"On direct orders" from Dick Cheney

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.
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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.”
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Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.
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Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.

It looks as though Cheney can't be hung on the basis of these findings, reported in the New York Times. 

But it also looks as though Obama's Justice Department may defy the White House and investigate the use of torture by the Bush administration, according to the Washington Post.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking
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Holder's decision could come within weeks, around the same time the Justice Department releases an ethics report about Bush lawyers who drafted memos supporting harsh interrogation practices, the sources said. The legal documents spell out in sometimes painstaking detail how interrogators were allowed to subject detainees to simulated drowning, sleep deprivation, wall slamming and confinement in small, dark spaces.

Any criminal inquiry could face challenges, including potent legal defenses by CIA employees who could argue that attorneys in the Bush Justice Department authorized a wide range of harsh conduct. But the sources said an inquiry would apply only to activities by interrogators, working in bad faith, that fell outside the "four corners" of the legal memos. Some incidents that might go beyond interrogation techniques that were permitted involve detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are described in the secret 2004 CIA inspector general report, set for release Aug. 31.

In many respects, it is right and proper that the attorney general should hold the key to further investigations.  It's also true that American administrations don't investigate each other. For Obama to take the lead in investigation the Bush administration appears to be out of the question.  But Eric Holder can do it and should do it.  It looks as though he may well push ahead.

Laura Rozen speculates [with great intelligence, no pun intended] that the CIA program we're not supposed to know about in fact involves kind of post-9/11 CIA raids on European targets without the knowledge of or permission of European governments.  (The move on the part of Italian judges to prosecute an entire group of CIA agents in Italy may bear this out.)

Marcy Wheeler's beady eyes pick up a line in George Tenet's memoir which suggests the Bush administration deliberately included Republican Intelligence chair, Porter Goss, in meetings and excluded Bob Graham -- or Nancy Pelosi or Jane Harmon.  That's a big no-no.

...What was Porter Goss doing at a meeting with the National Security Advisor, the Deputy National Security Advisor, Cheney's henchman, and the UK's chief spook? Was he representing "the temperature" of those in Congress on a potential Iraq war? Or was he participating in the Administration's early planning for that war?

I raise that question because of all the recent discussions about CIA briefings of Congress. This meeting occurred, of course, just as the Administration was implementing its torture program for Abu Zubaydah. CIA originally claimed that Bob Graham had been briefed on torture, twice, the previous month (April 2002). I have long suspected that Goss--the guy who would later have at least a tangential role in the destruction of the torture tapes that portrayed CIA torturing Abu Zubaydah before the Administration got formal approval from OLC--was "briefed" on torture in the April time frame, and that that was part of the Administration's CYA for torturing without Congressional approval.

Comments

[russ]

Poor lying little democrats. Bunch of crap! Hayden says they were informed and now nancy can't remember it - think I believe Hayden!

[PW]

I think a lot of Republicans would like to believe this is all about Pelosi. Wait and see.