Secret CIA Program: Al Qaeda Hit Teams, or Death Squads?
Jul 14th, 2009 | 11 responses
This CIA assassination team story is getting bigger, and the questions are multiplying.
Let’s start with this post David Kurtz wrote yesterday. “Something [about this program] isn’t adding up,” he said:
The Times compares the program to drone attacks against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “This was another effort that was trying to accomplish the same objective,” Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), ranking member on the Senate intel committee, tells the paper.
But as a former CIA counterterrorism chief told TPMmuckraker today:
“The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time,” said Cannistraro, explaining that there’s no important difference between those kinds of attacks and “assassinations” with a gun or a knife.
So regardless of how you might feel about targeted assassinations, it’s not at all clear why this particular program would be so radioactive — compared to what the U.S. was, and still is, doing more or less openly — that (1) Cheney would demand the CIA not brief Congress about it for eight years; (2) Panetta would cancel it immediately upon learning of it; and (3) Democrats would howl quite so loudly when finally informed.
Or to think about it another way, put yourself in the seat of a Democrat on one of the intel committees after 9/11. If you had any doubt about whether the intel agencies were targeting al Qaeda leaders, wouldn’t you have demanded that they show you proof they were? And if you didn’t have any doubt that they were, why are you complaining now about not being briefed?
It doesn’t add up. There’s more to this story to be told.
Indeed. Something had been nagging at me about this story, and after I read Kurtz’s piece, it crystallized. Hadn’t Seymour Hersh caused a minor ruckus a few months back when he made a seemingly off-the-cuff reference to an “executive assassination ring” run by Dick Cheney?
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of “America’s Constitutional Crisis” whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.
Hersh replied, “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “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.”
Mmm, that’s a bit different from “capturing or killing” top Al Qaeda leaders, no? Actually, I think the technical term for what Hersh was describing is “death squads.”
So far, I have not seen anyone connect the CIA assassination program that Leon Panetta briefed members of Congress about last week to this specific revelation by Sy Hersh (although I have not read all the commentary, admittedly). However, Scott Horton does raise another interesting possibility (emphasis mine):
The detail here is critical. In wartime, a nation is certainly free to target and remove the command and control mechanisms of an enemy force, including individual commanders, and a program designed to identify and take out Al Qaeda kingpins in a war setting therefore raises more policy than legal concerns. Removed from the war setting, however, the issue becomes one of summary execution and raises serious legal issues. And were the targets entirely Al Qaeda leaders? The Bush Administration had a disturbing habit of labeling anyone it disliked a “terrorist” and then immediately reaching to the strongest weapons in its arsenal against them. The kill list would therefore be worth careful study, though that’s something that will assuredly occur behind closed doors.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) told Spence Ackerman today that their concern in Congress is about much more than just the fact that the program was kept secret from them for eight years. There is something about the program itself — about the details of the program, which of course are classified and thus unknown to anyone outside of the intelligence committee members briefed by Panetta — that has set off major alarms for Rep. Holt and his colleagues:
“The content of the briefing was serious,” said Holt, speaking about the June 23 briefing when Panetta told the House Intelligence Committee about a still-secret program begun after 9/11. “I don’t think he would’ve launched into this if it were just a trivial matter. It was serious.” [...]
… Holt, one of the seven signatories of the congressional letter that announced the program to the public, expressed deep concerns about the fact that the CIA withheld the program from Congress, and put that secrecy on par with the substance of the program itself. “The issue here, as much as anything, is just how far can we let the intelligence [community] go in unexamined activities, dangerous activities. It’s been going on for years and years, and not just under the Bush administration.” He added that since it’s been three and a half decades since the comprehensive congressional reviews of the intelligence community known as the Church and Pike commissions, “I think the public would find some other jawdropping revelations” about what the CIA has committed with minimal oversight.
Also-reads:
- Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff’s Newsweek piece about plans within the CIA to model assassination squads on Israeli Mossad hit squads.
- Siobhan Gorman in the Wall Street Journal — not many new details but good for overview and background.
- Steve Benen has that pesky moral relativism (or moral equivalency — I never can keep those two straight): “For the same reason the U.S. government would be displeased with foreign paramilitary teams carrying out assassinations on American soil, the prospects of sending small, surgical U.S. assassination squads around the world, including into allied countries, proved problematic.”
- Ron Brynaert in The Raw Story: How Panetta found out about the program (it will not increase your confidence in the efficiency or logic of the CIA’s information-sharing procedures).
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11 Responses to “Secret CIA Program: Al Qaeda Hit Teams, or Death Squads?”
