Cheney on Wiretapping: "Congress said we could"

Dick Cheney's taunts continue. He brazenly admits to authorizing torutre--committing war crimes, just daring someone, anyone, to do something about it. He upped the ante yesterday in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, in which he emphasized the complicity of a handful of members of Congress--chairs and ranking members of Intel, House and Senate majority and minority leaders--in the warrantless wiretapping program.

CHENEY: Well, let me tell you a story about the terror surveillance program. We did brief the Congress. And we brought in...

WALLACE: Well, you briefed a few members.

CHENEY: We brought in the chairman and the ranking member, House and Senate, and briefed them a number of times up until — this was — be from late '01 up until '04 when there was additional controversy concerning the program.

At that point, we brought in what I describe as the big nine — not only the intel people but also the speaker, the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate, and brought them into the situation room in the basement of the White House.

I presided over the meeting. We briefed them on the program, and what we'd achieved, and how it worked, and asked them, "Should we continue the program?" They were unanimous, Republican and Democrat alike. All agreed — absolutely essential to continue the program.

I then said, "Do we need to come to the Congress and get additional legislative authorization to continue what we're doing?" They said, "Absolutely not. Don't do it, because it will reveal to the enemy how it is we're reading their mail."

That happened. We did consult. We did keep them involved. We ultimately ended up having to go to the Congress after the New York Times decided they were going to make the judge to review all of — or make all of this available, obviously, when they reacted to a specific leak.

But it was a program that we briefed on repeatedly. We did these briefings in my office. I presided over them. We went to the key people in the House and Senate intel committees and ultimately the entirely leadership and sought their advice and counsel, and they agreed we should not come back to the Congress.

As Glenn points out in a couple of updates to this post, while initially it looked like Cheney was implying a greater knowledge and complicity by Democrats in Congress than he's stated previously, it's long been known that they knew about at least some aspects of the program. How much they knew is in dispute, and they have said that they objected to the program, but Cheney ignored their objections. Via Think Progress:

Rather than asking for congressional input, Pelosi and Rockefeller said in 2005 that Cheney simply informed them of what was going on — and ignored their objections:

PELOSI: The Bush Administration considered these briefings to be notification, not a request for approval. As is my practice whenever I am notified about such intelligence activities, I expressed my strong concerns during these briefings.

ROCKEFELLER: The record needs to be set clear that the Administration never afforded members briefed on the program an opportunity to either approve or disapprove the NSA program.

Other congressional members who attended those briefings have said that they were told only the barest outlines of the program. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Jane Harman (D-CA) said that the White House never disclosed that it was skirting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. Former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL)  said the same thing:

The assumption was that if we did that, we would do it pursuant to the law, the law that regulates the surveillance of national security issues. And there was no suggestion that we were going to begin eavesdropping on United States citizens without following the full law. ... There was no reference made to the fact that we were going to use that as the subterfuge to begin unwarranted, illegal — and I think unconstitutional — eavesdropping on American citizens.

What’s more, Rockefeller, then vice-chairman of the Intelligence Committee, wrote a hand-written letter to Cheney in 2003 to "reiterate [his] concerns" about the wiretapping program. "I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities," he wrote.

Now, it's not hard to believe Cheney is lying about the extent to which Congress was read into the program. Cheney is highly likely to reflexively lie about just about anything. What he has done, though, is to expressly and emphatically call out all of the Democrats involved and dare them to contradict him, just as he dared them to do something about his involvement in torture.

So the question is, what are they going to do about it, and when are they going to come clean with the public about what precisely they knew about this program, and when they knew it. As Spencer argues, this intensifies the need for a renewed Church Commission:

Cheney might not be acting in good faith, but he’s nevertheless pointing to something barometrically significant. In Washington, the phrase "bipartisan" is supposed to cash out to something like "legal" or "wise" or "no longer controversial" or "kosher." The Germans probably have a word that’s a more acceptable translation. In any event, that’s self-evidently foolish: lots of people can make mistakes and lots of people can make venal decisions, and it’s not a function of belonging to one political party or the other. Cheney doesn’t get off the hook if Nancy Pelosi is on it with him. Naturally, what I imagine Cheney’s doing is warning the Democrats off creating an independent commission into the abuses of the administration, lest it go after them too, but that’s all the more reason one should be created.

The nation is going to have to carry the stain of the Bush administration's lawlessness for generations to come. That stain has spread to cover the Democrats in Congress who, at the very least, failed in their duty to provide any kind of check on these abuses of power. That means Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman, Jay Rockefeller, Tom Dasche, and Harry Reid. For their own legacies, for their own place in history, they're involvement needs to be clarified. The stain won't go away, ever, but it can be lessened. At the very least, the very least, we need to know the extent of these activities--who was spied on and why, and who was involved. Sunlight is the only way to reduce the stain.

There's more discussion on this in packerland progressive's diary.