Josh is puzzled.
The New York Times is also reporting now that the secret Bush-era CIA program kept from Congress and terminated last month by CIA Director Leon Panetta was a plan to assassinate top al Qaeda officials that was never implemented. This is additional confirmation of the Wall Street Journal story that essentially reported the same basic outlines of the still-classified program.
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.
[…] 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.
Phrasing the same question differently, why would we need an assassination squad when drones and bombs accomplish the same thing with less operational risk? Not counting risk for Afghan wedding parties, obviously.
The answer is that you use an assassination squad where you can’t drop a bomb. The difference between, say, cratering a car outside of Kabul and sniping a shopkeeper in Jakarta is that one could at least argue that we are still fighting a war in Afghanistan. Various international treaties, and the Posse Comitatus act, keep our killer drones penned up in Afghanistan and a small part of Pakistan.
Everyone agrees that terrorism doesn’t respect national borders. If you’re a neocon who believes that violence alone can solve problems, what do you do about that? You’ve got all that manly vigor, all that aggression, and you’re using it to scare smaller countries into renegotiating extradition treaties. That must chafe.
***Update***
BTW, here is a fun idea. Put together secret assassination squads, the One Percent Doctrine and Dick Cheney. Let your imagination run wild about the minute care they must have taken in selecting targets.
Balconesfault
Ahh – international assassinations.
How KGB of us. How MOIS of us.
Who needs to bring someone to justice … when you are justice?
General Winfield Stuck
It all depends on where you’re using targeted assassinations. If it’s in the theater of war, and you have a congressional act to be at war in a certain place, then using covert teams to kill your enemy is one thing. But if your going around the world and covertly killing people, that is something else altogether different. Even if they are AQ you are at war with.
It would run afoul of all sorts of lnternational laws and local ones too. This was one of the main bugaboos the Church Commission dealt with in the 70’s, when the CIA was knocking off people willy nilly.
So right now there is a whole lot of speculation and unknowns about what was happening and where, if anything. But the fact that it was withheld from congress is a separate issue and if cheney ordered it, then he has some explaining to do.
Tim F.
Right. It is silly to imagine anyone in the Bush administration, even James Comey, getting fratic about the CIA shooting (knifing, garroting, whatever) one more maybe-bad man in Afghanistan.
A.L.
I completely agree. When I read the WSJ piece, my first thought was that this was probably a program for assassinating people in places like Hamburg, Paris, or Jakarta (as opposed to Kabul, Baghdad, or Waziristan).
someguy
Granted there are no laws against assassination, but there are laws against murder and conspiracy to commit murder, which is what this was. Maybe this is the hook they eventually use to indict Cheney, along with crimes against humanity. Either way, Congress has been on record opposing assassination since the Church Committee, and there are Executive Orders directing that there will be no assassinations. Of course when you’re king, what does an Executive Order have to do with anything? You’re king, for f***’s sake…
And WTF does the Posse Comitatus Act have to do with keeping our drones penned up anywhere? I’m reasonably certain that all it prohibits is the use of the active duty military in *domestic* law enforcement roles – that means no using cops for search, seizure, traffic stops, or similar hands-on law enforcement activities in the United States.
General Winfield Stuck
And when has one of these little lawless gems from the Bushies ever not turned out to be a lot worse than first reported.
Tim F.
I was being arch. It is perfectly clear that the last administration did not consider counterterrorism a law enforcement issue.
...now I try to be amused
It figures that the neocons envied the hell out of Mossad and wanted to reverse the Church Commission. What better way to show solidarity with Israel than to make the US an international pariah too.
NonyNony
@someguy:
I believe that that was exactly what Tim was suggesting – though I read it as a joke – that if you needed to assassinate someone in the US a drone isn’t going to get it done because of that whole Posse Comitatus thing.
And really, the Bushies would have to have been even stupider than I have given them credit for if there were plans to use assassination squads within the US. I suspect that if we ever find out details about this it will turn out that these plans were for bumping off suspected al Qaeda located in countries where Cheney couldn’t trust the government or the law enforcement to arrest the guys instead of warning them off (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria).
kid bitzer
i dunno. i think i’m with josh on this one.
there’s still some piece of the puzzle that we haven’t heard yet, which boosts this one into a higher orbit.
aww
I 100% approve of the secret CIA plan to air-drop Dick Cheney along with his shotgun and some farm raised quail into terrorist hideouts.
Fulcanelli
Laws? Laws are what keep us Liberals from killing those that openly aspire to kill us in their sleep.
