On Friday I wrote about how CIA Director Leon E. Panetta learned on June 23, 2009 (4 months after taking the agency's helm) of a secret intelligence program that had been hidden from Congress for 8 years. http://www.dailykos.com/... He immediately canceled the initiative--that's how serious it is--and briefed the two intelligence committees the next day in closed-door meetings.
In Friday's diary, I asked: Who ordered the program? Where did the money come from? Who gave the order not to inform Congress?
The answer to the third question, courtesy of The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/... and the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/...: Dick Cheney.
Can we please prosecute now??
Granted, we still don't know what the classified CIA program is, other than an on-again, off-again attempt, formulated in the hours after 9/11, to create a new intelligence capability related to the collection of information on suspected terrorists. Congress has been told it does not have to do with torture or warrantless wiretapping.
But if the program was a covert action (a particularly secret category in which the United States' role is hidden), the amended National Security Act of 1947 requires a presidential finding and a report to Congress. 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.
Instead, the super-secret program--too secret to even tell congressional leaders--was designated under a lesser secrecy category, "classified," in order to avoid oversight.
Prosecute Dick "Secrecy" Cheney for ordering the CIA to withhold this information from Congress. For covert action programs, the National Security Act allows briefings to be limited to the "Gang of Eight,"--the Deomocratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the heads of their intelligence committees. But even select Members of Congress designated to receive such information were not briefed and only learned of it on June 24.
Even Panetta, who has consistently stood with CIA officers in a longstanding dispute with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over a similar allegation (namely, that CIA officials intentionally misled her in 2002 about their interrogations of terrorist suspects), immediately ended the program upon learning of it.
The CIA's truthfulness in congressional briefings has been criticized since its inception. The intelligence oversight committees were created in the '70s after revelations of CIA assassination programs, mind-control attempts, and the like. But when you get CIA misleading, coupled with Cheney secrecy, it's a recipe for destroying the Constitution. The National Security Act needs to be changed to mandate that the full intelligence committees be briefed on a wider array of matters, something, incidentally, President Barack "Transparency" Obama, has threatened to veto.
