Dick and the Dark Side

The recent (and utterly unsurprising) revelation that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not inform Congress of certain covert programs is, or should be, an edifying lesson on the perils of unaccountable executive power.

It must be understood and acknowledged that the very existence of the CIA is a threat to democratic principles. It is the only department of the federal bureaucracy whose operations and budget are not public.

The CIA is, by definition, a criminal international enterprise. CIA agents go to other countries and break the laws of those countries in the interest of soliciting information, or undermining or promoting governments, that will enhance America's position in the world.

This is what spy agencies do, and assuming we all agree on the need for such an agency, the issue then becomes ensuring that our spies are letting the peoples' representatives know what's being done in the peoples' name and with the peoples' money.

What if the CIA didn't need to tell anyone what it was doing? Well, it might try to kill Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. And Fidel Castro might summon Soviet nuclear protection because of these very real threats. And the whole world might be pushed to the precipice of extinction without ANYBODY knowing, quite frankly, what the fuck was going on. Oh wait, that DID happen.

So there, in a nutshell, is why we can't have secret American armies running around the world doing God knows what in our name with our guns and our money.

Enter Dick Cheney who, after 9/11, was recognized as some sort of legitimate arbiter of the sweeping historical forces of the 21st century. This claim may have been burnished, in my opinion, had Cheney ever given an inkling of a shadow of a clue that he had any idea who Osama bin Laden even was before 9/11, but let's just assume that Cheney knew what he was doing.

The story, as being reported now, has is that Cheney ordered the CIA not to inform Congress about a certain program. Three problems.

Problem the first: Cheney was not the president. The Vice-President has constitutional authority to do absolutely nothing other than break tie votes in the Senate. But let's just assume that Bush somehow transferred his authority to Cheney.

Problem the second: Even the president can't break the law. So even if Cheney was acting on Bush's authority, not even the President's authority transcends the law, which explicitly requires Congress to be informed of all covert programs. But let's just assume it wasn't a "real" program and therefore required no notification.

Problem the third: The claim is that the program in question was an effort to capture or assassinate Al-Qaeda leaders, even in countries friendly to America. I have no moral or legal objection to that in principle; if an American had a clean shot at bin Laden in Paris, I wouldn't think twice, and neither should anyone else.

But here's the problem with assuming that that's all this program was: We're already doing that. That's what the war on terror is. So the idea that this aim to capture and kill was a secret does not pass the smell test or any other olfactory standards.

So what was it? I don't know. But I know that if only Cheney knew about it, then it was a) utterly illegal and b) probably pretty bad.

There are things that we know about the Bush / Cheney years. We know about the invidious and insidious arrogance. How Bush walked as if he were on horseback. How Cheney smirked away virtue in between claims of patriotism, and came as close as I'd ever care to see to restoring monarchy on this continent.

We know (sort of) about 9/11, about Iraq, about Katrina. But what this latest story alerts us to is how much we don't know. We don't know how much we don't know, to paraphrase Don Juan Rumsfeld.

"Blowback" is the term used in academic circles. This is when secret actions lead to public retaliations. When American hostages were taken in Iran in 1979 and charged as spies, most Americans felt victims of irrational hatred.

But this was blowback. Americans did not know that "their" government had overthrow the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953. "Our" government, of course, was in no rush to admit this after it had fallen prey to the "blowback" in Iran, thereby perpetuating the idea that the action of the enemy was unprovoked and undertaken purely out of hatred for freedom and Jesus and kittens.

The next time something terrible happens to our country, will we KNOW that it was not the response to some horribly misguided and short-sighted skulduggery carried our by "our" government without "us" ever knowing about it? No, we won't.