I love conspiracy theories and though I tend to be pretty skeptical about most of them, this ones a hoot. I am admittedly biased against the former VP Dick Cheney, mostly because over the years I came to see him as embodying all the anti-values that I firmly believe are destroying this once great country. Cheney’s pride and arrogance, his selfishness, his utter disregard for the will of the people and the Constitution, his legacy of corruption which can be traced straight back to the mother of it all in Watergate, his hypocrisy as a draft dodger who is the loudest voice in the room for sending off the troops to fight a needless war in Iraq on totally fabricated evidence while ignoring the real criminals of 9/11. I could go on, but I’d hate to be accused of going off on a rant But the latest news that Cheney authorized a CIA program so secret that the current administration only just learned about it is downright incredible.

The right expended so many hours ripping into Nancy Pelosi over her claim that she was inadequately briefed by the CIA, its amazing that now it seems likely that she may have been telling the truth after all. If the right wing “hate stations” as I like to call them would spend half as much time on investigation and journalism as they do on spin, we might actually have some real news programs made in the US again. There are now several theories about what Cheney’s uber-secret CIA program was all about, but my favorite one comes from the Huffington Post which alludes to a story by Seymour Hersch of the New Yorker in which he made the claim at a University of Minnesota event that Cheney may have been using the CIA as a private assassination squad!

The Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC…do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office… Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on… Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

Panetta, the head of the CIA! was only told about the secret program on June 23rd! Democrat Anna Eshoo, one of seven democrats who signed a letter recently to Panetta to ask him to correct his public statement that the CIA has not misled Congress in light of the revelations about Cheney’s secret program

said she could not discuss what was a “highly classified program.” She did, however, note that when Panetta told House Intelligence Committee members what it was that had been kept secret, “the whole committee was stunned, even Republicans.” A Republican committee member told Who Runs Gov’s Greg Sargent it was something they hadn’t heard before.

This is the important bit. If it is a revelation that Republicans had not heard before and by which they were ’shocked’, it can’t be a simple cover-up of waterboarding or ‘advanced interrogation techniques’ this is old news, and anyway most Republicans have suggested they’d be happy to do a bit of waterboarding while on holiday if doing so would make it all go away. If Hersch’s suggestions are near the mark, Mr Cheney has some serious explaining to do. I only hope he gets to do it on the witness stand.