WASHINGTON - May 19 - "It would be wonderful if it were fantasy; it's all too real," Ray McGovern says about Liz Cheney's accusations against Lawrence Wilkerson of fabricating "fantasies" about her father, former US Vice President Dick Cheney.

Wilkerson accused Cheney of being involved in a series of actions, including authorizing the torture of Al-Qaeda suspects, to justify the war in Iraq.

On May 17, Liz Cheney accused Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, of creating a "cottage industry" making up "fantasy stories" about her father on the George Stephanopoulos Show.

However, McGovern, retired CIA analyst, says that former President Bush "deputized" Cheney in ordering the CIA to treat and torture prisoners to obtain information about connections between Sadaam Hussein and Al-Qaeda and Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.

"Dick Cheney was the acting president, Dick Cheney told [former CIA Director] George Tenet what to do and George Tenet said, 'Yes, sir how high would you like me to jump? You want weapons of mass destruction, no problem, I'll serve them up to you,'" McGovern says.

McGovern also says that The National Security Act of 1947 gave the US President almost complete control over CIA operations. "[That act] says the director of intelligence shall perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence as the head of the National Security Council shall direct," McGovern says. "Who's the head of the National Security Council? The President. Is there any vote? No, the President decides. That gives the President, and I use this word carefully, the power to have his own Gestapo. The only check on that is to have a kind of director that will say, 'No, I won't do this kind of thing,' or a Congress that's supposed to have an oversight role, but in the last years, has had this overlook role and we know the result of that. It's a structural flaw, a structural flaw, in the role of the intelligence apparatus of our country, but there's also a premium on character. I've worked with nine CIA directors, and most of them stood up to this schizophrenic, two-headed approach. Most of them had integrity. The last couple have not had any integrity."

While the President may appear to have command of CIA operations on paper, McGovern also suggests that the current administration may not have as tight a hold on the agency. "I think the President is afraid of the CIA. I think [new CIA Director] Leon Panetta is afraid of the CIA[...]they have either been co-opted or they're afraid. And that's, that's new. I haven't seen that in my forty-six years in this city where the Head of State and the Director is afraid," McGovern says. "If that's the case, if it has come to that point, that's dangerous for our civil liberties, that's dangerous for our foreign policy, that's dangerous for our ability to defend ourselves."

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