You don’t know Dick. . .

The Washington Post’s multi-part expose on Dick Cheney’s role in forging policies to allow cruel and inhumane treatment — or, in the common vernacular, torture — of prisoners is another instance of the Post bursting the bubble of secrecy on the sordid underbelly of the Bush administration. One paragraph in today’s article, which describes Cheney’s central role in the promulgation of memoranda and policy directives issued in 2002 to facilitate torture of enemy prisoners jumps out:

On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post [link]. According to a former White House official with firsthand knowledge, they confronted Gonzales together in his office.

This further underscores the level of contempt the administration had for the professionals in our foreign service, and for Colin Powell. They used Powell, and destroyed his credibility, by sending him before the United Nations to make the case for war with cartoons of fabulous Iraqi weaponry fabricated by a drunk janitor.

After chumping Powell by sending him to sell Chalabi-Curveball’s WMD fable, it chumped him again by keeping the facts surrounding the administration’s pro-torture policy, yet sending him to front for the administration in meetings with the International Red Cross and its President, Jakob Kellenberger. Despite Powell’s direct dealings with the international agency and other countries on the issue, the mania for secrecy within Cheney’s office was so fervid, that Powell had to learn about the memos from a newspaper, years after the fact. When Powell had his fateful “Pottery Barn” conversation with Bush about the potential for a fiasco in Iraq, one can imagine the smirk Bush must have hidden, knowing his Secretary of State was an outsider, in the dark and pushed out of the business of foreign policy making by Cheney and Bush, with their group of select and incompetent insiders like Gonzales.

Powell’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, later described Cheney’s office and its minions as a “cabal” seizing control of government policy away from it’s established organs, like the State Department, and operating in a vacuum of secrecy.

. . . the colonel objected to the administration’s secrecy, which allowed Cheney, Rumsfeld and others to subvert the foreign policy apparatus that has been in place since 1947.

“What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld,” he said. By cutting out the bureaucracy that had to carry out those decisions, “we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, and generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina.” If there is a nuclear terrorist attack or a major pandemic, Wilkerson continued, “you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that’ll take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”

In the end, you had an administration where critical decisions were being made in secret from the office of the Vice President. That is where the skeletons of this administration lie most deeply buried. It is little wonder that Cheney has twisted the role of his office to both claim executive privilege, and claim he is exempt from laws governing the executive branch. He will continue to take any position to shield the sordid inner workings of his office from the light of day.

Who knows what other monumental decisions, and massive blunders lay buried in Dick’s Bunker of Secrecy?