If media reports are to be believed, US Congressmen on both sides of the aisle have "expressed horror and outrage" at recent revelations that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s Machiavellian Veep, had not merely initiated a secret CIA program to assassinate, not capture, al-Qaeda leaders following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 but, worse still, had also ordered that the program be kept secret from Congress.

The Congressmen’s performance was worthy of Broadway in terms of make-believe. But this was no play-acting; it was for real. Having done it for so long, indulging collectively in political hypocrisy has become second nature to both Democrats and Republicans.

Media reports claim Cheney’s secret plan was never implemented, which is a lot of bull. What is being fathered on Cheney has, in fact, been part of official US policy for decades under both Republicans and Democrats. It would require Congress to be in a deep self-induced sleep mode to not know that from the day Obama took over from GWB he has most enthusiastically pursued Bush’s targeted-assassination program, using armed drones and Special Forces teams to hunt ‘high-value targets’ in Pakistan and, more often than not, ending up killing civilians instead.

Famed New Yorker investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, raised eyebrows back in March when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota about Cheney’s secret hit squad that he kept hidden from Congressional oversight.

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," Hersh said. "Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."

When his assertion was officially denied at the time, Hersh’s response: "The last time they said the government doesn’t torture, this time it’s the government doesn’t assassinate."

For the record, there remains in place a US ban on assassination that dates back to President Gerald Ford in 1976. "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," states Executive Order 11905. That order was updated by President Jimmy Carter, who dropped the term ‘political’, and simply prohibited ‘assassination’ of any kind. The current Executive Order, 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, has remained on the books through every administration since.

The plain yet brutally ironic truth is that Reagan, having signed the ban on state-sponsored extra-judicial killings by US government personnel, also authorized repeated assassinations on the quiet, notably the 1986 attempt on Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, an exercise which only succeeded in killing his infant daughter.

It was Leon Panetta, Obama’s pick as Director of the CIA, who in June this year ‘unearthed’ and then publicly announced t he cancellation of Cheney’s secret program, six months after the former Vice President ceased to hold office – which also happens to be six months after Obama took office. [Discovery of ‘hidden’ treasures, as any archaeologist will vouchsafe, takes time.]

Asks Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army: "Why would the CIA need to conceal a program that never was implemented and, if it never was implemented, why did Panetta need to shut it down? Moreover, who was running this inactive program from the minute Barack Obama was sworn in until June 24, when Panetta supposedly announced its cancellation?"

Why now?

"Because," writes Manuel Garcia, Jr., "openly airing a few dirty underpants will distract simple short-attention-span minds from the unavoidable stench of much worse that is rotting under hasty burial," and goes on to ask: "Did this program metastasize into a wider ranging disease that consumed Benazir Bhutto, and other foreign political leaders?"

Partisan politics often requires selective amnesia, says Scahill. "Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President George W. Bush’s most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats. It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and - particularly these days - Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty."

Throughout the 1990s, notes Scahill, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House, and such assassinations were doubtless attempted with presidential approval. Newsweek magazine, in 1995, reported on how US Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan ‘terrorist’ in Bosnia. [Interestingly, the same Leon Panetta, then Clinton’s Chief of Staff, would have acquired valuable experience on the subject of covert assassinations which the inexperienced Obama can now fall back on.]

Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars, says that during Clinton’s tenure the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to "military targets" or "to attacks carried out in pre-emptive self-defense."

What must be Clinton’s most significant ‘covert’ operation, however, was when, on August 20, 1998, he ordered an urgent missile strike against Osama bin Laden in his Afghanistan hideout. The ‘urgency’ was to distract media attention away from his imminent impeachment hearings over his sexual dalliance with young intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. The strike succeeded only in killing about two dozen innocent civilians.

Ray McGovern, an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 years, brings readers right back to Cheney by noting what has pretty much escaped notice: that the former Vice President has publicly underlined the fact that GWB was ‘The Decider’.

"That unusual word sounded quite macho as Bush strutted around and about reminding us regularly that he was also ‘Commander in chief’," says McGovern. "But now, it could be the kiss of death - for Bush, as well as for Cheney."

He recalled the exchange on May 10 this year between Cheney and Bob Schieffer on the program Face the Nation relating to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. Asked if President Bush knew everything about the methods that were being used and which he himself had approved, Cheney replied: "I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew - he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the President. He signed off on it."

Cheney is clearly angry with Bush for leaving his former chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby "sort of hanging in the wind" by merely commuting his prison sentence, and not pardoning him on the eve of leaving office in January this year. Libby had been convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to federal agents investigating the leak of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. Cheney refused to disclose details of efforts to lobby Bush on Libby’s behalf, saying that was "best left to history."

Commented McGovern: "It’s getting close to history time. Cheney is smart enough to know that he, too, may soon be ‘sort of hanging in the wind’ along with his former subordinate, Libby. You do not need to be a cracker-jack analyst to understand that Cheney is feeling betrayed - that he is thinking not of Libby, but of himself, and fearing that, if our system of justice works, he could be in for some serious, uncommuted jail time."

But what’s stopping Bush, Cheney et al doing well-deserved time in the cooler?