Charlie Savage Takeover Summary

Charlie Savage’s Takeover analyzed several questions of the Bush-Cheney Administration. These questions examined more on the Cheney side of President Bush’s presidency. As such, in Takeover, Charlie Savage contends that Vice President Cheney assumed unprecedented and illegal powers to change laws and shape American Foreign Policy. Savage contends that Cheney played a pivotal role (an illegal one) in the “run-up” to the Iraqi War. Savage argued that Cheney’s concern with executive power began with the Watergate Scandal, when the scandal wrongly reduced the power of the presidency. Cheney; therefore, made it his life’s work to reverse that process and to restore the executive branch to its “proper constitutional power.” To that, it became Cheney’s

This program meant that the presidency had begun to ignore law. For Savage, Bush and Cheney’s authorization to ignore law, “was no different in principle between the warrant law and any other law that regulates how the president can carry out his national security responsibilities.” Furthermore, Savage claims, that this act “locked down the president’s power to arrest U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and imprison them in a military brig without trial if he or she thinks they pose a terror threat.” What Savage argues is that Bush through Cheney’s “signed statements” did not need to seek congressional approval, but as president could enact in any manner that he, as president, deemed necessary in order to protect the

However it was Cheney’s actions of signed statements and warrantless surveillance that made Americans question the Bush Presidency and the Iraqi War. Through the data mining of surveillance, the Bush-Cheney Administration was able to collect and apply the messages and emails as distant, unconnected evidence to illegal detain Americans. This is a critical step for it opened the door for scrutiny into why the United States went to war in the beginning. The Bush Administration argued that it had intelligence that there were weapons of mass distraction in Iraq. However, this intelligence never definitively proved the claim. In fact, “The Whole Truth about Iraq” made the claim that intelligence is a means to get you out of war or even to avoid war – not to get you into war, as the Bush Administration used it. The argument is that there was no “true” intelligence – no “true”