Tracey Barnett: Cheney's legacy on the line

Behind every quail-hunting joke is a US vice-president everyone is still scared of, even after shooting season is finished. That may be the dubious career-end tribute to Dick Cheney when the lame duck jokes die down.

Renowned for what some would call Darth Vader diplomacy, never before has the US office of vice-president seen the lofty heights of the "Cheney Administration's" unchecked political power. Never before has such a traditionally ineffectual office manipulated that power with such middle finger-gesturing to domestic and international law, many contend.

His secret? Unaccountability - and an astounding talent for quietly working the margins of legality through the back door. The strategic pulse of this presidency beats in the chest of a man with chronic heart disease. Because he isn't running in 2008, Cheney has worn the untouchable "Elder Statesmen / I'm policy not politics" button emblazoned across his chest.

It is the ultimate red herring and has worked, beautifully. Many underestimated his passionate policy agenda hidden behind a dispassionate backseat demeanour.

It began four presidents before Cheney found George W. Bush the perfect foil for his unflinching vision. For more than three decades, Rumsfeld, Libby, Wolfowitz and Cheney in various configurations have worked to concentrate unchecked presidential power, subvert an unwieldy CIA they have never trusted, and promote pre-emptive military action.

Each time their vision stalled. Each time their president chose a more centrist path, until now. Today, the non-electable vice-president is the voice defending unwarranted domestic wiretapping and torture policy in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan. The Cheney Administration's specialties have ranged from designing a brilliant attack on John Kerry's Swift boat patriotism to planting Republican operatives in the press corps.

Politics doesn't enjoy context or backstory. But if Cheney and his cabal are making history today, it is because it has been boiling for a political generation.

Ever heard of Michael Maloof or David Wurmser? Unlikely, as these two men worked in a windowless, cipher-locked room tucked away in the Pentagon. They were known as the "Iraqi Intelligence Cell". Their job? Connecting the dots between Iraq and al Qaeda. Maloof was a former journalist and Wurmser a veteran of neo-con think tanks. Neither man had formal training in intelligence analysis. The one thing they did have was the ear of Rumsfeld and the vice-president's office.

It was from their now highly suspect intelligence that these two men told the Cheney Administration what they wanted to hear - justification for war, justification even the CIA wasn't buying.

Murray Waas in the National Journal reports Cheney writing in the margin of a report linking Iraq to al Qaeda, "This is very good indeed, encouraging - not like the crap we are all so used to getting out of CIA".

Now cut to a different administration, a different war, but the same players: Bush snr's pending entanglement in the Gulf War. This time, Secretary of Defence Cheney created "Operation Scorpion", a similar secret intelligence operation set up to develop an alternative war plan behind Colin Powell's back.

In Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, James Mann cites Cheney instructing Wolfowitz, "Set up a team, and don't tell Powell or anybody else". He describes how Cheney took the plan to the President while Powell was out of the country. The elder Bush ultimately rejected it, but Norman Schwarzkopf was enraged at Cheney's actions.

This backdoor knife fight has a precedent, during the Ford Administration. Chief of Staff Rumsfeld brought back his former assistant in the cut-throat Nixon White House, Dick Cheney, to be his right hand on intelligence.

Sidney Blumenthal of Salon reports how, in what is now known as the "Halloween Massacre", Rumsfeld and Cheney orchestrated a cabinet purge that made Rumsfeld secretary of defence and Cheney White House chief of staff. They also brought in like-minded George Bush snr to run the CIA.

From this vantage they set up an alternative intelligence unit outside the CIA to challenge Kissinger's policy of detente with the Soviets. This time they called it "Team B". Sound familiar?
"Team B", "Operation Scorpion" and "The Iraqi Intelligence Cell" each were set up by men who didn't want to hear what the CIA was telling them.

Each time they created a special covert intelligence unit outside the CIA to bolster the political vision of Cheney and his colleagues. Each time they did it under the radar and through the back door.

Many speculate that outing CIA agent Valerie Plame was just another Cheney stab at an unco-operative CIA which wasn't drum-beating Cheney's war message. His vision has been clean, if his methods have not. Dick Cheney now presides over what history may regard as one of the most power-driven US vice-presidencies ever.

Today the vice-president is not just defending his actions in a hunting accident or the pending court case against one of his own, Scooter Libby - or even his war path to Iraq. Cheney is fighting for his political legacy. This is the beginning of the end of his finest hour.

* Tracey Barnett is an American journalist working in Auckland.