You do mean the proposed “program” right? This is just silly. If somebody didn't bring up the idea then they wouldn't of been doing their jobs. I'm also not sure what they were supposed to tell congress. Do they seen someone up the hill every time they launch a predator? Unless there is much much more it seems like another NYT non-story.
BREAKING NEWS FLASH!!!!
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TMV's Editor-in-Chief, Joe Gandelman, was unable to explain how such an obvious oversight occurred. “It is like forgetting to put Ripken or Gehrig into the line-up when they are sitting in the dugout. I mean, she just put out an op-ed today in the Washington post criticizing Obama and cap-and-trade for f&*%'s sake! Inexcusable.”
Speculation on the street is that in an effort to placate the base, TMV will immediately institute a mandatory minimum of three Sarah Palin posts per day per editor/columnist for the foreseeable future, with Joe setting an example for his troops by personally providing ten posts per day.
I guess I'm a bit confused on how “secret” this program really was. Here's a NYT article from 2002 talking about the program. If this was in the news back then, what makes it so secret now?
A slow news day?
jchem,
From what I've understood reading all the coverage in the last few days, the program was a lot more involved than that. And you and I do not know most of the details because they remain classified. The members of Congress who were briefed by Panetta were told all those details.
And you and I do not know most of the details because they remain classified.
You're right, Kathy, and that seems to be most of the problem. You and I do not know most of the details, but by extension anyone reporting on it right now probably doesn't either. If they did, we would. But as I pointed out by citing that NYT article, nothing new has come out, has it?
Actually, the reporting has been less on the details of the program (because nobody knows) and more on the fact that Leon Panetta just found out about it, apparently by chance, in a staff meeting, and that he subsequently briefed Congress (intelligence committees) about the program in a 45-minute closed-door session. Panetta told them that (a)the program existed, but he had shut it down; and (b) Dick Cheney gave direct orders that the program not be revealed to Congress, and that he gave this order eight years ago. Now, what WE know, from the press coverage, is that the program had something to do with setting up an assassination team to capture or kill Al Qaeda leaders, but that is all we know, and apparently (per what Rush Holt and other members of Congress who were briefed have said) that is a very, very small part of the overall program. We know that whatever those other substantive details are, the members of Congress who were briefed by Panetta on this program that had been kept hidden from them for eight years, they are extremely serious.
That's what we know. Do you think we should know more? Do you think the press should be writing about this, and trying to find out whatever they can about what this program was?
Actually, the reporting has been less on the details of the program (because nobody knows) and more on the fact that Leon Panetta just found out about it, apparently by chance, in a staff meeting, and that he subsequently briefed Congress (intelligence committees) about the program in a 45-minute closed-door session. Panetta told them that (a)the program existed, but he had shut it down; and (b) Dick Cheney gave direct orders that the program not be revealed to Congress, and that he gave this order eight years ago. Now, what WE know, from the press coverage, is that the program had something to do with setting up an assassination team to capture or kill Al Qaeda leaders, but that is all we know, and apparently (per what Rush Holt and other members of Congress who were briefed have said) that is a very, very small part of the overall program. We know that whatever those other substantive details are, the members of Congress who were briefed by Panetta on this program that had been kept hidden from them for eight years, they are extremely serious.
That's what we know. Do you think we should know more? Do you think the press should be writing about this, and trying to find out whatever they can about what this program was?
Well since by every report there where no “hits” or “assassinations” from this program I would think at the least using terms like “hit teams” and “death squads” to describe the never active program is gratuitous and pandering at best and an outright lie at worst. I realize that if you wrote a headline that was accurate “congress never told about program that never happened” no one would care. Then again so far it does seem like nothing to care about. Maybe you should wait for there to be some news involved in your stories?
That's what we know. Do you think we should know more? Do you think the press should be writing about this, and trying to find out whatever they can about what this program was?
Kathy, these are the ultimate questions concerning the matter. I do believe that there are some things worthy of secrecy, but it seems to me that the lid is already partly off the jar here. And the Al Qaeda leaders have long known we wanted to kill them–We're at War with them. I would like to see the press dig a bit more into this in the hopes that we can finally release all of the documents involved and have some sort of fair hearing. Otherwise, we're stuck right where we always have been–partisan debating about whether or not to proceed. A number of commenters here and elsewhere have called for releasing all relevant information, but still we're at a standstill. If Congress really wants to pursue this, then they are going to have to put some pressure on Obama and his DOJ, because he seems rather unwilling to “look to the past”.
Can't find anything to argue with here.