I noticed that the investigation or should I say possible investigation of Dick Cheney has been scrubbed from the news in less than 24 hours. Nothing on yahoo, google or cnn websites today. I have a bit of a theory about all of this. While Cheney was in office he was able to claim executive privelage thereby blocking any investigation. And this little transgression was so well hidden that even the head of the CIA at the time was not informed or so we are led to believe. That may or may not come out.
Note that when Cheney left office he was busy on the airwaves for weeks on end trying to justify everything his administration did. I'm sure at that time he was going through and destroying any documents that would link him to the crimes. Remember there's more than just the witholding of information from congress here. There was the outing of Valerie Plame that came from his office. There's the torture memos that I'm sure were directed by him. There's the firing of Sibel Edmonds because her translations of intercepted arabic messages didn't fit somebodies needs. There's that wonderful Unpartiot Act that had to be written long before 911 took place. It was after all over 1000 pages and you can't just slap that together in a couple of weeks.
But back to the program. An assasination program whereby trained assasins move secretly through other countries and kill suspected terrorists leaders. Slight problem there. It's called sovereignty. You can't just go moving through other countries kidnapping or executing people as you please. And that brings me to a supposition. As we know at the beginning of this 911 world Bush gave himself (or should I say his handlers) the power to declare any U.S. citizen an "enemy combatant". No habeus corpus no investigation no grand jury bang you're now an enemy. So I suspect that this CIA program that was so well hidden from us and congress would have permitted the CIA to operate within the borders of the U.S. because if someone is declared enemy combatant then they are then no longer a U.S. citizen with all the rights that go along with it. We saw that with Jose Padilla. This would have permitted death squads to operate within U.S. borders. And to say as an excuse that this was not an operational program doesn't take into account that over a million dollars had been spent on the program.
Lastly there was the no warrant wiretap program. This had the effect of keeping the rest of congress in line. It permitted those in power the ability to spy on the other side of the isle with no oversite or repercussions. We've heard from former NSA employees that they abused that power by listening on juicy conversations that had nothing to do with national security. So the last bastion of freedom seems to be the internet and bloggers who have the courage to post the truth and maintain an intelligent discourse on today's issues. Speaking of truth I have another bit of info from Iran that I'll post later.
