House of secrets

The fire in the Vice-Presidents office revives questions about the transparency and accountability of the Bush administration.

Vice-President Dick

ON December 19, a fire broke out in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building situated right next to the White House, the residence and office of the President of the United States. The Mayor of Washington DC., Adrian Fenty, told the press: The White House buildings are not immune from fire. The Eisenhower building, a magnificent example of French second empire architecture, houses the office of the Vice-President. According to the fire marshals, the fire started in an old utility closet next to the Vice-Presidents ceremonial office. Nothing else about the incident was made public, except that one Marine was slightly injured.

One can only wonder. Vice-President Dick Cheney is a notoriously secretive man. In June, Washington Post reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker published a four-part series on the secrecy of Cheney. Stealth, they write, is among Cheneys most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the Vice-President. All documents from the office are stamped Top Secret/SCI (short for sensitive compartmented information), with the assumption that everything that goes through the office should not be disclosed or else it could cause exceptionally grave damage to national security, according to his staff. Across the board, the Vice-Presidents office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency, the reporters note. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. The Vice-President even proposed to abolish a government office whose mission is to audit his work. Commenting on Cheneys remarkable penchant for secrecy, reporter Bob Woodward compared him to a kind of Howard Hughes, the reclusive man behind the scenes who would never answer questions.

In September 2004, Representative Henry Waxman (Democrat from California) released a report on secrecy in the White House. The Bush administration has an obsession with secrecy, Waxman pointed out. It has repeatedly rewritten laws and changed practices to reduce public and congressional scrutiny of its activities. The cumulative effect is an unprecedented assault on the laws that make our government open and accountable.

So, perhaps the fire in the utility closet is not so mysterious after all. It could be that it is the place where the Vice-President has an incinerator. Or so it would seem after two revelations about secrecy that have major implications. On December 3, the government released a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) finding that showed with high confidence that in fall 2003, Teheran halted its nuclear weapons programme. The report was completed in November 2007, and with confidence that it might be leaked to the press, the White House decided to declassify it. In October 2006, a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, Philip Giraldi, wrote in The American Conservative that the intelligence agencies had produced an NIE on Iran, and that Vice-President Cheneys office has reportedly objected to many of the conclusions in the draft Iran NIE, or, more to the point, to the lack of any conclusions that he would welcome. That NIE was suppressed. When the intelligence agencies would not adopt the Cheney line on Iran, the White House replaced the Director of National Intelligence in early 2007 with retired Vice-Admiral Mike McConnell. As Cheneys position failed to carry the day in Washington, McConnell issued a directive in late October to U.S. intelligence agencies making it virtually impossible to declassify the NIE. A virtual revolt from the intelligence community pressured the White House to release the NIE, much to its displeasure.

The day after the NIE appeared, Bush appeared testy before the press. Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. In other words, from the White House it was business as usual. In mid-October, Bush went out on a limb on the Iran nuclear issue.

Ive told people, he said, that if youre interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. But by then Bush would have known that Iran had, according to his own intelligence agencies, disbanded its nuclear weapons programme in 2003. But the President denied that he knew about this beforehand. He said that in August McConnell came into his office and said that he had some new information on Iran, but Bush, apparently, did not question him on it.

Nevertheless, in his October news conference, Bush already seemed to indicate that he knew that Iran did not have an active programme. He used phrases at that time, which he repeated in December, such as that it was important not to let Iran have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon (this phrase appeared during the press conferences in October and December).

Cheney, meanwhile, was nonplussed. Not everyone understands the threat of nuclear proliferation, in Iran or elsewhere, he told a gathering of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City. But we and our allies do understand the threat, and we have a duty to prevent it. The hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv should not lose heart.

The Smoky Eisenhower

The second bombshell came on December 5, the day after Bushs press conference. CIA Director Michael Hayden issued a statement saying that his agency had destroyed two videotapes in 2005 that showed his agents interrogating Al Qaeda suspects. Hayden pointed out that the CIA destroyed the tapes to protect the agents, and that he was only revealing this now because the press had learned about the tapes.

In other words, someone in the administration had leaked the information and breached the Mosler-safe secrecy. When Bush was asked about when he first learned about the tapes, he said, It sounds pretty clear to me when I say the first recollection is when Mike Hayden briefed me. It sounds pretty clear to me. In other words, he did not know about the tapes or their destruction until late November or thereabouts.

The CIA destroyed the tapes as the U.S. Congress debated a new Bill that would allow enhanced interrogation, or provide legal cover for the use of excessive force (what the rest of the world calls torture). The New York Times reported that the White House top legal aides (including Cheneys chief of staff David Addington) had discussed the destruction of the tapes in early 2005. White House spokesperson Dana Perino was outraged by this suggestion, saying,

We have not described, neither to highlight nor to minimise, the role or deliberations of White House officials in this matter. Or, in plainer language, mums the word. Cheney made no comment.

In the wake of the NIE and CIA tapes revelation, the Democratic-controlled Congress pushed a Bill on the Open Government Act. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi greeted the passage of the Bill with a statement saying, the Bush administration has greatly expanded the veil of secrecy and that this law hopes to restore transparency and accountability to government. Of course, the new law will still allow agencies to withhold information, the crucial way in which the government maintains its secrets. The White House has 10 days to sign the Bill. It is being very secretive about what Bush will do.