Jane, no one could ever accuse you of skirting the big questions. I'm a different story. I'll leave your second question to others and take up your first:

...Vice President Cheney, from whose office most of these policies appear to have sprung, will be seen by history as not just the most powerful vice president in America, but, also the most successful?

Here I draw both on your book and Bart Gellman's new Angler, which makes an excellent supplement to The Dark Side. (And, if I can be a jerk for a moment, this piece, too.) The most obvious argument against Cheney is that the ends to which he applied the power he husbanded were disastrous: most clearly, a war that was manifestly against the national interest.

But Cheney's myopia didn't end with his policy goals. He saw hoarding power as its own aim. Remember that Jack Goldsmith, Pat Philbin and James Comey didn't want to end the constellation of domestic surveillance activities now euphemistically referred to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. They wanted to bring it in line with the law. (As -- to reference Scott's point -- did Jane Harman; leave aside for a moment whether such a thing could in fact be brought in line with the Fourth Amendment.) But Addington, on behalf of Cheney, rejected such remedies entirely, believing them to infringe on the supremacy of the executive. Clearly that, and not the destruction of al-Qaeda, was the first-order concern in the Office of the Vice President.

The result is rather plain to see. Cheney came to office famously trapped in 1975, when Congress took away a number of pre-Watergate presidential powers. He either didn't notice or didn't appreciate the steady resurgence of executive authority during the Reagan-through-Clinton years. And now he leaves office having discredited, through example, the idea of unfettered executive supremacy. Jack Goldsmith, remember, was a unitary-executive guy; Cheney showed him what happens when the extremes of a theory become the standard operating procedures of governance. It would be too much to say we're returning to a post-Watergate moment, as, it seems, the five of us established in the last exchange. But the CIA feels that it was ordered to go way too far during the Bush era and is at risk of footing the bill from a future administration. That's precisely the arrangement that worried Cheney after his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This time it's his own fault.

Last thing. Do you guys remember in September 2002, when Mike Hayden -- then the NSA director and now chief of the CIA -- testified before the joint House-Senate 9/11 inquiry? He said something that really resonated:

What I really need you to do is to talk to your constituents and find out where the American people want that line between security and liberty to be.

In the context of NSA's mission, where do we draw the line between the government's need for [counterterrorism] information about people in the United States and the privacy interests of people located in the United States? Practically speaking, this line-drawing affects the focus of NSA's activities (foreign versus domestic), the standard under which surveillances are conducted (probable cause versus reasonable suspicion, for example), the type of data NSA is permitted to collect and how, and the rules under which NSA retains and disseminates information about U.S. persons.

These are serious issues that the country addressed, and resolved to its satisfaction, once before in the mid-1970's. In light of the events of September 11th, it is appropriate that we, as a country, readdress them.

What we didn't know -- what we couldn't have known -- at the time was that Hayden was effectively ordered by Cheney to readdress those rules entirely in secret, preempting any such actual debate, and ensuring that rather than reaching a stable and reasonable and enduring consensus about the liberty-security boundary, we would pinball between over and under-reactions. It's probably too much to believe -- Hayden was by all accounts a willing participant in the illegal spying -- but it's easy to wonder, at least, if he was actually directing his plea to Dick Cheney.