Secrets of the mundane and the profound

The Bush administration giveth:

The Central Intelligence Agency will make public next week a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detail domestic spying, assassination plots and other C.I.A. misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s, the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said yesterday.

In an address to a group of historians who have long pressed for greater disclosure of C.I.A. archives, General Hayden described the documents, known as the “family jewels,” as “a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.” He also directed the release of 11,000 pages of cold-war documents on the Soviet Union and China, which were handed out on compact discs at the meeting, in Chantilly, Va.

[...]

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, which obtains and publishes collections of once-secret government records, said the step announced yesterday might be the most important since at least 1998, when George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, reversed a decision to release information on cold-war covert actions. “Applause is due,” Mr. Blanton said.

But Mr. Blanton took issue with General Hayden’s assurance that the current C.I.A. was utterly different from the pre-1975 institution. “There are uncanny parallels,” he said, “between events today and the stories in the family jewels about warrantless wiretapping and concern about violation of the kidnapping laws.”

The six-page 1975 Justice Department summary, of C.I.A. actions that some officers of the agency had reported as possible illegalities, included the 1963 wiretapping of two newspaper columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, who had written a column including “certain national security information.”

The document said those wiretaps had been approved after “discussions” with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. A C.I.A. report described them as “very productive,” picking up calls of 12 senators and 6 members of the House, among others.

And they giveth...um...not so much.

For four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has resisted routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information, and when the National Archives unit that monitors classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president’s office suggested abolishing the oversight unit, according to documents released yesterday by a Democratic congressman.

The Information Security Oversight Office, a unit of the National Archives, appealed the issue to the Justice Department, which has not yet ruled on the matter.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, disclosed Mr. Cheney’s effort to shut down the oversight office. Mr. Waxman, who has had a leading role in the stepped-up efforts by Democrats to investigate the Bush administration, outlined the matter in an eight-page letter sent Thursday to the vice president and posted, along with other documentation, on the committee’s Web site.

Officials at the National Archives and the Justice Department confirmed the basic chronology of events cited in Mr. Waxman’s letter.

[...]

J. William Leonard, director of the oversight office, has argued in a series of letters to Mr. Addington that the vice president’s office is indeed such an entity. He noted that previous vice presidents had complied with the request for data on documents classified and declassified, and that Mr. Cheney did so in 2001 and 2002.

But starting in 2003, the vice president’s office began refusing to supply the information. In 2004, it blocked an on-site inspection by Mr. Leonard’s office that was routinely carried out across the government to check whether documents were being properly labeled and safely stored.

Mr. Addington did not reply in writing to Mr. Leonard’s letters, according to officials familiar with their exchanges. But Mr. Addington stated in conversations that the vice president’s office was not an “entity within the executive branch” because, under the Constitution, the vice president also plays a role in the legislative branch, as president of the Senate, able to cast a vote in the event of a tie.

Mr. Waxman rejected that argument. “He doesn’t have classified information because of his legislative function,” Mr. Waxman said of Mr. Cheney. “It’s because of his executive function.”

Mr. Cheney’s general resistance to complying with the oversight request was first reported last year by The Chicago Tribune.

In January, Mr. Leonard wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales asking that he resolve the question. Erik Ablin, a Justice Department spokesman, said last night, “This matter is currently under review in the department.”

Whatever the ultimate ruling, according to Mr. Waxman’s letter, the vice president’s office has already carried out “possible retaliation” against the oversight office.

As part of an interagency review of Executive Order 12958, Mr. Cheney’s office proposed eliminating appeals to the attorney general — precisely the avenue Mr. Leonard was taking. According to Mr. Waxman’s investigation, the vice president’s staff also proposed abolishing the Information Security Oversight Office.

The interagency group revising the executive order has rejected those proposals, according to Mr. Waxman. Ms. McGinn, Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Mr. Cheney’s penchant for secrecy has long been a striking feature of the Bush administration, beginning with his fight to keep confidential the identities of the energy industry officials who advised his task force on national energy policy in 2001. Mr. Cheney took that dispute to the Supreme Court and won.

Steven Aftergood, who tracks government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and last year filed a complaint with the oversight office about Mr. Cheney’s noncompliance, said, “This illustrates just how far the vice president will go to evade external oversight.”

But David B. Rivkin, a Washington lawyer who served in Justice Department and White House posts in earlier Republican administrations, said Mr. Cheney had a valid point about the unusual status of the office he holds.

“The office of the vice president really is unique,” Mr. Rivkin said. “It’s not an agency. It’s an extension of the vice president himself.”

Hmmm. Really? I think the truth lies somewhere in the decision to stop complying in 2003, when it no doubt became clear to even the dead-endiest of the dead-enders in the White House that the intelligence was showing there were no WMD in Iraq. No one can be sure the extent Cheney's "extension of himself" -- the office of the VP -- manipulated that intelligence if we don't really know what the intelligence maintained.