WASHINGTON - With his closest aide for the
past five years facing arraignment in federal
court on Thursday on five counts of perjury and
obstruction of justice, US Vice President Dick
Cheney appears to be hunkering down with a
familiar cast of faces.
His choices
to replace his now-indicted former chief of staff
and national security adviser, I Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, suggest a determination to stay the
course, despite calls from various quarters that
his office, as well as the White House itself,
bring in new blood, if not make a complete overhaul.
Libby's two positions will now be shared
by different people, both attorneys. His hardline
legal counsel, David Addington, is taking over the
chief-of-staff post, while John P Hannah, who
served as Libby's deputy in the national security
position, will move up the
advisor's spot.
Staff
changes in the vice president's office would not
normally attract much notice - indeed, scarcely
anyone noticed when Libby was first appointed in
January 2001 - but Cheney's status as the most
powerful vice president in US history and a key
architect of US policy in the run-up to the Iraq
war has brought the post far more attention.
Addington has served the vice president in
a variety of posts, dating all the way back to the
mid-1980s, when Cheney was a member of the
Intelligence Committee of the House of
Representatives defending then-president Ronald
Reagan over the Iran-Contra affair.
He has
reportedly been a strong proponent of both
unilateralism in US foreign policy and of sweeping
presidential power, particularly in time of war. A
close associate of UN Ambassador John Bolton,
Addington, who almost obsessively shuns the public
spotlight, also regards international law with
undisguised contempt.
Addington has been
accused by both Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch of being among the strongest
advocates within the administration for exempting
detainees taken in the "war on terror" of any
constitutional due process rights or of the
protections of the Geneva Convention.
According to the National Journal, he has
also argued aggressively and so far successfully -
even over the objections of President George W
Bush's legal counsel and political aides - for
refusing to turn over critical documents
concerning the White House's treatment of pre-Iraq
war intelligence to the Congressional Intelligence
committees.
Hannah, who was hired by Libby
in 2001, has a much shorter history with Cheney
and spent two years working as a senior advisor to
Bill Clinton's first secretary of state, Warren
Christopher.
But he, too, is seen widely
seen as a hardliner who, according to published
records, acted as the main White House contact for
the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group led by
Ahmad Chalabi, that provided "defectors" and other
intelligence in the run-up to the 2003 invasion
that later turned out to be bogus.
Hannah
has also worked particularly closely with the
INC's main Pentagon contact, Harold Rhode, a
Middle East specialist and close collaborator of a
group of hardline neo-conservatives based mainly
at the American Enterprise Institute who have
urged confrontation with Syria, Iran and even
Saudi Arabia.
Hannah also served two
stints, in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, as senior
fellow and deputy director at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank
established in the mid-1980s by the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most
powerful pro-Israel lobby group.
Two of
AIPAC's former senior staff members were indicted
earlier this summer in connection with classified
information provided to them by a Pentagon
official who had worked with Rhode on Iran policy.
The two appointments defy growing public
and Democratic calls for the Bush administration,
and particularly Cheney, to both overhaul their
top staffs and to disclose all they know both
about the case that led to Libby's indictment -
which involved his "outing" of a covert Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative whose
husband-diplomat had publicly accused the
administration of going to war under false
pretences - and about their handling of the
pre-war intelligence.
Democrats took their
boldest step yet on Tuesday by abruptly forcing
the Senate into executive session to discuss the
Intelligence Committee's stonewalling of an
investigation into the possible abuse of pre-war
intelligence in which Cheney's office, along with
political appointees in the Pentagon, is widely
believed to have played the leading role.
"The Libby indictment provides a window
into what this is really all about, how this
administration manufactured and manipulated
intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and
attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge
its actions," charged Senate Minority Leader Harry
Reid in an unusually direct attack on the
committee chair, Senator Pat Roberts, who
reportedly has close ties to Cheney and Addington.
According to the special prosecutor,
Patrick Fitzgerald, Libby had repeatedly lied to
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a federal
Grand Jury about his role in telling selected
journalists that retired ambassador Joseph Wilson
had been sent to Niger in February 2002 to
investigate reports that Iraq had attempted to buy
uranium yellow cake there at the suggestion of his
wife, Valerie Plame, who was then serving as a
covert operative.
The leak was apparently
intended to discredit Wilson's claim, published by
the New York Times on July 6, 2003, that the
administration knew that the reports were false
and yet used them anyway in its campaign to rally
the public behind the support the war.
In
his indictment, Fitzgerald disclosed that Cheney
himself was informed of Wilson's relationship with
Plame by then-CIA director George Tenet and that
he then informed Libby. The unusually close
working relationship between Cheney and Libby -
they rode together most mornings on the way to the
office, and Libby was a frequent guest at Cheney's
Wyoming ranch - has raised questions about whether
Cheney authorized or knew about Libby's subsequent
leaking.
Some observers, notably New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, have noted
Fitzgerald's finding that the two men discussed
the Plame affair on July 12 while on board Air
Force 2, immediately after which Libby told two
reporters about Plame's identity.
Fitzgerald so far has declined all comment
on whether Cheney knew about or authorized the
leaking. Cheney's office, citing the fact that
Fitzgerald's investigation has not yet concluded,
has refused all comment on the case, including
what Hannah or Addington, who have testified
before Fitzgerald's Grand Jury, may have known
about Libby's role in outing Plame. Separately,
Hannah's attorney has claimed that his client
played no role at all.
All of these
developments come amid a series of statements by
former high-level officials about Cheney that have
added to the drama around the vice president. Two
weeks ago, former secretary of state Colin
Powell's chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence
Wilkerson, accused Cheney and Pentagon chief,
Donald Rumsfeld, of leading a "secretive,
little-known cabal" that effectively ran US
foreign policy for much of Bush's first term.
Rumsfeld on Tuesday dismissed that charge,
insisting he had never met Wilkerson and did not
know what position he held under Powell.
Last week, The New Yorker published an
interview with former national security adviser
Brent Scowcroft, who worked closely with Cheney
both under the Gerald Ford administration in the
mid-1970s (when Cheney was chief of staff) and
under George H W Bush, whom Cheney served as
secretary of defense.
"I consider Cheney a
good friend - I've known him for 30 years,"
Scowcroft said. "But Dick Cheney I don't know
anymore."
