Cheney's Unmistakable Admission
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, August 1, 2007; 1:50 PM
He as good as admitted it.
In an interview yesterday, CNN's Larry King asked Vice President Cheney if he dispatched Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card to a Washington hospital room to pressure a sedated John Ashcroft, then attorney general, to approve surveillance techniques that Ashcroft's subordinates had concluded were illegal.
Cheney's response?
"THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall -- . . . I don't recall that I gave instructions to that effect.
"Q That would be something you would recall.
"THE VICE PRESIDENT: I would think so. But certainly I was involved because I was a big advocate of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and had been responsible and working . . . to get it to the President for approval. By the time this occurred, it had already been approved about 12 times by the Department of Justice. There was nothing new about it.
"Q So you didn't send them to get permission.
"THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't recall that I was the one who sent them to the hospital."
Have you ever heard such a non-denial denial? Seriously: Can anyone reading this see it as anything but an admission that Gonzales and Card (then White House counsel and chief of staff, respectively) were following Cheney's orders?
He doesn't remember sending them to the hospital. Well, what does he remember? Sadly, King moved on.
And it worked. Many mainstream media reporters just don't know what to do with this sort of flimflam. There's no mention of Cheney's de facto admission of involvement in this particularly sordid saga in any of the major papers this morning.
Wolf Blitzer and King came pretty close to calling baloney while discussing that segment of the interview yesterday afternoon on CNN.
"You know, Larry, those words 'I don't recall,' that's going to, I think, you know, subject him to some criticism, because, as you correctly point out, a major decision like that, someone would recall," Blitzer said.
"I was surprised at the answer," King replied, "because he hinted at being involved and certainly being for the concept. I don't know why he didn't just say --" and here King caught himself about to state the obvious, and stopped dead in his tracks.
"However, I'm not going to put words into his mouth," King continued. "That was his answer, 'I don't recall.' I think the one thing of the beauty of our job is, the audience then looks at this, takes it any way they wish."
Blitzer: "And they can make up their own minds."
King: "That's right."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/08/01/BL2007080101281.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
