Cheney's Secret Program - Not About Al Qaeda

The federal government and the US news media are busy trying to sell the idea that former Vice President Dick Cheney was secretly targeting Al Qaeda -- which is ridiculous. Everyone on the planet knew that the US was trying "to capture or kill Al Qaeda leaders". There would be absolutely no reason for Cheney to have any special program to do that.

What is more reasonable and also more frightening is the likelihood that the true targets of Cheney's secret program were US citizens. The Pentagon and CIA had gone well beyond the Constitution in designing new covert programs for domestic use. It is that secret that the federal government is desperate to keep from the US public.

Cheney and the architects of the Bush Doctrine were committed to the idea that they could "exclude" persons and themselves from the Constitution. Thus, captives in Guantanamo became "enemy combatants", or persons without any legal rights whatever. That same concept was applied to domestic programs.

The federal government is tring to avoid revealing the actual scope of the "domestic surveillance program". They also need to keep the US public from discovering the "other practices" that were used by the intelligence agencies. -- These practices are well outside any common concept of surveillance. Those "other practices" are the ones Cheney needed to keep from Congress. --jd