Dick Cheney Heart Transplant: Former Vice President Recovering After Undergoing Surgery

On NPR, host TerryGross asked investigative journalist SeymourHersh if, as he continues to investigate the BushAdministration, “more people” were “coming forward” to talk to him now that “the president and vp are no longer in power.” Hersh replied that though “a lot of people that had told me in the last year of Bush, ‘call me next, next February,’ not many people had talked to him. He implied that they were still scared of Cheney.

“Are you saying that you think VicePresidentCheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward,” asked Gross. “I’ll make it worse,” answered Hersh, adding that he believes Cheney “put people back” in government to “stay behind” in order to “tell him what’s going on” and perhaps even “do sabotage”:

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.

The idea that Cheney would seed the government with trusted contacts isn't surprising. As Hersh noted, Cheney has “been around forever” and “understands bureaucracy much better” than almost anyone in government. In 2006, RobertDreyfuss reported for The AmericanProspect that when Cheney helped staff the BushAdministration in 2001, he put together a “corps of hard-line acolytes” that served “as his eyes and ears” in the federal bureaucracy. Former officials called them “DickCheney’s spies.”

Additionally, before leaving office, the BushAdministration aggressively placed political appointees into permanent civil service positions as part of a process known as “burrowing.” Some of the burrowed former political appointees have close ties to Cheney.

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