There’s a long excerpt from Barton Gellman’s new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, in this morning’s Washington Post. The excerpt further fleshes out the details of the NSA program to do warrantless electronic surveillance on U.S. citizens in violation of the law. Here are a couple of highlights. Cheney lied to Congress:

Cheney, who chaired briefings for select members of Congress, said repeatedly that the NSA’s top law and ethics officers — career public servants — approved and supervised the surveillance program.

That was not exactly true, not without one of those silent asterisks that secretly flip a sentence on its tail.

In fact, the NSA lawyers initiated the process that led to the Justice Department decertifying the program.

The ‘certifying documents’ that technically authorized the warrantless surveillance program were held in a vault in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB), controlled by Cheney’s lawyer David Addington.

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had “no idea,” he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.

The vice-president wanted to do warrantless domestic surveillance even when all parties were domestic.

The NSA chief [Michael Hayden] insisted on limiting surveillance to e-mails, phone calls and faxes in which one party was overseas, deflecting arguments from Cheney and Addington that he could just as well collect communications inside the United States.

That was one reason Hayden hated when reporters referred to “domestic surveillance.” He made his point with a folksy analogy: He had taken “literally hundreds of domestic flights,” he said, and never “landed in Waziristan.” That sounded good. But the surveillance statutes said a warrant was required if either end of the conversation was in U.S. territory. The American side of the program — the domestic surveillance — was its distinguishing feature.

You’ll also learn that the President’s chief of staff Andy Card, the Deputy National Secuity Chief Stephen Hadley, the Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge, and the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism Frances Fragos Townsend were not read into the program. Lawyers at the Justice Department, CIA, and the NSA had more knowledge about a massive illegal domestic surveillance program than the top levels of our national security apparatus.