Congress ‘kept in the dark’ about CIA programme

THE chairwoman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee said yesterday the Bush administration may have broken the law if it ordered the CIA to conceal the existence of a counter-terrorism programme.

Senator Dianne Feinstein said that CIA director Leon Panetta told senators last month that former US vice president Dick Cheney as vice president had ordered the programme not be disclosed to congress.

Feinstein says that congress was kept in the dark and that, in her words, “that’s something that should never, ever happen again”.

The New York Times reported that the CIA withheld information for eight years about a secret counter-terrorism programme on direct orders from Cheney.

The California Democrat spoke on Fox News Sunday.

Officials said at the weekend that Cheney directed the CIA eight years ago not to inform congress about a nascent counter-terrorism programme that Panetta terminated in June.

Subsequent CIA directors did not inform congress because the intelligence-gathering effort had not developed to the point that they believed merited a congressional briefing, said a former intelligence official and another government official familiar with Panetta’s June 24 briefing to the House and Senate Intelligence committees.

Panetta did not agree. On learning of the programme on June 23 from within the CIA, he terminated it and the next day called an emergency meeting with the House and Senate intelligence committees to inform them of the programme and that it was cancelled.

Cheney played a central role in overseeing the Bush administration’s surveillance programme that was the subject of an inspectors general report this past week. That report noted that Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, personally decided who in Bush’s inner circle could even know about the secret programme.

But revelations about Cheney’s role in making decisions for the CIA on whether to notify congress came as a surprise to some on the committees, said another government official.

An effort to reach Cheney was unsuccessful.

The Cheney revelation comes as the House of Representatives is preparing to debate a bill that would require the White House to expand the number of members who are told about covert operations.

The White House has threatened a veto over concerns that wider congressional notifications could compromise the secrecy of the operations.

That provision, however, would have no effect on programmes like this one.