- Asserted Presidential power to create military commissions,
which combine the functions of judge, jury, and prosecutor
in the trial of war crimes.
- Claimed authority to detain American citizens
as enemy combatants indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay on the President's
say-so alone.
- Initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and
torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international
terrorists.
- Championed a Presidential power to torture in
contravention of federal statutes and treaties.
- Engineered the National Security Agency's warrantless
domestic surveillance program targeting American citizens on
American soil in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act of 1978.
- Orchestrated the invocation of executive privilege
to conceal from Congress secret spying programs to gather foreign
intelligence, and their legal justifications.
- Summoned the privilege to refuse to disclose
his consulting of business executives in conjunction with his
Energy Task Force.
- Retaliated against Ambassador Joseph Wilson and
his wife Valerie Plame, through chief of staff Scooter Libby,
for questioning the administration's evidence of weapons of
mass destruction as justification for invading Iraq.
(Read Bruce
Fein's SLATE article on Cheney)