'It's clear Bush could stop Cheney,' Post reporter says of his expose
CNN spoke on Monday to prize-winning Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, co-author of a current four-part series exposing Vice President Cheney's dominance of US policy decisions.
Gellman first described Cheney's leading role in approving of enhanced interrogation methods, saying that "Dick Cheney decided early on, we're not going to win against al Qaeda unless we extract serious intelligence quickly from captured enemies, and he helped push through a fairly remarkable change in law, which was to establish a new distinction between 'torture,' which the United States government would not do, and 'cruelty.'"
"Could the argument be made that some of these policies advocated by the vice president are working?" asked the CNN interviewer. "He certainly makes that argument," responded Gellman.
Gellman was unwilling to speculate on the nature of the relationship between Cheney and President Bush, but did comment, "It's clear that the president knows what Dick Cheney is doing and it's clear the president could stop it."
Finally, when asked about Cheney's claim not to be part of either the executive or the legislative branch of government, Gellman responded, "It's got an interesting constitutional basis. Scholars could argue about it. It's certainly [a claim] no vice president has ever dreamed of making before."
RAW STORY reported previously on the first part of the Washington Post series. The second part, out today, focuses closely on Cheney's attentiveness to "the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist." It details the history of US detainee policy since 2001 and the process by which "on critical decisions for more than six years, Cheney has often controlled the pivot points -- tipping the outcome when he could, engineering stalemate when he could not and reopening debates that rivals thought were resolved."
At the White House press briefing Monday, Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino was besieged by reporters with questions about Cheney and the Post series, in particular.
"Dana, is the White House comfortable with the way the vice president is being portrayed in this Washington Post four-part series?" one White House correspondent asked. "I mean, two instalments have come out now suggesting almost that he's out of control; that he's operating around the president; that people like John Ashcroft, when he was attorney general, actually had to deal with the vice president, not the president, had to argue 'I'm the chief law enforcement officer and should be included in discussions, legal arguments about how detainees are being held.' Is the White House comfortable with this portrayal?"
Perino responded, "You know, you've heard me say before that we don't do book reviews from the White House, and I think that that -- you know, with the length of this article. But look, I think any of the -- a lot of what is being talked about there is classified -- dealing with classified issues and following the attacks on our country on 9/11. I'm not going to opine on those. I'm not going to say one way or the other about the articles."
"What I will say is that, number one, this country has not been attacked again; and number two, all that we have undertaken has been lawful," Perino added.
Reporters became exasperated when Perino refused to say whether or not Cheney even belonged to the executive branch, and limited her commenting to her "personal experience at the White House."
"You should get someone out here who can answer our questions," one correspondent muttered during the briefing.
The following video is from CNN's American Morning, broadcast on June 25.
|
