Cheney's Actions Exceed His Job Specs

From Slate, obvious but still interesting (and were in any one but Cheney, this would NOT be allowed):

Today's revelations in the New York Times about the Bush administration's internal debate over how to treat foreign detainees highlight the unprecedented role that Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff are playing in setting national security policy.

In the Constitution, the vice president is the nation's understudy. He is not supposed to be in the chain of command. Cheney knows this better than most: In 1989, when he was George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney slapped down Vice President Dan Quayle for calling a meeting of the National Security Council about a coup attempt in the Philippines while the president was out of the country.

Yet now the Office of the Vice President is dictating the rules by which the U.S. military interrogates and detains terrorist suspects. This is being done subtly. All the Office of the Vice President has to do is informally convey its opposition to complying with international law in this area, and any such effort is thwarted.

This is what happened to an attempt by some officials in the Department of Defense, along with the lawyers of all the armed services, to write a new directive on the treatment of detainees. Since the Bush administration began sending foreigners captured abroad to Guantanamo Bay in winter 2001, its refusal to afford them all the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions has been, to say the least, internationally contentious. Now the military and some Pentagon officials are increasingly aware that this refusal is making American troops vulnerable abroad by potentially provoking other countries to respond in kind. The current policy has also created confusion in the armed services among interrogators who were originally trained to follow Geneva and now don't know which standard to apply. The goal of the drafters of the new directive was to set clear standards that are consistent with international law and with the military's rules since 1949.