The Dick: Cheney let it be known yesterday that despite the general conception by Congress and the President all the way down to 8th grade civics students that the Vice President has been under the executive branch of government for 230+ years, nothing could be further from the case.

Because The Dick does not want anyone knowing his secrets, he tried to get the congressional oversight agency in charge with keeping an eye on him abolished. That did not work, so he did the next best thing. He claims since he also has duties as the President of the Senate, he is not actually part of any branch, therefore exempt from oversight.

Congressman Ralm Emmanuel has responded rather slyly by basically saying, “Ok good.” He says he will attempt to cut off the operating budget 4.6 mil that Congress appropriates to the Office of the Vice President, which they give to him assuming he’s part of the executive branch.

But what is The Dick: Cheney hiding from Congress? No one really knows. But the tip of the iceberg can be found in this four part expose by the Washington Post, which shows the stranglehold Cheney has on the President, so much so that his other advisers are made to seem obsolete. It is absolutely riveting, yet horrifying that the same time. A sample:

…a meeting of nearly three dozen Pentagon officials, including the vice chief and top uniformed lawyer for each military branch. Matthew Waxman, the deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, set the agenda.

Waxman said that the president’s broadly stated order of Feb. 7, 2002 — which called for humane treatment, “subject to military necessity” — had left U.S. forces unsure about how to behave. The Defense Department, he said, should clarify its bedrock legal requirements with a directive incorporating the language of Geneva’s Common Article 3 [Read Common Article 3]. That was exactly the language — prohibiting cruel, violent, humiliating and degrading treatment — that Cheney had spent three years expunging from U.S. policy.

“Every vice chief came out strongly in favor, as did every JAG,” or judge advocate general, recalled Mora, who was Navy general counsel at the time.

William J. Haynes II, a close friend of Addington’s who served as Rumsfeld’s general counsel, was one of two holdouts in the room. The other was Stephen A. Cambone, Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for intelligence.

Waxman, believing his opponents isolated, circulated a draft of DOD Directive 2310. Within a few days, Addington and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, invited Waxman for a visit.

According to Mora, Waxman returned from the meeting with the message that his draft was “unacceptable to the vice president’s office.” Another defense official, who made notes of Waxman’s report, said Cheney’s lawyer ridiculed the vagueness of the Geneva ban on “outrages upon personal dignity,” saying it would leave U.S. troops timid in the face of unpredictable legal risk. When Waxman replied that the official White House policy was far more opaque, according to the report, Addington accused him of trying to replace the president’s decision with his own.

“The impact of that meeting is that Directive 2310 died,” Mora said.

Stay tuned…

Trevor Timm is a Blast Magazine staff writer