NEXT TO CHENEY, ADDINGTON IS TO BLAME

David Addington looked forward to getting rid of the FISA Court, served as a conduit for the disinformation provided by Chalabi and his followers, encouraged Prof. Yoo to support the notion that the President is not bound by law during wartime and ignored attempts to look into the justification for warrantless wirtetapping. Colin Powell put it best: “He doesn’t care about the Constitution.”

Jane Mayer has a new book:

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

Andrew Bacevich has a good review in the WaPo and this part highlights the role Addington played in betraying our trust:

In the Bush administration, the task of sweeping aside impediments to the exercise of power fell to a small group of lawyers styling themselves the "War Council." Led by David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, and including Alberto Gonzalez, then serving as White House counsel, and John Yoo, at the time deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the War Council seized upon 9/11 as a pretext for establishing what Addington himself referred to as a "new paradigm" of vastly expanded presidential authority. As the administration embarked upon its war on terror, Mayer says, the American legal system "was instantly regarded as a burden." To shed that burden, members of the War Council issued (in secret, of course) what she describes as "error-prone legal decisions whose preordained conclusions were dictated by Addington." In the view of the War Council, Mayer writes, when it came to matters of national security, presidential authority was "not limited by any laws"; indeed, the president "had the power to override existing laws that Congress had specifically designed to curb him." The net effect was to declare the concept of checks and balances inoperable.