CHENEY AT WORK

Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially Cheney, were adept at getting their own way on issues in part because they left other players entirely out of the loop. The WaPo has a great example in one part of its series on Cheney:

The Justice Department delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002, stating that the U.S. law against torture "prohibits only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" and therefore permits many others. [Read the opinion] Distributed under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, the opinion also narrowed the definition of "torture" to mean only suffering "equivalent in intensity" to the pain of "organ failure ..... or even death."

[snip]

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 [Read the article].

This is exactly the type of thing that Paul O'Neill, Richard Armitage and Paul Wilkerson were talking about when they claimed that the Executive branch had become dysfunctional.