"What makes you think they'll print it?"

Here's a quick follow-up post to this post from a couple of days ago about the "counterterrorism program" former VP Dick Cheney ordered not be reported to Congress. TIME magazine reports that "CIA Director Leon Panetta was told of the program's existence on June 23, four months after he took over the agency."

Why is that particular sentence jarring? It seems to suggest that Mr. Cheney, was running some sort of rogue, stay-behind, shadow operation within the intelligence community (the actual agency is not specified, only that Mr. Panetta of CIA is the one who discovered it) for something like six months after he left office (someone had to be running it) and six months after President Obama's took office. Nothing has been positively stated as to whether the program was dormant at the time of Mr. Panetta's discovery or to whom within or without the intelligence community the agents involved reported. Doesn't that sound just a little fishy? Doesn't that sound a little like Treason? Does it make, as I suggested in my previous post, the extension of the Secret Service "protection" Mr. Obama ordered for Mr. Cheney sound more plausibly like a house-arrest type situation?

One further thought: a "program" may indicate more than simply an information-gathering capacity—the kind of thing others have been speculating about. It could include an operational capability.

Questions: Did this program have anything to do with the mass graves that have been discovered recently in Afghanistan?

Did this program have anything to do with the manipulation of the American mass media that the Bush administration engaged in over the years? That is to say, was it a psy-ops or propaganda operation. It's not just spying on Americans—we know they were doing that to varying degrees of FISA legality. It has to do with disinformation and misinformation activities through various witting fools, plants, and cutouts in the media: Judith Miller and Ahmed Chalabi, Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus, Hannity & Beck & Doocey & the whole Murdoch gang at FOXNews, the Wall Street Journal editorial staff, Limbaugh, Jeff Gannon, Tim Russert, etc. On that note, did you hear that Rupert Murdoch got busted for bugging a number of celebrities and politicians and publicists. Tip of that iceberg? Was someone within this let's call it CIA within the CIA actually running an op through Murdoch and his far-flung media empire?

Hey! And what about George Tenet's and Porter Goss's roles in all this?

Pay attention, folks. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of this. It could be nothing. Still, watch for other seemingly unrelated intelligence-related expositions in the next few weeks and months as this thing unravels behind the scenes.