The control of power is currency in Washington, and to control things you need to be the master of shaping the information fed to the people in charge.  When you’ve been successful at placing your minions in important positions around the head of state, you get both better information about what may be going on and also the oportunity to shape the views of the nation’s leader toward your side of things.  So it has been in every court of power for all time, and so it is today for Dick Cheney.  To wit:

The vice president’s reputation and, some say, his influence, have suffered in the past year and a half. Cheney lost his closest aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to a perjury conviction, and his onetime mentor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, in a Cabinet purge. A shooting accident in Texas, and increasing gaps between his rhetoric and events in Iraq, have exposed him to ridicule and approval ratings in the teens. Cheney expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history’s, and those close to him say he means it.

Waxing or waning, Cheney holds his purchase on an unrivaled portfolio across the executive branch. Bush works most naturally, close observers said, at the level of broad objectives, broadly declared. Cheney, they said, inhabits an operational world in which means are matched with ends and some of the most important choices are made. When particulars rise to presidential notice, Cheney often steers the preparation of options and sits with Bush, in side-by-side wing chairs, as he is briefed.

Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney. (emphasis mine)

You tell me: do all those trips to the CIA headquarters in Langley that Cheney and Libby made in the run-up to the Iraq invasion start standing out in even starker relief for you this morning? Because they should.  Sure would be an effective means of shaping policy recommendations prior to the President ever getting his hands on the intelligence and would also have given Cheney a leg up on anyone else in the room in knowing what was or was not to be presented so that he could either (a) push certain interpretations with even more background knowledge or (b) discredit a briefer or policy maker by pulling out information they might think he wouldn’t know.  Crafty old manipulative spider, isn’t he?

When you control both the messages that are getting through to the top, and you are the most valued counselor whose opinions are given last and with the most weight to the nation’s leader, you wield a very powerful hand indeed.  

Cheney has worked since before Bush took office to place his sycophants and loyalists in every important nook and cranny of the Bush Administration.  And he guards his secrets, every last one of them, with an obsessive quality that makes Nixon look lax.  Because Cheney understands the value of approaching an issue from the shadows, and the even greater value of stealth and surprise when one is trying to end-run real discussion and disregard the rule of law when it got in the way of his plans:

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.”

A document from the Office of the Vice President is stamped “Treated as Secret/SCI” 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.

In the usual business of interagency consultation, proposals and information flow into the vice president’s office from around the government, but high-ranking White House officials said in interviews that almost nothing flows out. Close aides to Cheney describe a similar one-way valve inside the office, with information flowing up to the vice president but little or no reaction flowing down.

This has all been information that has been whispered about, that we saw glimpses of during the Libby trial with the insinuations of the Vice President unilaterally declassifying intelligence matters at will to suit his own political machinations. What is stunning about the Gellman and Becker report is that people were willing to talk, on the record on occasion, about Cheney. He’s overplayed his hand, and with the end of the Bush administration’s tenure in the White House, a weakened Cheney enforcement apparatus with the loss of Libby, and with the weaker position in which Rove finds himself, I think we are going to be learning a whole lot more in the days ahead.

This whole beginning of the unraveling of the Cheney machine brings to mind the well-played Sam Neill version of Cardinal Wolsey in The Tudors.  (You really should be watching this show – it is brilliant, superbly acted, and the manifestations of ego and avarice are all too familiar by comparison to the Bushies.)  I say bring on the sunshine — it has been a long time coming for Dick Cheney, and I cannot think of a man who deserves the exposure more.

And, while I’m thinking of it, what took the WaPo so long to allow Barton Gellman to put this series together?  He’s been working out bits and pieces of this for ages.  Here is a question that I would like to see answered:  Was the White House Iraq Group really Cheney’s idea — a way to head fake the sale of the Iraq invasion to the American public to push not only public opinion, but also opinion in the West Wing, in his direction?   One would hope that if Colin Powell knows the answer to that particular question, he’d take a little time to talk with Gellman or someone else about it — because that is one we all ought to know.

PS — I’ll be on Sam Seder’s Show today beginning at 5 pm ET.  You can listen live via the Air America website.