Dick

Josh Marshall at TPM has a bit of context about the Veep's problems with handling classified information.

This black comedy, right out of Through the Looking-Glass, does have a sobering side:

This is Leandro Aragancillo. He was a US Marine security official and last year he pled guilty to stealing classified documents from the Vice President’s office, where he worked at the time, and giving them to opposition leaders in the Philippines.

As far as we know he’s the only person ever to be caught committing espionage in the White House, so another bad day for the Cheney Office of Vice President. Now maybe you could say that this is just bad luck. You have the Scooter Libby case, you have the Aragancillo case. But there’s actually evidence now that it’s not, that there’s now evidence of systematic problems in, not only the Vice President’s office but the President’s office too, and problems they’re having safeguarding classified information.

Watch video of the TPM/Veracifier story here.

How can Dick Cheney possibly be so obsessed with secrecy and yet so cavalier about the means of keeping secrets?

One theory is that Cheney is capable of maintaining secrecy when it suits him. Thus, one might conclude that in the Valerie Plame case, it didn't suit him.

Thus, the theory goes, in the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame/Nigerien yellowcake story, Cheney made a calculated choice between the short-term gain of preventing the last remaining justification for the Iraq War from crumbling and the long-term goals of ensuring continued intelligence collection.

Because the latter pertained to goals under the same umbrella as the Iraq War supposedly did (Valerie Plame working as a NOC tracking Iran's WMD procurement and proliferation and attempts), such a choice betrayed a vertigo-inducing level of self-interest at the expense of the national interest - which was pursued, in Cheney's mind, with the national interest in mind.

Or so the story goes. And no, of course it doesn't make any sense. But that's the logic anyway.

But someone stealing documents out of Cheney's office and handing them over to a foreign government?

There are echoes of James Jesus Angleton here. The CIA's counter-espionage eminence grise spun elaborate conspiracy theories out of pure vapor about double- and triple-agents lurking everywhere. Yet Angleton managed to miss the nation's largest ever exposure of intelligence secrets: the Aldrich Ames case.

CIA desk jockey Aldrich Ames simply carried piles and piles of documents right out the door, into his car parked in the CIA parking lot, and off to meet his KGB handlers. Then back to work again the next day for more of the same. Lists of overseas NOC officers; intelligence assets worldwide: all carried right out the door in Ames' briefcase. And all the while, Angleton brooded in his office, bleary-eyed, chasing ghosts.

(Angleton had his own special safes in his office too. Fat lot of good, etc.)

Thus do the most complicated theories and counter-theories leave the Cheneys and Angletons of the world vulnerable to the most pedestrian threats.

That's the problem with those prone to conspiracy theories: in Cheney's world, the security officers tasked with ensuring the maintenance of documents are not allowed in the West Wing, but men who will walk documents out the door and into the hands of the Philippine government are.

In Cheney and Rumsfeld's world, an ascetic living in a cave cannot possibly be responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Must be state sponsorship involved. Next stop: Iraq and Saddam Hussein. (Not Saudi Arabia, of course...)

Yet another timely reminder that Cheney is, and has always been, as incompetent as he is Machiavellian.

Josh Marshall was on the case - in 2003:

Cheney is conservative, of course, but beneath his conservatism is something more important: a mindset rooted in his peculiar corporate-Washington-insider class. It is a world of men--very few women--who have been at the apex of both business and government, and who feel that they are unique in their mastery of both. Consequently, they have an extreme assurance in their own judgment about what is best for the country and how to achieve it. They see themselves as men of action. But their style of action is shaped by the government bureaucracies and cartel-like industries in which they have operated. In these institutions, a handful of top officials make the plans, and then the plans are carried out. Ba-da-bing. Ba-da-boom.

In such a framework all information is controlled tightly by the principals, who have "maximum flexibility" to carry out the plan. Because success is measured by securing the deal rather than by, say, pleasing millions of customers, there's no need to open up the decision-making process. To do so, in fact, is seen as governing by committee. If there are other groups (shareholders, voters, congressional committees) who agree with you, fine, you use them. But anyone who doesn't agree gets ignored or, if need be, crushed. Muscle it through and when the results are in, people will realize we were right is the underlying attitude.

The danger of this mindset is obvious. No single group of people has a monopoly on the truth. Whether it be plumbers, homemakers, or lobbyist bureaucrats, any group will inevitably see the world through its own narrow, mostly self-interested, prism. But few groups are so accustomed to self-dealing and self-aggrandizement as the cartel-capitalist class. And few are more used to equating their own self-interest with the interests of the country as a whole.

If you're President - I mean Vice President - Cheney, why wouldn't you be feeling a wee bit smug?

Cheney earned the confidence of a callow President-elect and has guided government - with surrogate hands seeded throughout the West Wing - to his own ends ever since.

So there sits Cheney, twirling his mustache. No doubt he is quite satisfied that he has managed to substantially control many levers of the most powerful country in the history of the world.

What do we do in the face of this supreme arrogance? How do we wipe that smug smile off Cheney's face?

Conservative Bruce Fein says, Let's impeach the bastard:

In grasping and exercising presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III. The most recent invention we know of is the vice president's insistence that an executive order governing the handling of classified information in the executive branch does not reach his office because he also serves as president of the Senate. In other words, the vice president is a unique legislative-executive creature standing above and beyond the Constitution. The House judiciary committee should commence an impeachment inquiry.

Yes, let's.

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