they believe that a president could do as he liked even if congress, even if the supreme court said he couldn't. >> for three decades, vice president dick cheney led a secretive and bitter behind- + presidential power. >> he believes that the president should have the final word, indeed the only word, on all matters within the executive branch. >> after 9/11, there were enhanced presidential powers to detain, render, interrogate,j]y wiretap.g@ >> mr. president, it is time to have some checks and balances in this country! >> it's a direct showdown constitutionally between the president and congress. >> the latest clash is over secret justice department findings authorizing the cia to engage in the harshest interrogation techniques ever. >> mr. president, we are a democracy! >> frontline goes inside the efforts to rewrite the rules to enhance the power of the presidency. tonight, "cheney's law." >> in washington, there are so many people who will say, "he's not the same man as i used to know." >> there's a lot of speculation among his friends-- "did he change? did i change? what happened here? why do we see the world so differently when we once saw it so similarly?" >> cheney is regarded as a pretty reasonable, evenhanded, yes, conservative, but somebody you can work with. what people miss is that he's an absolute fanatic about executive power. >> i, richard bruce cheney, do solemnly swear that i will support and defend the constitution of the united states against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help me god. >> congratulations. ( "hail to the chief" plays ) >> right around inauguration day, dan quayle went to see dick cheney and he said, "you know, dick, you're going to be doing a lot of traveling, going to a lot of funerals, lot of fundraisers. rere going to be doing the things that presidents don't want to do and that your president doesn't want to do." and cheney just looked at him with that little half grin and raised his eyebrow and said, "i have a different understanding with the president." >> narrator: the "understanding" was that the vice president would be the central player in the new administration and do everything he could to enhance presidential power. >> they came in, spurred by dick cheney, to have an enlarged sense of the presidency, to have a penchant for secrecy, to basically have a view that the congress, in effect, "works for us, not with us; that we're the lead branch, not a coequal branch." >> narrator: and from the beginning, the vice presiden set the style: secrecy. >> vice president cheney is an extremely secretive public official. he himself doesn't write things down, doesn't use email, because he doesn't want to even raise the possibility his actions could someday be exposed, which g@would then constrain what he wants to do now. >> executive privilege was also an issue in the vice president's energy task force... >> narrator: through the years, cheney's penchant for secrecy would cloak bold assertions of executive power and broad claims of executive privilege in an ongoing war with congress. >> ...tries to get testimony from white house advisor... >> narrator: cheney had learned some hard lessons early in his political career. >> they are now boarding the helicopter, walking... >> narrator: he has been watching presidents for three decades. >> the president now at the door, a final wave... >> narratot t began at the end of the nixon administration. >> tell us how and when did you first meet president nixon. >> narrator: 33-year-old dick cheney saw it firsthand. >> he viewed the searing moments of the nixon administration, which he was there in the front seats for, as a diminution of what the president ought to be. >> narrator: then, in 1975, he became president ford's chief of staff. >> dick cheney was in about his mid-30s, for the first time in his life really having a substantial amount of power and responsibility. >> the subcommittee will come to order... >> narrator: cheney watched congress assert its authority over the president. >> you have a wave of congressional investigations... >> the program certainly appears to violate the fourth amendment to the constitution... >> ...and cheney is trying to fight off these investigations. >> he's talked about how congress unduly burdened the president and in a way that he believed was unconstitutional. >> and dick came out of that absolutely committed to the idea of restoring the powers of the presidency. >> narrator: then, in the 1980s, cheney went to congress. >> we have a bit of a tendency in the congress to act as if we are the fount of all political virtue in this society, and obviously we're not. >> narrator: he found himself surrounded by democrats determined to limit ronald reagan's powers. >> admit to a certain amount of ambivalence to all of these proceedings. >> narrator: cheney said reagan didn't need congress' approval to fund the contras through a back door. >> i think it was perfectly acceptable for the president to encourage the cause of the contras. >> narrator: at that time, cheney met david addington, one of the few staff lawyers who shared his views on executive power. >> david addington is an extremely intelligent, extremely forceful individual. >> he first entered the government in, i believe, the late '70s, when he worked as a lawyer in the c.i.a. >> he has very fmly held views, and very well-grounded views, on a lot of issues. >> you know, cheney is not a lawyer, so what he finds in addington is someone who can argue it in a way that can hold sway in the room. i mean, he's got a lawyer now who can say it's constitutional. and so it becomes a very powerful duo at that point. and they've stayed together ever since. >> narrator: together, cheney and addington brought their ideas to the defense department in the first bush administration. >> this wg@nonot stand, this aggression against kuwait. >> narrator: as secretary of defense, cheney argued the president should not seek congressional authorization for the gulf war. >> the leadership in congress generally was telling the first g@esident bush, "you have to get permission from congress to go into the gulf war." the president didn't think that was the case. he resisted it. >> i argued that we did not need congressional authorization, and that legally, and from a constitutional standpoint, we had all the authority we needed. >> secretary of defense cheney's advice was that it was unnecessary and imprudent-- unnecessary because the constitution did not require it, imprudent because congress might say no. >> if we'd lost the vote in the congress, i would certainly have recommended