1 Boring Old Man

Siobhan Gorman reports that the secret program that Leon Panetta just revealed to Congress is an assassination squad.

^{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.}

Two comments about this. First, there must be something more. Aside from the near ubiquitous drone strikes, which seem to be fully acknowledged and non-controversial, there have been enough personal strikes against al Qaeda figures that appear likely to have been assassinations, that for all intents and purposes, it appears we are assassinating al Qaeda figures.

It may be, for example, that the conflict reported by Sy Hersh is the problem – that Special Ops has the mandate to kill but CIA is being dragged into those assassinations.

^{Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. [In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.]}

^{The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing.}

^{“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight. Everything is justified in terms of fighting the global war on terror.” He added, “The Administration has been fuzzing the lines; there used to be a shade of gray”—between operations that had to be briefed to the senior congressional leadership and those which did not—“but now it’s a shade of mush.”}

^{“The agency says we’re not going to get in the position of helping to kill people without a Finding,” the former senior intelligence official told me.}

But even that can’t be it. While the conflict Hersh reported pertained to Iran, not al Qaeda, Congress clearly knows about this conflict – they’ve even drafted legislation to curb it. Nevertheless, you’d think that if Congress saw this going on with regards to Iran, it’d worry them more than the same practice going on with al Qaeda. Second, just to pre-empt the inevitable discussion of "law" every time this comes up. Yes, EO 12333 still appears to ban

assassinations.

^{No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.}

But EO 12333 is precisely the Executive Order that Sheldon Whitehouse invoked in 2007 when he revealed that Bush got an OLC opinion stating he could change EOs without changing the EO–what I call pixie dust.

^{"But what does this administration say about executive orders?"}

^{An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.}

^{"Whenever (the President) wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order," he may do so because "an executive order cannot limit a President." And he doesn’t have to change the executive order, or give notice that he’s violating it, because by "depart(ing) from the executive order," the President "has instead modified or waived it."}

So for those who will, inevitably, immediately invoke EO 12333 in arguing that assassination is "illegal," please do your homework. EO 12333 apparently prohibits assassinations, but there’s no way we can guarantee that Bush didn’t pixie dust the EO back in 2001 when he set up his little assassination squad. Furthermore, an EO is just that, an EO, one that a President can change at will without even publicly informing Congress or the American people. While it counts as law for the Executive Branch, it is not the same as a law passed by Congress, and treating it as if it is is simple foolishness at this point. I assume we’ll learn more about this in coming days. But thus far, I’m not convinced this is the whole of the story yet.

That’s my thought too. Panetta wouldn’t have been stirred so deeply by any of this. Congress wouldn’t have been so bent out of shape by it either. What I think we know at this point is that the C.I.A. had a hit squad program, that isn’t fully operational that went around any number of Laws. Either it had to do with Iran, not Iraq, or it is a C.I.A. Operation that should be under the Military’s control, or it was something else. My guess is that its some fancy techn-gizmo for assassinating people. Maybe they’re finding ways for bombs/drones to locate and hone in on cell phones.

Update: Okay, the WaPo explains that it’s not the assassinations themselves, it’s technical capability to make assassinations easier…

Also, consider this recent reporting from Wired…