Did Cheney Order The CIA To Hide A Top Secret Program From Congress
If he did there are no excuses for it. The President is not king. I recognize that there are, at times, reasons for the government to keep national security details out of the public light. But there is no excuse to evade the checks and balances built into our government.
All that being said, this seems rather suspiciously timed as the Democrats launch a war on the CIA and the Bush administration to distract from their duplicity on the water boarding issue. Specifically Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lies on the matter.
The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.
The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.
Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.
Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.
The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.
The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.” But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”
It could well be that the Bush administration did nothing wrong, and that this is just the latest attempt by the liberals to muddy the waters on what they made into a high-profile issue (waterboarding) that suddenly backfired on them when it became clear that many of them had been less than honest with the public about it.
We’ll see how this shakes out, but given the political environment these revelations from anonymous sources are being made in it would be foolish for anyone to jump to conclusions. Especially when it’s reported in the New York Times.
