It just happened again. In mid-July the news headlines were suddenly full of allegations that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the formation of a CIA kill squad and expressly ordered the agency not to disclose the programme even to congressional overseers with top security clearances, as required by law.
As soon as CIA officials disclosed the programme to CIA director Norman Panetta, he ordered it to be halted.
The CIA insisted it had never proposed a specific operation to the White House for approval.
Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation programme post-2001 surfaced, the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either.
Torture manuals drafted by the agency would surface - a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the 'Contra' war against central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan's years - and the agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as "an old story".
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