Jackmormon
The New York Times is also reporting now that the secret Bush-era CIA program kept from Congress and terminated last month by CIA Director Leon Panetta was a plan to assassinate top al Qaeda officials that was never implemented.
Never implemented? Planned only to target top al Qaeda officials? Yeah fucking right. Why would Panetta need to cancel in a hurry and hold secret Congressional hearings about a program that was never implemented? We don’t even know the contours of this yet, as far as I can tell.
And when has one of these little lawless gems from the Bushies ever not turned out to be a lot worse than first reported.
This is absolutely correct.
mai naem
Just a minor quibble. It’s not Josh who’s confused, it’s David Kurtz. And I agree. There is something huge behind this. Panetta is not some liberal activist. He’s just a moderate Dem and heck, even DiFi had something negative to say and Holy Joe hasn’t has anything to say and you know he would. Kind of OT I’ve always felt the Bushies wiretapped Kerry’s campaign or at least some of the major aides and I would bet the Dems were stupid enough to never check their systems out. Remember when the Dems on the Judiciary Committee has their computers hacked by Manuel Miranda?
Iron-Ick-Ally
Why, just this past weekend History Channel had a long piece on Pablo Escobar, whose 80’s Colombian coke lord exploits included car bombs in Bogota, killing half the Supreme Court, and bombing airplanes. When he escaped his resort prison in 1992, we sent Delta Force guys to train a task force called Search Bloc, who we also gussied up with advanced equipment.
Quite coincidentally, around that same time, a surprisingly well-trained and equipped paramilitary vigilante group called Los Pepes popped on the scene. They took a decidedly extra-legal approach, wherein kidnapping and killing any of Escobar’s relatives or associates (complete with taunting signs hung around the corpse’s neck) was used to try and flush Pablo out of hiding.
John Yoo wouldn’t have had a problem with Los Pepes, right?
jenniebee
I’ve got fifty buck that says that whatever they’re doing was funded by trafficking Afghani opium in the Far East. What’s the over/under on Thailand as the major market?
Whispers
I think it’s absurd to take this story at face value.
The “leak” depicts a picture that would portray Cheney’s actions in the most favorable light possible. And it was published in the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal.
At what point are we allowed to simply reject any of this leaks summarily? We’ve had to deal with so many lies over the course of this decade, it strikes me as pure idiocy to believe any leak published by the Moonie Times that is flattering to Bush and Cheney.
Or let me put this a different way. This program was covered in more secrecy than the torture programs. The notion that it could be something that would be a political winner like “killing terrorists” is laughable.
TenguPhule
I have bad news for you.
They are.
Dick Cheney, too dangerous to humanity to be allowed to live.
General Winfield Stuck
Jules Crittenden weighs in. No doubt he speaks for most of the wingnuts, and we should hear this repeated in different terms more and more as this story unfolds.
Your average Lizard Brain at work
mclaren
Indeedy doo, if you’re doing tagerted assassinations in America on Americans, well, goll-ee, Sarge, as Gomer Pyle used to say… That might raise some eyebrows.
Of course that’s just crazy talk. Wild conspiracy theory. Like, oh, say, the notion that a president would lie us into a war of aggression. Or the possibility that the NSA might eavesdrop on the phone conversations of members of congress.
Cassidy
@kid bitzer: Just a little perspective. If our gov’t wants to assassinate someone in other countries, we already have military personnel for that. For better or worse, there are more than a few stories of “Delta” missions being a little more open-ended than just wartime actions and whatnot. Or you can read “Killing Pablo” and draw your own conclusions.
What I’m getting at, is while anything Cheney touches is sinister, I’m not entirely convinced that a secret assassination program would have to be created. I’m also not convinced that the CIA has the resources and expertise (anymore) to singularly handle such a mission.
Anne Laurie
C’mon, dude. You know Rove and Libby were giving each other tiny boners giggling over which Democ-Rats they could target with their Super-Sekrit Mighty Force Awsumness ninjas. That’s why Scooter was willing to go to jail rather than sing — he found it totally plausible that his Dear Leader Darth Cheney would have him killed at the first hint of insubordination.
Whether the Cheney-boys were actually capable of pulling off assassinations inside the U.S. is a whole different story… but I’m sure it would have gone hard on a random selection of yellow buses full of middle-schoolers and bingo nights at the senior center in whichever D.C. exurb Libby called home for tax purposes.
Et Tu Brutus?
