February 13, 2002
The Axis of No Access
By MAUREEN DOWD
ASHINGTON -- Back in the 60's, my brother would occasionally pretend to be a spy to impress girls.

It was pretty silly.

But nothing compared with the vice president pretending to be a Secret Agent Man.

Dick Cheney has taken his cloak-and-dagger routine to absurd extremes. "There's a man who leads a life of danger. . . . To everyone he meets he stays a stranger."

We are not allowed to know where Secret Agent Man sleeps. (Sometimes he'll entertain people at his residence, and then leave for his "secure, undisclosed location" at the same time his guests leave for unsecure, disclosed locations.) We are not allowed to know whom he talks to in the White House. We are not allowed to hear how he shapes our energy policy or our war plans. We may not even be allowed to cover his trip to the Middle East to prepare our allies for a campaign against Saddam.

Mr. Cheney does pop up for Sunday shows, fund-raisers and the occasional soiree. He played host at a book party at his house Monday night for his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who has come out with a paperback of an old novel about — what else? — shadowy political intrigue. Vice, as the president called him on Tom Brokaw's White House tour, stood under a blue painting in his red tie and gray suit, talking in a low voice out of the side of his mouth, which adds to the conspiratorial aura.

Outside, guests saw an ominous sign that read "Threat Condition Bravo."

The vice president does give up some information. He has been happy to fill in reporters on how amazing the Bush team was on 9/11 and after. And the Bush administration authorized the release to Congress of thousands of e-mails by Clinton officials, including ones sent to Al Gore.

But he prefers to operate under deep cover. The Bushes' attitude toward disclosure is embodied in Mr. Cheney: We know best. Leave it to us. In their view, the American public has been cleared for very little information about the American government.

In a speech Monday to roofing contractors, 41 grumbled about the national press, "which I now confess I hate."

And 43 spirited his Texas gubernatorial records — which would include contacts with Enron — into his father's presidential library, where reporters will have to wait months, or years, to get at them.

Just as Mr. Cheney thinks he is entitled to cook up our energy policy behind closed doors with his oil and gas buddies and Republican donors, His office had been considering treating Air Force Two like a corporate jet. Just wave goodbye to the White House press corps at Andrews and fly off to 10 Middle East countries for clandestine talks.

Should we be countering the Axis of Evil with the Axis of No Access? Should our leaders leave a free press at home when they go to talk to regimes that do not countenance a free press?

Aren't we supposed to be influencing the Saudis and other Middle Eastern countries in the direction of honesty and transparency? Instead, the vice president emulates his Saudi friends — operating with high-handed secrecy, plotting with cronies to develop a petrostate, and restricting the press — just as he did during Desert Storm.

Cheney staffers came up with numerous explanations why it may be difficult to take the press — all of them silly. They're not the president: they don't have two planes. They don't have the resources. They don't have the staff. They're going to a very insecure region.

On CNN last night, the conservative Bob Novak admitted the idea was unprecedented, but explained the Cheney-think.

"You do remember the Spiro Agnew and the Dan Quayle trips were circuses," he said. "Dick Cheney is going on a 10-day trip to the Middle East and his staff is considering whether they really want to take any press along. No members of the media whatsoever, to avoid all these made-up stories. . . . They may say, `Hey, this is a business trip.' "

But that is precisely the problem. The American government is not a business. And the vice president's diplomacy in the Middle East is not a business trip.

Dick Cheney may truly be the most powerful vice president in the history of the universe. Everything he does is the public's business.



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