Cheney Unbound

This is stunning. In case you missed it because I glossed over it in a previous post, Dick Cheney is claiming that his office is not required to comply with a Presidential Order regulating the handling of classified information because he doesn't consider his office part of the Exectuive branch. Once his refusal was rebuffed by the National Archives Oversight Office, he tried abolishing said office that was asking for the information.

As an LA Times op-ed piece stated, that's like trying to disband the Internal Revenue Service for demanding a tax audit.

...Cheney's inventive argument is that because the vice president also serves as president of the Senate, his is "a unique office" that is not part of but rather "attached to" the legislative branch. Yet the vice president is funded and housed by the executive branch, travels on Air Force Two, enjoys Secret Service protection and seldom appears in his (mostly symbolic) Senate office. And he has never subjected his staff to the even more restrictive Senate rules on handling classified material. Apparently, Cheney sees himself as a fourth branch of government that enjoys all the authority of the presidency but is bound by none of its rules.

On Friday, the White House defended Cheney yet again, saying the president never intended the veep to have to comply with the presidential order. Bush should stop enabling his errant No. 2 and enforce the rule of law.

But why stop there? The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.

"If the president and the vice president don't take their own rules seriously, who else should?" said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University in Washington that lobbies for open government.

"If they get a blank check, it's a recipe for disaster. I can't think of a quicker way to break down the credibility of the entire security-classification system." Blanton noted that the White House had acknowledged that a substantial number of in-house e-mails had disappeared in recent years, at a time when investigators wanted to review them for possible evidence of inappropriate leaks of classified information.

"If there are all these great safeguards in place, then where are the e-mails?" Blanton asked.

By the way, for you to get any of this information, you would have needed to read it in the newspapers. All the TV "journalism" shows were too busy looking for a missing pregnant woman.