CIA News

Nancy Pelosi came under fire earlier this year for accusing the CIA for failing to reveal in 2002 that it waterboarded a terrorism suspect, a charge that current CIA director Leon Panetta has rejected and Republicans such as former Vice President Dick Cheney had angrily declared was without merit.

Now it has been reported that Cheney told the CIA to withhold information about a secret counter-terrorism program that was begun after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that Panetta ended the program upon learning about it.

Panetta, as CIA director, has vowed to end the torture and coercive interrogation of terror suspects that happened during the Bush years. With regards to this secret program, the details remain, well, secret. But the New York Times was told the program had never been put into operation and it did not involve CIA interrogation programs or activities concerned with domestic intelligence.

Well, that's good to know.

Nancy Pelosi has brought up an unpleasant truth about the CIA, and that is that the agency is at least too secretive and at worst misleading. Panetta deserves credit for trying to undo the damage of the Bush years but the agency remains far less forthcoming then even it deserves to be.