The Sunshine Empire

I was watching the only sane man on Fox News Sheppard Smith last night and he did a story about the recently revealed news about Dick Cheney’s CIA program that Director Leon Panetta canceled. The first news in this story was that the CIA was ordered by then Vice President Dick Cheney to not inform Congress about a certain program, which by the way is a violation of Federal Law. Fox News reported last night that it was nothing more than an al Qaeda assassination program which would be nothing different than Predator drone attacks that occur every day. The difference being that the program was to assassinate people in U.S. friendly countries without their authorization, and without informing them as well. Now again that is the same as the drone attacks that we launch into Pakistan on a regular basis. Even I don’t have much of a problem with that, but those activities are disclosed to the intelligence committees in Congress. Beyond the issue of another blatant and flagrant violation of intelligence law by Cheney is that if it was nothing more than assassinating al Qaeda operatives, why the need not to tell the intelligence committees?
Another matter that Fox did not disclose but The Guardian in the UK did was that apparently only half the program was not operational and that the army part of the program did proceed. To the surprise of no one Fox News was again laying cover for the Vice President, but no matter the news outlet this is another example of an intelligence community after Bush that can only be described with the word cluster. The Bush administration took a dysfunctional intelligence community and made it worse. Whatever the politics of this, national security is at stake. This is more reason to have some kind of investigation of the practices of the Bush administration. This has nothing to do with individual CIA caseworkers or soldiers and such as the right will paint it. But everyone on the right was so anxious to investigate former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger for taking some classified documents but the Vice President ordering the CIA to break the law is suddenly a bad idea? That’s a question I don’t think will be addressed on tonight’s episode of Hannity.