No possibility that any Bush Administration official will be held to account?! No, Jane, that's not my view at all. So let me be a bit more clear. I believe that the accountability process will not go quickly. It will take its time. The facts will have to be developed carefully. Then, when the heat is gone from present political feelings, some cold assessments can be reached. Everything I have seen up to this point makes pretty clear that there was a formal policy, adopted at the top of the administration, to abuse prisoners. This policy also included some practices which are well understood as torture (waterboarding, hyperthermia, sleep deprivation over two days, long-time standing, the administration of psychotropic drugs), and indeed have long been called torture by the United States when used by other governments. This can't be allowed to pass without action, because that would open the door for use of these techniques with impunity for posterity--not just by the United States, but by the Sadaam Husseins and Kim Il-Jongs of future generations. If we look at the enforcement actions in Argentina, Chile and Peru, for instance, it took a decade or longer. By that point, the crimes were thoroughly exposed and documented, and no one viewed the prosecutions as destabilizing, or even as politically motivated. Time addressed the "political retaliation" argument.

The United States needs to travel a similar path to clear its own name and to uphold the rules. But it's not a process that will mean prosecutions that get underway in the spring of 2009. It could take another five years or perhaps even 10, and in fact it might work far better if time is allowed to flow before the prosecutions come. I'll have a major piece setting out a proposal for how to deal with this in one of the next issues of Harper's.

The major issue hanging out there, of course, is a Bush pardon. In our system, the president's pardon power is almost unlimited, and presidents have in the past issued mass preemptive pardons--Andrew Johnson's pardon of Southerners, for instance, or Jimmy Carter's pardon of Vietnam war draft dodgers and resisters. I think the odds that Bush will pardon those who were involved in policy making behind his "program" are pretty good. If he does this, that would make it very difficult to proceed with prosecutions. But the public should still learn exactly what was done that led Bush to grant pardons.

I think there is no doubt that Dick Cheney has been the most powerful vice president in the nation's history. Jane documented that very well in The Dark Side. And we have Barton Gellman's new book Angler that covers several other angles. The key to Cheney's extraordinary power is hard to pinpoint. He understands the power of working quietly, behind the scenes. Of sitting through a meeting with the president and his advisors and saying nothing, and then privately offering the decisive input in the end. Of claiming presidential authorization he didn't really have--as Gellman documents in the case of the 9/11 shoot-down order. He knows how to influence decisions at the mid-management level by placing his people in key second or third echelon positions to influence policy. And as Dick Armey has recently shown, Cheney was a master in intimidation and in the use of bold lies to pressure an adversary (Gellman's recounting of the Cheney-Armey meeting on the eve of the Iraq invasion is one of the most dramatic tales of Washington power wielding I've ever read).

But will Cheney's term be viewed as successful? If the measure of "success" is gaming the system, perhaps the answer is yes. But I don't think he's going to get kind marks on many of his initiatives from the Bush 43 presidency. I continually hear Cheney being compared very unfavorably with a different person--Dick Cheney, the former Secretary of Defense. He was a savvy, cautious fellow. The later Dick Cheney has been a compulsive risk-taker, with nearly catastrophic consequences.

And will the tradition of the "strong vice presidency" à la Cheney continue? I think not. The role of vice president is shaped by the successive vice presidents and their senior partner. Cheney had a president who was out of his depth in many areas and leaned heavily on Cheney. Whether the next occupant is Obama or McCain, that's not going to be repeated.