New York, July 12: Former US vice president Dick
Cheney had instructed the CIA to withhold information about a
secret counter-terrorism programme from Congress for eight
years, a media report claimed on Sunday.
The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) director Leon
E Panetta, who ended the programme when he first learned of
its existence on June 23, disclosed this to the Senate and
House Intelligence committees in a closed briefing a day
later, New York Times reported citing two people with direct
knowledge of the matter.
"Because this programme never went fully operational
and hadn't been briefed as Panetta thought it should have
been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor
controversial," an official said. "That's worth remembering
amid all the drama."
The report that Cheney was behind the decision to
conceal the still-unidentified programme from Congress
deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush
administration had put a high priority on the programme and
its secrecy.
Intelligence and Congressional officials said the
programme was started by the counter-terrorism centre at the
CIA shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, but never
became fully operational, involving planning and some training
that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.
In the tense months after 9/11, when Bush administration
believed new Qaeda attacks could occur, intelligence officials
brainstormed about radical countermeasures. It was in that
atmosphere that the unidentified programme was devised and
deliberately concealed from Congress, officials said.
The question of how completely the CIA informed
Congress about sensitive programmes had been hotly disputed by
Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi
accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was
waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Panetta rejected.
The briefing occurred only after a terrorism suspect,
Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times.
The disclosure about Cheney's role in the unidentified
CIA programme comes a day after an Inspector General's report
underscored the central role of the former vice president's
office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge
of the National Security Agency's programme of eavesdropping
without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report
concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counter-terrorism
surveillance effort.
The law requires the President to make sure the
intelligence committees "are kept fully and currently informed
of the intelligence activities of the US, including any
significant anticipated intelligence activity."
Bureau Report