to the president we go forward anyway. >> narrator: in the end, cheney's view did not prevail. the president agreed to a congressional vote. >> on this vote, the yeas are 52 and the nays are 47. ( gavel banging ) >> narrator: as the first bush administration ended, cheney and addington headed to the private sector. they waited for a future president, one more receptive to their ideas. >> david addington, dick cheney, are true believers in what they are saying. they not only believe that the president has these powers, that the president has effectively unlimited powers as commander- in-chief, but that he has to; that if he doesn't that this country will be at grave risk. >> i believe you're looking at the next vice president of the unittatates. >> narrator: eight years later, dick cheney found a willing partner. >> i think it's something the president has bought into. did cheney help to persuade him? absolutely. but is the president now persuaded? absolutely. and i think he's now a devotee of expanded executive power. >> narrator: the new president brought some of his own people to the task. one of them was his top lawyer, alberto gonzales. >> bush calls him fredo. he's intensely loyal. he was a justice on the texas courts. he'd actually ruled favorably on several important cases for bush. >> they all like him. he's the judge. they call him the judge inside the white house. he's a nice fellow, but he's not exactly a heavyweight. >> narrator: gonzales had virtually no experience in matters of constitutional law, executive power or national security. but david addington did, and he was the vice preside's lawyer. >> david addington was someone who had experience in all of the matters that gonzales initially did not have experience in. >> i think it's fair to say that... that cheney's lawyer, addington, dominated bush's lawyer, alberto gonzales. >> in other presidencies that i've covered, anyway, most of the center of the action is in the president's office. it's in the oval office or maybe even the white house counsel's but the strange thing about this administration is all of the most crucial decisions seem to be taking place in the vice president's office, or even the vice president's counsel's office. >> narrator: but then, something happened that even they could not have imagined: september 11. ( telephone rings ) >> police operator. what is the emergency? >> help! >> fire department. >> this is another call in regards to the world trade center. >> oh, my god! >> it looks like a second plane has just hit... >> ...just exploded... >> i think 9/11 is a moment of preparation meeting opportunity. >> i'm going to die, aren't i? >> ma'am, say your prayers. >> after 9/11, essentially, you know, it's a whole 'nother world. >> narrator: the secret service took the vice president to a secure room deep under the white house. meanwhile, the rest of the staff was hurriedly evacuated. one of them was david addington. >> david addington was evacuated. so, he started walking home, out to cross into virginia when his cell phone finally starts working again. he gets a call from the white house and the message is, "turn around, come back, the vice president needs you." >> this is not the place to be unless you have to be here. >> narrator: addington walked back to the white house and the secretervice took him down to the bunker. >> what cheney does at that moment is say that we will probably have to be a country ruled by men rather than laws in this period. >> so, on the very morning of 9/11, dick cheney is turning to his lawyer and saying, "what extraordinary powers is the president going to need to meet this threat?" ( phone ringing ) >> white house. >> narrator: they wanted to gather as much power for the president as possible. they would need the legal backing of the justice department. the first calls were critical. >> the meetings and conferences werenitially done by video phone that each of the, you know, national security agencies have the capability to link to each other at these locations by high-speed communication networks. >> narrator: john yoo, a 3 year-old lawyer, was on emergency duty at justice. he had earned his conservative credentials as a clerk for supreme court justice clarence thomas and at the federalist society. >> even before i had gotten to the justice department, i had read every previous authorization ever written by congress in wartime and every declaration of war. that's sort of my field. >> narrator: the white house needed john yoo to authorize emergency presidential powers. >> i did have the feeling that we were going to start... we're entering uncharted territory. >> john yoo very quickly begins to be the go-to guy at justice who is willing to say yes to everything that the vice president and addington are asking him to do. >> he had views about legal issues that they found congenial. and he was very, very knowledgeable and he was very fast. so, i think he was a very important player. >> narrator: john yoo worked in one of justice's most powerful departments, the office of legal counsel-- the o.l.c. >> o.l.c., the office of legalg@ counsel, is the most important government office you've never heard of. >> people who've headed that office in the past have gone on to be on the supreme court-- justice rehnquist, justice scalia. >> it is a tiny little sort of mini-supreme court that passes legal judgment on whatever the administration wants to do. >> narrator: at the o.l.c., john yoo, with the input of addington and the white house counsel's office, drafted his first piece of legislation. t't's an extremely broad statute. it says use all necessary means to stop future terrorist attacks and to find those responsible for the past attacks. >> narrator: on friday, september 14, with john yoo's proposed legislation in hand, the administration reluctantly made a political gesture. they asked congress to approve the measure. >> the white house tries at some point to see if they can get congress to go along with giving them complete power to wage the war on terror globally against anybody that they deem to be a terrorist. >> and the key area that they want is that the president can use wartime authority-- very, very broadly constructed-- in the united states. >> narrator: but the democrats weren't disposed to grant such sweeping presidential authority, and they controlled the senate. >> the congress had experienced, going back to the gulf of tonkin resolution, a series of yielding power that made them a little bit chastened about how far they wanted to go. >> they saw it as completely unchecked authority for the president to use military