Today's Washington Post provides the second of two articles by Barton Gellman adapted from Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

The article discusses the process used in March 2004 to decide whether and how to renew the warrantless domestic surveillance program. The program was classified and knowledge of its very existence was limited to a very few people. Lawyers from the Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA felt it was illegal as it was being implemented, and the Department of Justice refused to clear on the required extension of the program. The Vice President and lawyers from the White House felt the president had the right to implement the program. With the limited information available to him, the president signed the extension.

At that point, according to the article, the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Assistant Attorney General, the head of the FBI, the General Council for the FBI and the General Council for the CIA were prepared to resign collectively on the basis that they would not serve in an administration that implemented such a policy in spite of the law and in spite of the advice of the relevant agencies. Only the Nixon "Saturday Night Massacre," in which the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resigned, is remotely comparable to the resignation that was to take place.

Again according to the article, President Bush still had no clue that there was such extreme opposition to the program, nor that the discussions had been going on for months. Condolezza Rice, not having been involved in the key meetings, heard through back channels that there was a real problem and took advantage of a brief meeting with him to tell the president that he should talk to the Deputy Attorney General. He did so, catching him on the way out of another meeting. Gellman described the president as "gobsmacked" by the discovery that he faced a revolt within his administration over a decision he had already made.

The president stepped back and the program was revised in ways that satisfied the Department of Justice of its legality.

The Decision Making Process

It is hard to know how the decision making process could go so wrong. Clearly the president should have been informed of the breadth and depth of the opposition to the continuation of the program in its initial form before he signed off on its unmodified continuation.

The original decision making must also have been flawed. Gellman includes in his description of the hospital bed scene the following:

Ashcroft told the president's men he never should have certified the program in the first place [7].

"You drew the circle so tight I couldn't get the advice that I needed," Ashcroft said, according to Comey. He knew things now, the attorney general said, that he should have been told before.

That flaw is perhaps understandable in the aftermath of 9/11, but the system failed to inform the Attorney General in time to act in previous reauthorizations.

The conflict appears to derive fundamentally from the difference of opinion between a faction in the White House headed by the Vice President advocating very great powers for the president in matters related to national security and the position of the lawyers within other agencies who advocated more limited powers more constrained by laws. However, the nature of the controversy does not explain why the president was not fully informed of the position of both sides, and his reversal of his signature clearly indicates that he did not understand its full implications when he originally signed.

Gellman seems to imply that the problem was that the president was detached from the decision making, perhaps due to the pressure of the election campaign. That too fails to stand up to scrutiny. Had the resignations taken place, I suggest that the election would most probably have been lost, and the president surely would not have wanted to lose an election due to public appearances eight months before the election itself. The system should direct the president's attention to the points where it is most needed. The administration should understand the president's priorities well in order to direct his attention to the issues he would wish to study without the need for his personal day to day guidance.

I think there is a good case to believe that the limitations on the information distribution about the program interfered with the decision making process. Some of the people who should have been involved in assuring that the president made is decision on an adequate basis of information were not informed about the surveillance program's existence, and none of the people who did know about it were free to discuss it freely among themselves.

It seems that there was a failure to get the whole range of parties involved in the decision analysis into the same room at the same time with the president to discuss the decision, or alternatively that key parties in that room failed to present their case clearly and make clear how very strongly they felt about the policy alternatives under discussion. Of course, one does not want to allocate more of the president's attention to a matter than is necessary, nor does one want to have meetings so large that discussion can not take place, nor does one want to have too great a social distance between participants given how hard it can be to tell someone several rungs about you that you disagree with their position. Still, for the president not to know that the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General and the head of the FBI were about to resign suggests a major failure.

Of course, it is possible that some parties were manipulating the system to assure the decision that they wanted. A charitable interpretation of that possibility is that they felt the surveillance was so important to the security of the country that the process should be biased to assure it continued. It has also been suggested that some in the White House had long believed that the Constitution gives the president powers that have been abridged by custom over history, and it might be that there was an attempt to influence the decision to provide a precedent for the exercise of that power.

Over the history of the United States great thought and effort has been given to perfect the process by which decisions are made by the President in the White House. The Chief of Staff and other officers of the administration are responsible both to understand the lessons that have been learned and to manage the system well. It would seem likely no single element would result in so egregious a failure of the decision making process as Gellman describes. Rather one must assume that several combined in a way that a priori appeared and probably were most unlikely.

One hopes that future administrations will learn from this case, and install still further safeguards on the decision making process.