Washington Post on Cheney's legal enabler:
Vice President Cheney's top lawyer pushed relentlessly to expand the powers of the executive branch and repeatedly derailed efforts to obtain congressional approval for aggressive anti-terrorism policies for fear that even a Republican majority might say no, according to a new book written by a former senior Justice Department official.
David S. Addington, who is now Cheney's chief of staff, viewed both U.S. lawmakers and overseas allies with "hostility" and repeatedly opposed efforts by other administration lawyers to soften counterterrorism policies or seek outside support, according to Jack L. Goldsmith, who frequently clashed with Addington while serving as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and 2004.
...he depicted Addington, who served as "Cheney's eyes, ears, and voice" on counterterrorism matters and with whom he was present at roughly 100 meetings on the topic, as having little patience for views contrary to his own.
"After 9/11, they and other top officials in the administration dealt with FISA the way they dealt with other laws they didn't like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," Goldsmith wrote, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs spying by U.S. agencies within the United States.
...Addington reacted angrily to many of Goldsmith's legal opinions, telling him in reference to one concerning detainees in Iraq: "The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections. You cannot question his decision," according to the book.
"He and, I presumed, his boss viewed power as the absence of constraint," Goldsmith wrote. "They believed cooperation and compromise signaled weakness and emboldened the enemies of America and the executive branch."
Of course, anyone the executive branch doesn't like is an enemy of America, and we know what can happen to them.
