It is clear Dick Cheney directed efforts to misleed Congress while vp. It is time for him to be prosecuted for his criminal conduct during the Bush years. If the Obama administration does not bring Cheney to justice they will betraying the American people; President Obama will be violating his oath of office.
Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney gave direct orders to the CIA to conceal an intelligence programme from Congress, US media reports say.
The existence of the programme, set up after 9/11, was hidden for eight years and even now its nature is not known.
CIA director Leon Panetta is said to have abandoned the project when he learnt of it last month.
He has now told a House committee that Mr Cheney was behind the secrecy, the unnamed US sources say.
There has been no comment from Mr Cheney.
War of words
The claims come amid an increasingly bitter row between the CIA and Congress over whether key information was withheld about other aspects of the agency's operations.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed that the CIA misled her about interrogation methods including waterboarding, while other senior Democrats have quoted Mr Panetta as admitting that his agency regularly misled Congress before he took office.
This has Watergate written all over it:
So what are the "significant actions" that these seven lawmakers insist were kept from Congress? Another theory being bandied about concerns an "executive assassination ring" that was allegedly set up and answered to former Vice President Dick Cheney. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, building off earlier reporting from the New York Times, dropped news of the possibility that such a ring existed in a March 2009 discussion sponsored by the University of Minnesota.
"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...
"Congress has no oversight of it," he added. "It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths. Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."
Asked if this was the basis of her letter to Panetta, Eshoo said she could not discuss what was a "highly classified program." She did, however, note that when Panetta told House Intelligence Committee members what it was that had been kept secret, "the whole committee was stunned, even Republicans." A Republican committee member told Who Runs Gov's Greg Sargent it was something they hadn't heard before.
Why wasn't something done or said about years ago? Where was the press in all this? Where were the Democrats? We knew about Cheney in 2004:
Vice President Cheney was aware of a meeting held by his staff that started a chain of events that ended with the "effective betrayal of our country," former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson charged Thursday in an interview with USA TODAY.
That betrayal was the revealing of his wife's identity as an undercover CIA operative, said Wilson, who served in diplomatic or White House posts in the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration before leaving government service in 1998.
Wilson did not accuse Cheney of leaking his wife's identity or of knowing about the leak before it was made. But he said Cheney had to have known that his staff was investigating Wilson in a probe that led to the discovery of his wife's job.
Knowingly revealing a CIA operative's name is a federal offense. Last July's leak of the name and CIA status of Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, mushroomed into a red-hot controversy by fall. The leak is being investigated by the Justice Department. Columnist Robert Novak, who first reported the news about Plame, has said his original source was "two senior administration officials."
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