WASHINGTON (AP) — Dick Cheney was the public face of the George W. Bush administration’s cross-border approach to surveillance and intelligence gathering in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
An unabashed advocate of sweeping executive power in the name of national security, Cheney placed himself at the center of the public debate over detention, interrogation and espionage that continues two decades later.
“I think the state of security that we have today is largely a product of our response to 9/11, and obviously Vice President Cheney was in the middle of operationalizing that response from the White House,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University.
Prominent supporter of the Patriot Act
Cheney was arguably the Republican administration’s most prominent supporter of the Patriot Act, the law passed almost unanimously after 9/11 that gave the U.S. government broad surveillance powers.
He also endorsed a warrantless National Security Agency wiretapping program aimed at intercepting the international communications of suspected terrorists in the United States, although there are concerns about its legality.
If such an agency had existed before 9/11, Cheney once said, it could have led to the U.S. “tracking down two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon.”
To counter potential terrorists and spies, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have essential tools that became widely known after the attacks. These include national security letters that allow the FBI to order companies to turn over information about customers.
Courts have questioned the legal justification of the government’s surveillance apparatus, and a Republican Party that once stood firmly behind Cheney’s national security worldview has become significantly more fractured.
Bipartisan consensus on expanded surveillance powers after 9/11 has given way to increasing skepticism, particularly among some Republicans who believe spy agencies used those powers to undermine President Donald Trump while investigating ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign.
Congress in 2020 allowed three provisions of the Patriot Act to expire that the FBI and Justice Department had declared indispensable to national security. One allowed investigators to monitor people without proving they were acting on behalf of an international terrorist organization.
A program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was reauthorized last year, but only after extensive negotiations. To collect foreign intelligence information, it allowed the government to collect communications from non-Americans outside the country without authorization.
“I think for someone like Vice President Cheney, expanding those powers wasn’t a secondary goal – it was a core goal,” Vladeck said. “And I think that the Republican Party today doesn’t see these kinds of issues – anti-terrorism policy, government surveillance agencies – anywhere near the political issues that the Bush administration did.”
Secret service as a political instrument
As the architect of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney pushed spy agencies to find evidence to justify military actions.
Cheney, along with other members of the administration, alleged that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al-Qaeda. Officials used this to sell the war to members of Congress and the American people, although this claim was later debunked.
The flawed intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq is viewed by American intelligence agencies as a earnest failure and as evidence of what can happen when leaders apply intelligence for political purposes.
The administration’s war arguments fueled a distrust among many Americans that now resonates with some in the current Republican administration.
“For decades, our foreign policy has been caught in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation-building,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the Office of National Intelligence, said last week in the Middle East.
Many lawmakers who voted for the apply of force in 2003 say they now regret it.
“It was a mistake to rely on the Bush administration to tell the truth,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said on the 20th anniversary of the invasion.
Expanded war powers
Trump has long criticized Cheney, but the president has relied on a legal doctrine popularized during Cheney’s time in office to justify deadly attacks on alleged drug boats in Latin America.
The government claims the US is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels and has declared them unlawful combatants.
“These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than al-Qaeda, and they will be treated equally,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media Oct. 28. “We will track them, we will network them and then we will hunt them down and kill them.”
After 9/11, the Bush-Cheney administration authorized the U.S. military to attack enemy combatants acting on behalf of terrorist organizations. This raised questions about the legality of killing or detaining people without prosecution.
Cheney’s involvement in strengthening executive power and surveillance and in “corrupting the books of the crude intelligence community” is reflected in today’s strikes, said Jim Ludes, a former national security analyst who directs the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University.
“You think about his legacy and some of it is very troubling. Some of it may be what the moment called for,” Ludes said. “But it’s a complicated legacy.”
Vladeck noted that a lasting legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration was “to blur, if not completely dissolve, the lines between civilian and military responses to threats.”
He pointed to the designation of foreign terrorist organizations, a tool that existed before the Sept. 11 attacks but has become more widely used in the years since. Trump has used the term for several drug cartels.
Contemporary conflicts within the government
Protecting the United States from espionage, terrorism, and other threats is a elaborate undertaking that spans the entire government. For example, when Cheney was vice president, agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were created.
As was the case then, the division of labor is controversial. Recently, a split arose between Director Kash Patel’s FBI and the intelligence agencies overseen by Gabbard.
The FBI said in a letter to lawmakers that it “strongly opposes” a proposed law that would eliminate the bureau as the government’s lead counterintelligence agency and replace it with a counterintelligence center under Gabbard’s office.
“The cumulative effect,” the FBI warned in the letter obtained by The Associated Press, “would be to delegate decision-making to personnel who are not actively involved in CI operations, knowledgeable about the intricacies of CI threats, or capable of developing coherent and tailored defense strategies.”
That would harm national security, the FBI said.
Agency spokesmen later issued a statement saying they would work with Congress to strengthen counterintelligence efforts.
