In 2001, shortly after his inauguration, Dick Cheney met with Dan Quayle, who had of course served in the same position eight years earlier. Quayle wanted to offer some advice, one vice president to another.

“Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this political fundraising … you’ll be going to the funerals,” Quayle said. “We’ve all done it.”

Recalling the conversation, Quayle said Cheney “got that little smile,” before replying, “I have a different understanding with the president.”

The first of a four-part series in the Washington Post today on Cheney’s White House role, written by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, helps demonstrate just how true those comments were. Today’s profile helps document the scope and breadth of a Vice President with unprecedented (and largely unchecked) authority. Cheney wanted a “mandate that gave him access to ‘every table and every meeting,’ making his voice heard in ‘whatever area the vice president feels he wants to be active in,'” and, naturally, Bush gave his VP what he requested.

It’s hard to know which of the many jaw-dropping anecdotes to highlight, but Cheney’s work in establishing military commissions for detainees stood out for capturing all the characteristics of Cheney’s hyper-secretive, ruthless, legally-dubious style.

At the White House, Bellinger sent Rice a blunt — and, he thought, private — legal warning. The Cheney-Rumsfeld position would place the president indisputably in breach of international law and would undermine cooperation from allied governments. Faxes had been pouring in at the State Department since the order for military commissions was signed, with even British authorities warning that they could not hand over suspects if the U.S. government withdrew from accepted legal norms.

One lawyer in his office said that Bellinger was chagrined to learn, indirectly, that Cheney had read the confidential memo and “was concerned” about his advice. Thus Bellinger discovered an unannounced standing order: Documents prepared for the national security adviser, another White House official said, were “routed outside the formal process” to Cheney, too. The reverse did not apply.

Powell asked for a meeting with Bush. The same day, Jan. 25, 2002, Cheney’s office struck a preemptive blow. It appeared to come from Gonzales, a longtime Bush confidant whom the president nicknamed “Fredo.” Hours after Powell made his request, Gonzales signed his name to a memo that anticipated and undermined the State Department’s talking points. The true author has long been a subject of speculation, for reasons including its unorthodox format and a subtly mocking tone that is not a Gonzales hallmark.

A White House lawyer with direct knowledge said Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, wrote the memo. Flanigan passed it to Gonzales, and Gonzales sent it as “my judgment” to Bush. If Bush consulted Cheney after that, the vice president became a sounding board for advice he originated himself.

Cheney and his small team had, by design, excluded the Justice Department, the NSA, and the State Department to create the entire policy, which would also circumvent the federal judiciary.

Occasionally, through a combination of hype and fear, certain public figures are exaggerated into scary, powerful caricatures.

And sometimes, the caricatures understate the case.

The Cheney profile has enough tidbits for a week’s worth of blog posts, but in the meantime, this is obviously a must-read piece. If you’re reading it with Sunday-morning breakfast, keep a bottle of Maalox handy.

That Dick Cheney is secretive is hardly news, but seeing just how secretive is striking.

Stealth is among Cheney’s most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped “Treated As: Top Secret/SCI.” Experts in and out of government said Cheney’s office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to “sensitive compartmented information,” the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words “treated as,” they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause “exceptionally grave damage to national security.”

Across the board, the vice president’s office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that “the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch,” and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.

Stick it in a time capsule; future generations won’t believe it.

This case may bear more attention. The apparently highly-qualified chief counsel of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, the successor agency to the INS) in El Paso, a Mexican-American woman named Guadalupe Gonzalez was repeatedly passed over for an immigration judgeship in favor of white men who were her subordinates. She’s suing Alberto Gonzales for employment discrimination.

On Friday I published an email by TPM Reader SM which noted how the most major media outlets now appear to be referring to nearly everyone fighting US troops in Iraq as ‘al Qaeda’. I want to point your attention to a follow-up to that post by Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald provides a nice detailed analysis of recent reporting on Iraq that strongly points to what most of us probably assumed: namely, that there’s no reason to believe that the folks now dubbed ‘al Qaeda’ are any other than the folks formerly called ‘insurgents’. Particularly look at the second half of Glenn’s post, including the update, where he notes how reporters with a good track record of not being bamboozled by administration claptrap appear to be resisting the rhetorical al Qaidization of the Iraqi insurgency.

Now there is one more detail I’d like to add to this discussion. On Saturday morning, TPM Reader AK sent in an email calling attention to this passage in an article in the Times, whose Michael Gordon appears to be one of the top Qaedization offenders …

Jalal Jaff, a Sunni Kurd, who lives just behind the street where the bomb exploded and raced to the scene to pull people from burning cars, turned his head away on Tuesday as he passed the parking lot with more than a dozen destroyed cars, only their charred frames left, the rubber completely burned off their tires.

“He is a paid terrorist, not a human being,” he said. “The families will never know which body belongs to their relatives. They were mutilated. They had no faces.”

Like most of the people in the neighborhood, Mr. Jaff blamed Al Qaeda, a term used by Iraqis to refer generally to terrorists. The group operating in Iraq known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia includes many Iraqis but has some foreign leadership.

