Just the book we've been waiting for!

Democracy!Now has and interview with author and columnist for the Washington Post, Barton Gellman, about his new book about Dick Cheney. It sets forth the process of how Cheney engineered a coup, with someone in the driver seat who should have been left down on the ranch.

His new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency tells about those days when this power hungry, and vengeful man slid himself into the oval office to curl up around the DESK leg. I am using more colorful language than Gellman uses but that's because I'm a Pirate.

THE BOOK Interview on Democracy!Now.

And a juice short quote. I think it's time to make this scurvy dog walk the plank. I'm offering the brand new and spiffy one on the Purple Prussian. He can christen it with his boot prints:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in the days after 9/11, the role that he began to assume?

BARTON GELLMAN: Well, even, actually, as of that day, he made an interesting decision. You’re in the middle of an ongoing emergency. There are so many decisions to make about restarting aviation, which has never been shut down in this country; reopening the stock markets; what to say to other countries; what steps to take at the borders. And one of the things that Cheney does is he calls for his lawyer, David Addington. “Please come back down here into the bunker. We have things to talk about.” And as early as the day of 9/11, they were talking together about what new powers the President would require and what legal changes would be required in order to empower the commander-in-chief the way Cheney thought he should be empowered.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the internal struggle within the Bush administration that almost ended Bush’s presidency.

BARTON GELLMAN: It starts just a few days after 9/11, in one sense, because it turns out the Vice President is truly the father of the warrantless domestic surveillance program. He called in Mike Hayden, who was the head of the National Security Agency, and he said, “Tell me what you’re not doing against al-Qaeda that you could be doing.”

And Hayden has this sort of famous, or famous in Washington, briefing device. He draws a Venn diagram with three overlapping ovals: one of them is what they would love to be able to do, one is what they’re technically capable of doing, and one is what’s legal. And what he says is, you know, “Where we work is right in the space where those three ovals intersect.”

And Cheney tells him, “Suppose that third oval wasn’t there. Suppose you were not constrained by the law.” And he is not saying, “Let’s break the law.” He’s saying, “Let’s suppose there were no legal restriction. Then what would you do?” And he does not go in the direction of asking for a change in the law. He presses the interpretation that, as commander-in-chief in wartime and because intelligence gathering is inherent in war, Bush doesn’t have to follow the explicit prohibitions in two felony statutes on warrantless surveillance, that Bush, as commander-in-chief, can simply override those and override them secretly.

And so, fast-forward now something around a little over two years later. December of 2003, the Justice Department starts to become very doubtful that parts of this program are legal. There’s a new guy heading the Office of Legal Counsel, which is sort of like the internal Supreme Court of the executive branch. And he says, “I just can’t back this thing.” And it needs to be certified as legal by the Justice Department every forty-five days. So it’s—there’s a deadline coming up in March of ’04, March 11th. And for three months, Dick Cheney and David Addington are trying to squelch a legal insurgency at Justice, where they’re saying, with increasing intensity, “We can’t go along with this.”