Cheney's Chief of Staff, David Addington, is Cheney's Cheney

murray waas, on his blog "whatever already!" posts an excellent david ignatius profile of dick cheney's chief of staff...

i can't imagine what daily life in the west wing must be like with folks like addington, rove and cheney kicking around... it'd be like taking all the bad guys from a james bond movie, giving them steroids and letting them loose to fulfill their dream - rule the world...

Who is David Addington? The simple answer is that he's Vice President Cheney's former legal counsel and, since the indictment and resignation of Scooter Libby in October, Cheney's chief of staff. But behind the scenes, the polite but implacable Addington has been a chief advocate for the interrogation and surveillance policies that have created a legal crisis for the Bush administration.

Addington, 48, is in many ways Cheney's Cheney. Like his boss, he has exercised immense power without leaving many fingerprints.

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What drives Addington is a belief that the president's wartime powers are, essentially, unfettered...

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"It was very surprising if anyone took a position more conservative than David, and this was a very conservative office," recalls one former colleague. "He was the hardest of the hard-core."

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He pushed Justice's Office of Legal Counsel to prepare a 2002 memo authorizing harsh interrogation methods. When that memo was later withdrawn, Addington was furious.

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"David is a fight-to-the-end kind of a guy," says one former colleague. "If you made it clear that you opposed him, he'd go to war with you. David was not an adversary you would want."

Even people who describe themselves as friends of Addington believe that he has damaged President Bush politically by pressing anti-terrorism policies to the legal breaking point. And for many Republicans who bear scars from Addington, his story raises the ultimate question about the Bush White House: Who's in charge here?

two words come to mind... h-a-r-d a-s-s...

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