MORE ON "THE CABAL"

I have written previously that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Dept., said that Cheney and Rumsfeld form a cabal that is essentially a secret "wartime" government. James Risen, the NY Times reporter who broke the NSA domestic spying story, has reached a similar conclusion. From an interview done by Andrea Mitchell for NBC News:

Mitchell: Among the players whom you describe, you say that the Secretary of State got rolled, really, by the Secretary of Defense, and so did the National Security Advisor.

Risen: The power in this administration was Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and that Cheney and Rumsfeld really set the national security agenda for the administration.

This concentration of power didn't happen by accident - it's exactly what Cheney wants. Paul O'neill relates his judgment in The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind, page 293:

Cheney and O’Neill had had more conversations on process in the preceding months, until O’Neill gave up. They talked about everything that was apparent. The President was caught in an echo chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that’s tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything – a circle that conceals him from public view and keeps him away from the one thing he needs most: honest, disinterested perspectives about what’s real and what the hell he might do about it. But then “I realized why Dick just nodded along when I said all this, over and over, and nothing ever changed…because this is the way Dick likes it.”