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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