who does Cheney think he is?

[Annie]

Interesting find:

http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2007/06/does-cheney-hav.html

Snippet:

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Executive Order 12958 (dated April 17, 1995), as extensively amended in Executive Order 13292 (dated March 25, 2003), is the relevant document (also reprinted here with some typos but with handy internal hyperlink cross-references). Section 5.2(a) of this executive order created "within the National Archives an Information Security Oversight Office." Section 5.2(b)(4) gives the ISOO's Director "authority to conduct on-site reviews of each agency's program established under this order, and to require of each agency those reports, information, and other cooperation that may be necessary to fulfill its responsibilities."

(I need a hard-core Beltway insider to tell me if the acronym for this office within the National Archives is commonly pronounced "Is SO!" That would be kinda cool, I guess.)

The ISOO Director implemented this executive order through a formal set of regulations that were published under authority of the order and subject to all of its limitations and restrictions. The pertinent regulation appears at 32 C.F.R. § 2001.80, and it says: "Each agency that creates or handles classified information shall report annually to the Director of ISOO statistics related to its security classification program." (It also goes on to say that the Director gets to specify the form and timing of the report.)

At first blush, neither the Vice President himself nor his staff would seem to be "agencies." But — as always with these pesky Washington lawyers! — whoever wrote this executive order had a special meaning for that word, and they gave it a peculiar definition in section 6.01(b) of the order:

"Agency" means any "Executive agency," as defined in 5 U.S.C. § 105; any "Military department" as defined in 5 U.S.C. § 102; and any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information.​

Thus, the specific question raised by ISOO Director's letter to Attorney General Gonzales on January 9, 2007 — the source of the current argument — was "whether the Office of the Vice President of the United States ('OVP') is an 'agency' as defined in § 6.1(b) of the Order."

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