{"id":327929,"date":"2010-02-16T17:30:09","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T22:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com\/?p=11556"},"modified":"2010-02-16T17:30:09","modified_gmt":"2010-02-16T22:30:09","slug":"a-few-details-emerge-over-bush-era-rifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/327929","title":{"rendered":"A Few Details Emerge Over Bush-Era Rifts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dick<\/p>\n

Dick Cheney<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said over the weekend that his administration — like\u00a0the current one — was fraught with internal disagreements over how to handle terror suspects, and now FOX News has learned a little more about those disagreements.<\/p>\n

A former Bush Administration official says there was dissent within the previous administration over how to handle a number of terrorism cases, including that of: “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and then prosecuted in a U.S. federal court; alleged “20th Hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison; and Jose Padilla, the American citizen who was held as an “enemy combatant” for several years before being prosecuted in federal court.<\/p>\n

Cheney, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” said he “won some” battles, and “lost some.”<\/p>\n

In addition, Cheney\u00a0described a meeting in the Roosevelt Room “of the White House where we had a major shootout over how this was going to be handled between the Justice Department, that advocated that approach, and many of the rest of us, who wanted to treat it as an intelligence matter, as an act of war with military commissions.”<\/p>\n

The former Bush Administration official offered some more details about that meeting.<\/p>\n

The official said the meeting was held within a couple months of the 9\/11 attacks — and just a few weeks before President Bush signed an executive order on Nov. 13, 2001, authorizing the creation of military tribunals for terror suspects.<\/p>\n

Cheney, then-Attorney General John Aschroft, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others gathered in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room to discuss a draft of the pending executive order, according to the official.<\/p>\n

The draft, as written, gave the Defense Secretary full authority to designate someone an “enemy combatant,” which would have allowed Rumself to unilaterally take someone in the criminal justice system and move them to a military commission, by designating them an “enemy combatant,” the official said.<\/p>\n

“Ashcroft strongly objected to that,” the official said. “He wanted it to be the Attorney General’s decision.”<\/p>\n

Cheney, in his interview with ABC over the weekend, said the problem was never “totally” resolved. However, according to the former Bush Administration official, after the meeting in the Roosevelt Room, Cheney brought the issue to President Bush, who decided that the Commander-In-Chief would determine who was an “enemy combatant.”<\/p>\n

The former official noted that Cheney’s recent comments about the Roosevelt Room meeting are not the first time the meeting has been discussed publicly.<\/p>\n

In fact, the official pointed out, a former Justice Department official seems to reference the same meeting in a book four years ago.<\/p>\n

“Press reports … describe a struggle between the White House, the Defense Department, and Attorney General Ashcroft over who would decide when military commissions ought to be used,” John Yoo, a top lawyer with the Bush Justice Department, writes in his 2006 book “War by Other Means.”<\/p>\n

“Defense wanted to decide, but Ashcroft, ever a defender of his bureaucratic turf, wanted a veto,” the book\u00a0continues. “After a contentious White House meeting, President Bush broke the deadlock by deciding that only he would decide when an al Qaeda detainee would be sent before a military court.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dick Cheney Former Vice President Dick Cheney said over the weekend that his administration — like\u00a0the current one — was fraught with internal disagreements over how to handle terror suspects, and now FOX News has learned a little more about those disagreements. A former Bush Administration official says there was dissent within the previous administration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4536,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4536"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}