David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo and I are on the same page bewildered as to why the secret CIA program that aimed to liquidate Al Qaeda operatives would be so controversial, or "radioactive" as David puts it, that Vice President Cheney deemed that it had to be concealed from Congress. Let's face it, this program is going on at the same time that extraordinary renditions were occurring and that we were detaining hundreds of "enemy combatants" in military gulags across the world. Nor is the policy seemingly different from our current use of drones to target Al Qaeda's leadership and operatives. Drones, it can be argued, are in fact worse than CIA assassination hit squads since drones have also left dozens of innocents dead. Furthermore, Al Qaeda is a military target and the Clinton Administration had concluded that killing Al Qaeda operatives was legal.
While there has been intense speculation about the nature of the CIA program since members of the House Intelligence Committee disclosed last week that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ended it upon learning of it on June 23, 2009 four months into his tenure, what remains puzzling is that nothing revealed so far seems illegal that would then necessitate concealing from the Congress.
Still the New York Times offers insight into some of the questions and problems encountered:
Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved because the Bush administration sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret C.I.A. jails.
Mr. Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The program was designed in the frantic weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks when President George W. Bush signed a secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to capture or kill operatives of Al Qaeda around the world. To be able to kill Osama bin Laden or his top deputies wherever they might be -- even in cities or countries far from a war zone -- struck top agency officials as an urgent goal, according to people involved in the discussions.
But in practice, creating and training the teams proved difficult.
"It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do it, it's not that easy," a former intelligence official said. "Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?"
Most of these concerns are operational, not legal. But even so, it is hard to see why this program needed to be concealed from Congress.
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