It’s an interesting passage in that it essentially confirms the point made above — that the only change here is one of labels, that the ‘Sunni insurgents’ and ‘Baathist dead-enders’ are now ‘al Qaeda’ merely by dint of blowing things up. But it also suggests that the change of labels isn’t simply a matter of the US military and American journalists but also appears to be the norm among ordinary Iraqis themselves.

I’m skeptical of that claim. But it is also worth noting that it has long been claimed that the Iraqi government, like the US government, has systematically overstated the role of ‘foreign fighters’ and ‘al Qaeda’ since they too do not wish to see the insurgency as Iraqi and either inter-sectarian or anti-occupation in nature.

Keep watching the press reports on this. Tell us what you find.

Ever the enabler of criminals and dangerous men, Alberto Gonzales has apparently been helping VP Cheney sustain his claim that he’s not part of the executive branch.

I knew the GOP was hard up. But I had no idea it was this bad.

According to this quite hilarious article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the California GOP has hired as its chief operating officer, an Australian national who the Department of Homeland Security has been trying to deport for repeated immigration violations. As recently as Februrary, Michael Kamburowski, was working, rather haplessly, as a real estate agent in the Domincan Republic until he “ran away without mentioning anything to us,” according to his one-time boss, Rico Pester, the owner of Re/Max Island Realty, in the resort town of Punta Cana. (Said his Re/Max bio: “With his attention to detail, laid-back yet professional approach, and sense of humor, Michael will smoothen the road to your dream property in Punta Cana.”)

Perhaps it is somehow implicitly redundant to note that in the second half of the 1990s Kamburowski was working for Grover Norquist on immigration policy, tort reform and ‘paycheck protection’ before becoming the executive director of Norquist’s Reagan Legacy Project.

Along the way there were a couple of hasty marriages leading shortly to his new brides submitting “Petition for Alien Relative” forms to get him citizenship, various stints as an “aspiring actor” and even a stay at the Wackenhut Correctional Facility in Jamaica, New York courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition to his work running the California Republican party he is also suing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for “significant financial hardship” and “severe emotional stress and embarrassment” for trying to have him deported.

Apparently, this wasn’t the last of the CA GOP’s overseas outreach.

Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring, who hired the afore-mocked Kamburowski, claimed he was not able to find a qualified political director for the California party among the three-hundred-odd million citizens of the United States. Nehring used a H1B visa (the type commonly used by high-tech companies when say they need to hire a foreigner with a skill not possessed by any American) to Christopher Matthews, a Canadian citizen, with no experience in California politics.

Report: Dem Presidential candidates tiptoeing around gay rights issues. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

The New York Times responds to our criticism of the paper’s Friday front-page slam of John Edwards.

William Kristol bills himself as a serious, credible person, and is routinely rewarded by the DC establishment. As Kevin Drum recently put it, “The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you.”

But one need not look too far below the surface to find the shameless partisan hack.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol defended Vice President Cheney’s decision to exempt himself from an executive order designed to safeguard classified national security information.

Kristol said the exemptions for the president and vice president were “reasonable enough.” He called it “a pain in the neck” to have “some bureaucrat” from the National Archives “come and inspect your safe to see whether you’re locking it up properly each night.”

He did not appear to be kidding.

Let’s review: Dick Cheney was bound by a presidential executive order to safeguard classified materials. Cheney ignored the E.O., exempted himself from its instructions, and mishandled secret information. The federal agency responsible for oversight had a few questions about all of this, which Cheney ignored, insisting that he’s not part of the executive branch of government. The Vice President then decided he’d like to resolve the questions by eliminating the oversight agency asking them.

Kristol believes this is “reasonable enough”? If Vice President Al Gore had conducted himself the same way, would Kristol come to the same conclusion? (As for some “bureaucrat” checking to see if the OVP properly locked up its safe, we’re not just talking about oversight; this deals with the willful mishandling of classified secrets in a time of war. That Kristol takes a rather blase attitude about the whole thing speaks poorly to the right’s credibility on national security.)

I’ve been curious about how the right’s leading voices might respond to Cheney’s bizarre and rather dangerous arguments. So far, we haven’t heard much, except Kristol’s ham-fisted nonsense this morning.

The White House’s allies will have to do better than this.

As part of its cover story on “what you need to know now,” Newsweek conducted a broad poll on a variety of political and cultural affairs. There were plenty of interesting results, but one section was particularly noteworthy.

Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in ten Americans (41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection. A majority of Americans were similarly unable to pick Saudi Arabia in a multiple-choice question about the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born. Just 43 percent got it right — and a full 20 percent thought most came from Iraq.

For that matter, one in five Americans (20%) believe that we did find chemical/biological weapons “hidden by Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

Perhaps most troubling, the number of people who are confused about Iraq’s non-existent role in the 9/11 attacks has gone up in recent years. When Newsweek asked the same question in the fall of 2004, 36% said Saddam Hussein was “directly involved” with the attacks. Nearly three years later, that number is 41%.

Sure, Bush administration officials have been careless with their rhetoric, leading to some confusion. And sure, there were probably some Fox News viewers included in the poll, skewing the numbers.

But that still doesn’t explain a result like this one.