Dick Cheney’s CIA secrets

“Now what will Dick Cheney have to say?” said Cheryl Sullivan in The Christian Science Monitor. The “self-appointed defender-in-chief of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies” is back in the news amid reports that he directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress out of the loop on an eight-year-old, “still-unspecified CIA program,” which CIA Director Leon Panetta killed June 24, right after he learned of it.

Those charges against Dick Cheney are “political dynamite,” said the Las Vegas Sun in an editorial. By law, the CIA has to keep Congress’ intelligence committees informed of covert activities. The CIA is reviewing the situation, but Congress needs to investigate, too. “It is frightening to think of our government keeping Congress in the dark about its secret activities.”

And what exactly were these “nefarious” activities? said Sammy Benoit in Yid With Lid. According to The Wall Street Journal, all this “craziness” is over a never-implemented CIA program of “targeted assassinations and/or kidnapping al Qaida big shots with the intent of killing them.” That’s bad? I wish the CIA had acted on it. “The Democrats need to switch to decaf.”

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Even GOP lawmakers agree that Congress needs to be kept in the loop about CIA activities, said Yael Abouhalkah in the Kansas City Star. But while Republicans are accusing Democrats of “playing up this story” to protect House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who’s had “her own run-ins with the CIA,” it’s certainly “believable” that Cheney pushed the legal limits on secrecy. If so, that will “permanently damage his legacy as a patriotic American.”