Meet the new boss

The new CIA director will be a secretive henchman of Dick Cheney who's behind the illegal spying on millions of Americans.

Late Friday night, word leaked out that Gen. Michael Hayden is the White House choice to take over CIA duties from suddenly-fired spook insider Porter Goss.

Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force general, was the "human face" of the National Security Agency's criminal spying on Americans that actually began before the convenient 9/11 attacks.

Accused in July 2001 of using the NSA to spy on millions of Americans, Hayden made the bizarre claim that everything was fine because the White House and Pentagon held the reins.

"We aren't off the leash, so to speak, guarding ourselves. We have a body of oversight within the executive branch, in the Department of Defense, in the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board."

Hayden made the claims on the TV show Nightline back in the summer of 2001.

When the latest NSA spying scandal made the news in January, Hayden was sarcastically dismissive of the concerns of Americans.

In 2005, he was moved from the "highest ranking military intelligence officer in the U.S. military" to the new post known as "principal deputy director of national intelligence."

That post was created by U.S. supervillain John Negroponte, who just last year was made "the nation's first director of national intelligence," with Hayden as his second-in-command.

(Some of the many recent rumors about Porter Goss' sudden shameful resignation as head of the CIA say that Negroponte is holding the axe.)

A lifelong spook operating under cover of an Air Force uniform, Hayden was put in charge of NSA -- known as "No Such Agency" for much of its cryptic history -- by none other than Bill Clinton.

Clinton had authorized the first attempt at constant electronic surveillance of Americans, a repugnant project called Echelon that was launched in concert with his police-state comrade Tony Blair.