Yes indeedy, something smells quite rotten in the state of Denmark- but whether or not the common folk, Holder and company’s best efforts not withstanding, will ever really discover the details seems unlikely. Particularly unlikely if this turns out to be something that resembles a subplot in a Bourne movie. Don’t want the good folks of Mayberry/Duloc wettin’ their beds over the realization that those in charge of the land of the free/ home of the brave condoned some nasty , human rights trampling shit, at least not when some of those being trampled might have been fair skinned ‘ Merican folk, rather than just more brown skinned foreigner types.
Willem van Oranje
When it was assassination squads that was so extraordinary that even Pete Hoekstra was disturbed by it, it can only be in the type of weapons used. To me, that sounds like biological, chemical and/or nuclear warfare, killing not just top al Qaeda officials, but entire populations.
Comrade Dread
You can use Predator drones in third world countries that don’t have long standing political ties to us, but you can’t exactly get away with that in say, London (the British are probably still a bit peevish about foreign rockets falling from the sky).
linda
there appears to be a huge concerted effort to get out front on this cia assassination squads only targeting al qaeda leaders.
that’s why i don’t believe for one friggin second that was the mandate of that program. it was much more frightening, as i suspect we’ll soon discover.
JD Rhoades
I agree. If “send our own James Bonds to kill Osama and his buddies” had been the goal, Congress would have been overjoyed. Hell, I might have, too, until it became clear that these people could find a way to fuck up a beach party.
SGEW
As always, The Onion got here first:
We already know about the mass graves in Afghanistan and the dozens (hundreds?) of people tortured to death. Does anyone really think that Cheney and his cohort didn’t do more?
kharma
Hmmm…Could the program be something like this?
or this:
link
4jkb4ia
This is a comment
Persia
@…now I try to be amused: I think they were just trying to revive the Phoenix program. Because we all know how well that worked to win hearts and minds.
Don
Kurtz is a moron. Comparing this to drone strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq either makes him reading-impaired or disingenuous. The Times article – which is also weird in its “hey so what?” kind of tone – clearly states the program was created to operate “around the world.” As in, not just in countries where we have ongoing and active military actions.
The Times clearly is taking some of the same stupid pills as Kurtz.
Because it’s a program designed to engage in violent and unsanctioned actions inside the borders of other sovereign nations. The fact that nothing has ever been green-lit – which the Times implies means there’s no reason to kill the program – doesn’t matter. If I hang a bat near my door with NIGGER THUMPER stenciled on it you would be entirely right to make some judgments about me even if I never pick it up.
I get that it’s not the NYT’s place to make value judgment statements in an article, but there’s a clear bias in the phrases and words in here. The choice of “it is not clear” rather than “has not stated any specific reason” regarding the program cancellation contains an unstated judgement.
An assassination program isn’t an “alternative” to those things, it’s a way to kill secretly and without process. Again, “alternative” rather than “other options” is bias language.
I’d like to see some statements from the Obama administration indicating that they think it’s okay to engage in covert operations inside the borders of other nations without their clearance.
nader paul kucinich gravel
Judge, jury, and executioner ~
Mossad “advisors” just like at Abu Ghraib?
B52 errant nukes, USMilSpec anthrax, 7/7 London bombings, Madrid train bombings, Tillman’s tight 3 shot group in the forehead, Benazir Bhutto?
DNC & RNC have BOTH sold out the country in order to enrich themselves.
Independents agree on more than we disagree.
Beware the divide and conquer.
Gravel Kucinich Paul Nader
McKinney Ventura too
perotcharts.com
Five veterans
The Fed
AIPAC
9/11
Sebastian Dangerfield
Um, that “small part of Pakistan” (which actually is not so small) is a very big problem for this argument. In fact, it undermines it completely. The international treaties that you mention certainly apply to Pakistan, with whom we are not at war, yet we attack more or less precisely identified targets in Pakistan without (to all that appears) the permission of the Pakistani government. This is not to say that I have enough info to disagree with the main premise fo the post–i.e., that the latest Program That Dare Not Speak Its Name is some kind of juiced-up international hit squad operated by Cheney. This is just to say that there is little to no distinction—in terms of whether or not laws are violated–between such a squad and what we are doing so lawlessly in Pakistan.
brantl
I take a certain amount of perverse glee thinking about how Darth Cheney must take a little dump in his pants when he reads about another of his secrets coming to light, especially when the discoverers aren’t sure which one it is, so Cheney can’t be sure which one it is either. I think the sonofabitch had hundreds, and each one found drives a little nail into this sorry excuse for a human being.