Cheney's Guy
He's barely known outside Washington's corridors of power, but David Addington is the most powerful man you've never heard of. Here's why:
If the question of incarceration was vexing, the question of how to extract information from those incarcerated was positively inflammatory. In August 2002, the head of OLC, Jay Bybee, signed a memo interpreting the U.S. law prohibiting torture and implementing the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Addington helped shape the Bybee memo, which was authored by Yoo. Once again, the State Department--which has the lead role in monitoring implementation of the treaty--was left out of the discussions.
Bybee, Yoo, and Addington saw the torture statute, unsurprisingly, as an unwarranted infringement on executive-branch power. Their goal was to interpret it as narrowly as possible, and their memo, consequently, explored the outer limits of the interrogation methods the statute allowed. The three lawyers agreed that the president could override or ignore the statute, as needed, to protect national security. And they concluded that those who engaged in conduct that might violate the law might nevertheless have an appropriate legal defense based on "self-defense" or "necessity."
The Bybee memo caused a storm of protest in the legal community, including among many conservative lawyers inside the Justice Department. "From the beginning, no one has ever said we would violate the torture statute," says a former Justice Department official. "So why would you write a memo writing all the ways we could violate the statute? It's just dumb."
In October 2003, Bybee's replacement as the head of OLC, Jack Goldsmith, began reviewing all the "war on terror" memos the office had generated and later told the Pentagon not to use the Bybee memo. Deputy Attorney General James Comey soon ordered the memo withdrawn, and another OLC attorney, Daniel Levin, then wrote a more limited opinion that scrapped whole sections of the Bybee memo. Unlike Bybee, Levin circulated his draft memo widely and made revisions, according to Justice Department officials, after lawyers at the State Department and other agencies had commented on it.
As with the incarceration and interrogation issues, President Bush's decision, within days of the 9/11 attacks, to authorize the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States, without review by the secret Justice Department intelligence court, had David Addington's handwriting all over it. Bush, Addington and others in the small coterie of conservative administration lawyers argued, had the authority to order the secret surveillance under his constitutional authority as commander in chief and by the authority granted to him by Congress's use-of-force resolution before the invasion of Afghanistan. Goldsmith and Patrick Philbin weren't so sure. In March 2004, the two Justice Department lawyers expressed their doubts about the program to Comey, the deputy attorney general. Like Addington, Goldsmith and Philbin are extremely conservative and pro-presidential power. But according to former Justice Department attorneys who know both men, they are also careful lawyers who found Addington and Yoo's legal analysis and opinions to be sloppy and overreaching. By reviewing all the "war on terror" memos, says a former Justice Department attorney, "part of what Jack was doing was returning OLC more to its traditional role." Addington excoriated Goldsmith over what he viewed as his betrayal, administration officials say, and his response, several individuals who know him say, was entirely in keeping with his character. People in the front lines of the war on terrorism "were relying on these memos," says one former Justice Department official. "People felt like you're changing the rules on us; you're running for the hills." That, says Cheney adviser Matalin, is antithetical to Addington's makeup: "Once he's disaggregated the problem and reaggregated the solution," Matalin says, "he can stand his ground."
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