force anywhere in the world. >> and congress rejects is and says, "no, we're not going to go quite that far." >> narrator: it was exactly what cheney and addington feared-- congress limiting the president. >> and so, cheney and addington and others sit down after that and say, "we shouldn't have to go to them. we're in a state of emergency. we need to do what's needed." >> the white house then secretly asked the justice department for another legal memo. >> narrator: that day, at the justice department, john yoo went to work. >> the justice department had long thought congress cannot limit the commander-in-chief power, that congress cannot tell the president how to exercise his judgment as commander-in- chief. >> narrator: the secret memo was officially signed by john yoo 11 days later. >> the president has broad constitutional power to take military force. >> the laws, as they were written, and the constitution that we have gives the president a lot of power in wartime. the president is the commander- in-chief. >> these decisions, under our constitution, e for the president alone to make. >> the truly remarkable thing about the opinion, it went beyond the idea that the president didn't need congress' authorization and said that there was nothing the congress could do to stop the president from doing these things. that was the remarkable part of the opinion. >> so, what congress took away, the justice department gave. >> narrator: the president was told he now had the authority to use virtually any means necessary anywhere, against any enemy, as long as the nation was at war. >> if you were president of the united states, i think you personally would want to make certain that you had done everything you could to prevent another catastrophic act of terrorism. >> this act will not stand. we will find those who did it. we will smoke them out of their holes. >> within days of 9/11, it became clear to insiders that there was going to be war in afghanistan. and pretty soon, people started asking themselves, "what are we going to do with all the people we start picking up on the battlefield?" >> narrator: the problem fell to alberto gonzales, who handed it off to an official at the state department. >> a week after september 11, i was in the white house meeting with then the white house counsel, alberto gonzales, and david addington. >> narrator: pierre-richard prosper was colin powell's war crimes ambassador. >> and because of my background, having been a war crimes prosecutor in rwanda and having dealt with these issues, it was decided that i would lead an interagency group to look at this question. >> narrator: prosper brought almost two dozen lawyers from around the government to the state department. >> it's going to meet on the seventh floor of the state department, around the corner from colin powell's office. and they are going to come up with a recommendation for the president about how to hdle these prisoners. >> i put the problem on the table. how are we going to deal with them? how can we prosecute them? what can we prosecute them for? and, ultimately, where will they be detained? ( sirens blaring ) >> narrator: but in the white house, at the same time, david addington was initiating a secret process. >> they knew exactly where they wanted to go. they had let the state department group go and do its study and ponder all these great things, but they decided to, on their own, in the back rooms, make the decisions on their own. >> cheney wants suspected terrorists, enemies of the united states, to be held as far as possible from civilian courts and as far as possible from thicrule books and precedents under the uniform code of military justice. >> narrator: ambassador prosper's group handed in their report. but while they waited, cheney and addington quietly acted on their own plan. first, they got the o.l.c. to sign off on a presidential order. then, they would outmaneuver others in the administration. >> addington and yoo discuss how they're going to create a military commission. almost no one else is consulted. and addington drafts a four-page text. >> narrator: at their weekly lunch on november 13, in a small dining room just off the oval office, the vice president delivered addington's four-page document to the president. >> we know from witnesses that cheney walks in the room with a document. we know he carries it back out with him afterward. we know that it then changes hands four times around the west wing of the white house. >> narrator: within an hour, the document was ready for the president's signature. >> what i remember is standing in the staff secretary's office in the west wing with stuart bowen, with final copies of the military order for the president to sign, and being aware that he was about to leave the west wing for some trip. in fact, i think we could hear the helicopter landing on the lawn as we approached the oval office. >> and bowen says, "that's not the way it works around here. the way it works around here is that every single person with the rank of assistant to the president, every one of them gets to look at this thing first, make their comments, sign off, then it goes to the president." bowen gets told, "this can't wait, this is urgent. this is secret. the president's waiting for it. he already knows it's coming." >> the people involved in this did not want to wait for the president to get back from whatever one- or two-day trip he was going on. they felt it was important that the authority to create these commissions exist immediately. and so stuart and i went into the oval office, brought the order to the president. he quickly reviewed it and put his signature on it and then headed off down the hallway with andy card and a couple of others to get on the helicopter. >> president bush has signed an order approving the use of a special military tribunal. >> ...and it was only the latest of a series of dramatic changes... >> the white house is defending... >> it's really to end-run this process. they don't even tell the lawyer for the national security staff, john bellinger. he finds out about it after the document. and bellinger comes bursting into gonzales' office saying, "what is this? i mean, you didn't even tell me about an essential document of the... that's really going to govern national security strategy after 9/11." >> president bush signed an order to allow special military tribunals to try... >> the news breaks on cable television. colin powell happens to be watching. he's astonished by what he's just seen. he picks up the phone to prosper and says, "what the hell just happened?" >> we did hav