July 14, 2009

Nothingburger

When unemployment continues rising despite your stimulus package, your energy tax and your health care proposals are both in trouble, and the deficit hits a trillion dollars in the ninth month of the fiscal year....who ya gonna call?

Dick Cheney.

Andy McCarthy - "Another Phoney Scandal"

With Speaker Pelosi caught in the web of her own deceit over what the CIA told her about “torture,” and the Obama administration in the middle of its latest 180-degree reversal over CIA interrogators (Attorney General Holder is now considering prosecutions despite Obama’s promise of no prosecutions), Democrats have trumped up a charge that the CIA, on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney, failed to notify Congress that it was contemplating — not implementing, but essentially brainstorming about — plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures.

This is their most ludicrous gambit in a long time — and that’s saying something. Given their eight years of complaints about President Bush’s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and given President Clinton’s indignant insistence (against the weight of the evidence) that he absolutely wanted the CIA to kill bin Laden, one is moved to ask: What did Democrats think the CIA was doing for the last eight years?

And if Democrats did not believe the CIA was considering plans to kill or capture bin Laden, why weren’t they screaming from the rafters about such a lapse?

Of course the CIA has been trying to figure out how to take out top al-Qaeda leaders. One assumes — one hopes — they are also brainstorming about wiping out the Taliban, overthrowing the Iranian regime, undermining Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program, disrupting Syrian support of Hezbollah, and tackling all manner of threats to the United States. But there is no law that requires, or could practically require, the CIA to brief Congress every time some agency component considers the feasibility of some security initiative.

The former CIA chief says in an NPR interview that he was never directed by Cheney to withhold any information from Congress, contrary to what Leon Panetta has said.

Jonah Goldberg...

...let me make sure I'm not missing something. Cheney ordered the CIA to look into sending out squads to kill al-Qaeda leaders after 9/11. Call me crazy, but that’s what I assumed they’d been doing all along. I’m far more scandalized that such plans haven’t been up and running for eight years than I am by the fact that Congress wasn’t briefed on a plan that had never been put into action. (I can only hope the plans were tabled because it was determined that cruise missiles and UAVs worked better than CIA assassins)

[...]

So what exactly is the fuss about? Cheney, with the backing of Congress, looked into killing people — who were very much in need of being killed — but the program was never operationalized and Congress is P.O.’d that they weren’t briefed further on a program that wasn’t operational?

Please don’t look at the socialized medicine in the corner; we’re hunting Cheneys.

Posted by dan at July 14, 2009 11:06 AM