Cheney, II

The Post continues its series on Cheney, today focusing on the debates over torture and cruel treatment of prisoners.

A couple second thoughts from yesterday. You can bypass bureaucracies effectively. The new book out on Nixon and Kissinger in China describes this well. They brutally cut out the State Department, humiliating Secretary of State Rogers. But it worked. My vague memory of reading Clark Clifford's memoirs has Truman cutting out the bureaucracy at one point, perhaps on the Marshall Plan.

The two examples show a key--if you're going to bypass the bureaucracy, you need to change the world in which they operate. Once we recognized China, once Marshall had made his speech, the bureaucracy had lost its veto power. Yes, bureaucrats could sabotage from within (as the remnants of the China Lobby tried to do with Nixon and his successors. But they don't have the leverage.

In the context of treatment of prisoners, Cheney tried to shift the parameters permanently, but the bureaucracy (and the structure of the U.S. government) ensured he couldn't do so. He would have been better off to claim a strictly temporary emergency power for the President--waterboard a handful, then declare the emergency over until the next time. The American people like to think of ourselves as holding to higher standards--we need our illusions.