APFN
Mr. Cheney is building a giant vault.
Wed Dec 11 17:53:04 2002
208.152.73.250


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/11/opinion/11DOWD.html?todaysheadlines
Disco Dick Cheney
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Some hush-hush bang-bang is going on at the vice president's house: big
blasts twice a day, morning and night, that cause the whole neighborhood to
quake and shake.

Rattled neighbors cannot learn what's going on at Mr. Cheney's Disclosed
Location from the Navy, which maintains the official residence on the
grounds of the Naval Observatory.

"We're doing infrastructure improvements and utility upgrades," says the
Navy's Cate Mueller.

If Dick Cheney won't tell us which energy fat cats drew up our energy
policy, he's not going to tell us why we're paying to renovate his pad.

The construction, which could last 16 months, is related to "national
security and homeland defense," according to a letter from the observatory's
superintendent printed in The Washington Post.

I'd say we have four possibilities:

1. Mr. Cheney is building a giant vault. Now that a judge appointed by the
president says that anything the vice president does can be kept secret,
there is even more incentive for him to run the government so everything can
be secret and stored away in the vault.

2. He's suffering from a bad case of bunker envy and wants a command center
and bunker like the president's in the White House and Rummy's in the
Pentagon.

3. He's digging a tunnel in case he has his priorities backward and we
should be more concerned with Al Qaeda than Iraq. A secret tunnel at his
house could easily feed into the secret tunnel at the nearby Russian Embassy
leading up to a safe house; the tunnel was built in the late 1970's by the
F.B.I. and National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Russian diplomats, and
abandoned after the Russians found out about it from the F.B.I. counterspy
Robert Hanssen.

4. He's constructing an underground disco. If he appears in a Travolta white
suit and gold chains, his desire to replicate the Gerald Ford era would be
realized.

It's a mystery why President Bush doesn't want to stock his cabinet with his
contemporaries from Yale, Harvard and Texas, rather than retreads from the
wilted salad days when Cheney and Rummy were ruling the Ford White House.

On Monday Mr. Bush again heeded Mr. Cheney and chose a Ford official to be
Treasury secretary (replacing the Ford official who was just fired from the
job) to work with the Ford official who is Fed chairman.

Yesterday he chose an old Ford hand as head of the S.E.C. And we have the
recrudescence of the secretary of state under Ford and Nixon, Henry
Kissinger.

Ford was the Fillmore of our time. His administration was famous for its
hapless economic policy, fighting inflation with marketing, passing out
those silly little buttons that read WIN (Whip Inflation Now). What do we
remember of that era except the pardoning of Nixon, the fall of Saigon and
the falls of Chevy Chase?

The lasting mark of that White House was tamping down the post-Watergate
zeal for truth, containing Congressional and media investigations into
C.I.A. abuses such as assassinations of foreign leaders and F.B.I.
overreaching on infiltrating civil rights groups.

It was in that battle that the Ford alumni — Rummy, Cheney & Kissy — forged
their worldview that the greatest threat to the country was the prying eyes
of the public, the press and Congress.

Trent Lott may want to turn the clock back to Jim Crow. Mr. Cheney just
wants to go back to a time before Vietnam and Watergate, when there was more
government secrecy and less moral relativism.

The administration is chockablock with people who kept the public and
Congress in the dark on foreign intrigue. Adm. John Poindexter, who took the
fall for Iran-contra, is now in charge of expanding the universe of secrets
to include dossiers at the Pentagon on every living American, under the
Orwellian heading of Office of Information Awareness.

Elliott Abrams, who misled Congress on Iran-contra and was pardoned by the
first President Bush, is in charge of the Middle East for the second
President Bush. Otto Reich, who worked with Ollie North and ran the covert
program to get public support for the contras, now runs Latin American
policy.

Maybe instead of worrying about American children who don't do history
lessons, we should worry about American presidents who don't care about the
lessons of history.
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