Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazer
That would be a nice distraction from America's real problems, wouldn't it?
Yeah, Cheney has a weird interpretation of his job, but he's got a point. The vice president has one Constitutional duty, to cast the tie-breaking vote in the senate and that makes him a figurehead at best. That's no excuse for his secrecy though. The Justice Department ought to get a court order to allow a search of Cheney's office. A figurehead like him only needs to keep the president's secrets, not his own.
Edit: not to discount the weight of this problem, but I think you're fishing for controversy, knife. Why the Federation of National Scientists has any opinion whatsoever on the vice president's classification practices, I can only guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if their inquiries were politically motivated. You needn't create a tempest in a teapot. There's enough real controversy in D.C. to go around.
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the American Federation of Scientists is not the inquiring party - they only reported the inquiry on thier site. the investigating office is the
Information Security Oversight Office.
US News is reporting on it as well.
as far as relevance, Cheney's office has been instrumental in the creation of our current problems - the invasion of iraq in particular - but more generally in the overall erosion of the constitutional checks and balances vis a vis the assertion of executive power over the other branches of government. Cheney's the most powerful VP in history - and a champion of warrantless wiretapping, denial of habeas corpus, torture, secret courts, rendition, secret prisons, and of course, the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the manipulation of intelligence data therein. the above inquiry is symptomatic of the VP's fundamental abhorrence of transparency in government. democracy works best in the open, no?