Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned - New York Times

Cheney’s Power No Longer Goes Unquestioned - New York Times: "From those first moments five years ago when Secret Service agents burst into Vice President Dick Cheney’s office on Sept. 11, lifted him off his feet and propelled him to the underground Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the man who had returned to Washington that year to remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable.

Within minutes, Mr. Cheney was directing the government’s response to an attack that was still under way. Within weeks, he was overseeing the surveillance program that tracked suspected terrorist communications into and out of the United States without warrants. Within months, he and his staff, guided by a loyal aide, David S. Addington, were championing the reinterpretation of the rules of war so that they could detain “enemy combatants” and interrogate them at secret detention facilities run by the C.I.A. around the world.

It was Mr. Cheney and his staff who helped shape the rules under which members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and would be tried by “military commissions” at Guant�namo Bay — if they faced trial at all.

“I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it,” Mr. Cheney said in December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman. “You know,” he added, “it’s not an accident that we haven’t been hit in four years.”

But as the nation observes the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for detention, interrogation and domestic spying."