the horrific treatment and tortuous deaths, during the Revolutionary War, of thousands of American Colonists held as prisoners
in subhuman conditions for months or years without trial at the hands of King George III (note the irony).
Seymour Hersh's investigative story, "Last Stand" (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060710fa_fact),
in the July 7, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, chronicles what he calls the "war" now being waged in Washington between
career military officers and the hawkish Bush White House over the prospect of war with Iran. (Guess which side the military
is on?)
And "Project Corpus Callosum," the winning essay in The Nation's 2006 Student Writing Contest, written by Yale
senior Sarah Stillman, will shore up your faith in the commitment of young activists. It appears in the magazine's July 17,
2006 issue. Read it and cheer.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 7/7/06)
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