CIA’s super-secret plan: assassinate al-Qaeda leaders

posted at 8:47 am on July 13, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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The Wall Street Journal reveals the CIA program so secret that Democrats allege the agency never shared it with Congress, breaking the law on oversight of intelligence.  It’s so shocking that Dick Cheney allegedly told George Tenet to shield it from America’s elected representatives.  Hold onto your hats!  The CIA secretly planned … to capture and/or kill … al-Qaeda’s top leaders.

I hear you gasp in shock over this news:

A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn’t clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.

Let’s see.  Democrats want to make hay over a program to kill Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of the radical Islamist looney tunes?  Best of luck with that. Show of hands: who in the US doesn’t want the heads of bin Laden and Zawahiri on a pike?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?  Bueller?

Congress authorized the Bush administration to use force against AQ.  At the same time, the executive order against targeted assassinations remains in force, but that hardly applies to an enemy at war.  The entire point of authorizing force is to make your enemies dead by, like, y’know, killing them.  Whether the CIA or the military carries out the mission makes no difference to me and probably not to 99% of the American public outside the Beltway, or I suspect, inside the Beltway either.

Why keep it secret?  Apparently the CIA dropped it in the planning stages for some reason after six months, which means that there wasn’t anything to report.  Perhaps the CIA didn’t want the operational parameters of the program to leak, in case they reactivated the mission.  However, it’s not as if anyone in the US doubted that we would kill anyone in AQ’s top network if we had the chance.  We didn’t exactly keep that a secret.

If Democrats want to score political points against George Bush and Dick Cheney for wanting Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri dead, they may find that a tough sell to their constituents.

Update: Commenter Coldwarrior explains “findings” as a legal term, and explains why this means the Democrats’ argument doesn’t hold up at all:

It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts.

A “finding” is a stringent legal procedure, and is required that the President, obviously, the DCI, Attorney General, the key leadership of the Senate and House Oversight Committees, and others if it has direct impact, and is a rigorous process.

That a “finding” was in order, as pointed out buried in the third paragraph…then whomever were the key members of the Senate and House Committees knew about this. Otherwise, no finding.

Not all committee members, and certainly not the entire House of Senate, needed to be brought on board. But that little word “finding” implies a good deal more than the current congressional /Dem leadership is willing to discuss.

Since they’re not disputing the “finding” part of the story, it seems as though the entire controversy is a non-starter.

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