Dick Cheney may be out of the White House, but he's still doing what he loves best - waging a secret war based on deliberately distorted "intelligence." But he's no longer waging a war on Terror. Instead, he's waging a war on Nancy Pelosi.

Why? Because he's trying to stop Eric Holder from investigating his War Crimes, but he has no way to stop him directly because Elections Have Consequences - including firing corrupt AG's like Michael Mukasey. So instead he hopes he can blackmail Pelosi into stopping Holder.

Will he succeed? No.

Cheney's whole blackmail campaign against Pelosi rests on the smear that the CIA briefed her about waterboarding on 9/4/02 and she approved.

Cheney's collaborators in his Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has been making that argument with greater or lesser specificity for weeks. We've heard it from Republicans in the Senate and the House, from rightwing pundits across the media dial, and from "journalists" like Rick Klein of ABC and Greg Miller of LA Times.

Unfortunately for Cheney, Pelosi adamantly denied the smear during her press conference on April 23:

"We were not, I repeat, we were not told that waterboarding or any of these other interrogation methods were used. What they did tell us was they had some legislative counsel opinions. And if and when they would be used, they would brief Congress at that time."

But Pelosi's categorical denial hasn't deterred the Cheneyites at all, including their Corporate Media cutouts.

So when the CIA delivered its report to House Intelligence Committee chair Sylvestre Reyes yesterday, the Cheneyites immediately went to work looking for "proof" that "Pelosi knew." Rep. Pete Hoekstra leaked the report to Rick Klein and told him to zero in on the entry for the only briefing Pelosi attended, which was on 9/4/02:

“Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

Klein took that tidbit and spun it into a "scandal" by claiming it

appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding

Klein's key phrase - "appears to contradict Pelosi" - then magically and instantly appeared in a dozen articles on the topic, including Greg Miller's.

A coincidence? Hardly. Dick Cheney's torture-stained fingerprints are all over this smear.

Of course it's just another one of Cheney's Big Lies (TM), because the CIA did not tell Pelosi about waterboarding on 9/4/02, as Marcy Wheeler writes:

we have on the record statements from Pelosi and Goss (and I've had even stronger assurances elsewhere) that CIA did not tell Congress they were already in the business of torture. Their discussions of torture were all prospective, and they may even have stated clearly that they had not used these techniques yet, which (if true) would be a clear and direct lie to Congress.

And it would certainly be no surprise that the CIA lied to Congress on 9/4/02, because the CIA had already broken the law by failing to tell Congress about its new torture program in advance, as Marcy Wheeler keeps noting:

The real story is that the CIA was playing a bunch of games to be able to claim it had informed Congress, even while only informing some of Congress some things.

First, CIA has officially confirmed what I have been saying for weeks. The CIA first briefed Congress on torture on September 4, 2002, 35 days after CIA purportedly began waterboarding and much longer after we know CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah.

By law, the CIA is required to inform Congress before it starts any major new intelligence programs - which would include Torture.

So who are the key players in Cheney's "War on Pelosi"? We're seeing many familiar faces, led by Cheney himself and the men Cheney appointed to run the CIA - Porter Goss and Michael Hayden. We can assume Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, David Addington, Cathie Martin, Mary Matalin, and the rest of Team Cheney are quietly working behind the scenes.

But the key question is who his "stay behind" operatives are inside the Obama Administration, as Seymour Hersh said on March 31:

He’s put people back. They call it a "stay behind". It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a "stay behind" that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a "stay behind". He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.

Who are Cheney's "stay behinds"?