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Influence of Cheney has waned

By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt The New York Times

Published: September 10, 2006

WASHINGTON 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, Cheney was directing the 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 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 CIA around the world.

It was Cheney and his staff who helped shape the rules under which the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva Conventions and were to be tried by "military commissions" at Guant�namo Bay, Cuba - 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," Cheney said last December on a flight from Pakistan to Oman. He added, "It's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years."

But as the United States marks the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his own 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.

There is little question that President George W. Bush and Cheney still share the goal of expanding the power of the presidency. Legislation they have sent to Congress would essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five years.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/10/news/cheney.php