What Was in Cheney's Boxes?

And why was he carrying them? Outgoing Vice-President Dick Cheney witnessed the Inauguration in a wheelchair, after injuring his back moving boxes himself from his office to his home. It is routine, of course, for professional movers to do this work, not the Vice-President, particularly one who is aged with heart trouble. Certainly for all the legitimate material, professionals did the job.

But Cheney, more than any other member of the Bush administration, was implicated in many scandals involving the withholding of information from public disclosure, and therefore, it is logical to conclude he's decided to be the sole custodian of some of his most controversial documents.

It follows that he wouldn't want anyone but himself to touch those boxes of secret papers, so that no paper trail be created via the tagging systems used by government movers.

Think back. He refused to reveal who influenced his secret energy-policy work in Bush's first term. Later, he was deeply involved in the torture decisions, such as water-boarding, following 9/11. (Strangely, during a round of "farewell" press appearances, Cheney admitted this role, which now seems likely to help trigger war crimes investigations, and probably charges against him, at least overseas, if not domestic courts.)

But there was so much more. The volatile Valerie Plame scandal, where Cheney threw his loyal aide Scooter Libby to the wolves, although hand-written notes on key documents bore powerful evidence of Cheney's involvement. Prosecutors couldn't get Libby or others to "turn," thus in the end Cheney escaped the consequences for his illegal actions once again.

The enormous illegal surveillance effort undertaken not against terrorist suspects but against millions of law-abiding Americans is only now beginning to come to light. Cheney helped architect this, as well as other programs to blatantly violate Americans' civil liberties, in ways we will still be discovering for years to come.

The Obama administration has promised a new transparency, part of which, in my view, must include not only what our government does in the future but what it was doing these past eight years. This represents a delicate challenge for Obama, who clearly does not relish disrespecting political opponents or predecessors in office.

But to ignore the errors of the past is to risk repeating them. A good start would be to investigate what was in the boxes that strained Cheney's back. My educated guess, rooted in human psychology, is that those particular boxes have an important story to tell.

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