The current on-line edition of Slate discusses Dick Cheney's methods:

Cheney's Rules of Evidence
How the vice president argues by deception.

By John Dickerson
Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2005, at 6:12 PM ET


By talking about "irresponsible comments," Cheney makes it seem that critics are welcoming insurgent bombs or inviting Saddam Hussein for dinner. But how outlandish, in fact, are these "irresponsible" claims by those who voted to authorize force? The most incendiary quote the administration and GOP committees can offer comes from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: "[T]he administration engaged in a pattern of manipulation of the facts … as it made its case for attacking, for invading Iraq." Reid's charge is debatable, but it's hardly the combustible, irresponsible speech Cheney suggests it is. Cheney is setting the bar for irresponsibility so low that any questions about prewar intelligence can be dismissed.

Cheney: "These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions."

Cheney talks only about a narrow question: Did the administration fudge evidence it gave to Congress in advance of the vote to authorize the use of force? That's the most solid ground he can stand on, but even it's still shaky. Cheney does not repeat Bush's claim that members of Congress had access to the same intelligence, because they didn't. But he plays up their unprecedented access to the National Intelligence Estimate before they cast their vote—though Cheney knows that some important caveats were left out of that report. Congress had access to intelligence before bombs started dropping, but the administration decided, in the end, how much and what kind of intelligence that was.

And what the vice president doesn't talk about is all the other ways he, the president, and other members of the war council manipulated evidence in hundreds of speeches and interviews leading up to the war. Cheney, for example, insisted there might be a link between Iraq and the attacks on 9/11 after the administration's official position was that there was no such link. He presented the direst view of Iraq's nuclear program without discussing dissent within the administration about those claims. This was not intelligence data, but these claims were critical to shaping public opinion and putting pressure on Congress to vote for war. He could make a case about why the administration had to be aggressive, but he doesn't. (snip)