\nCIA Vet: Agency Doesn’t Need Secret Program To Target al Qaeda<\/a><\/strong>
TPM<\/font>muckracker <\/strong>
By Zachary Roth
July 13, 2009 <\/div>\nEarlier today, we raised a few questions about the notion that the secret CIA program that Dick Cheney reportedly withheld from Congress concerned an effort to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. And now a top counter-terror expert is doing the same. Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we’ve been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization. <\/p>\n
Since the war on terror began, said Cannistraro, the CIA has routinely conducted operations targeting top Qaeda leaders. "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. Cannistraro said the Defense Department has also conducted such targeted efforts, under an initiative that New Yorker<\/em><\/strong> reporter Seymour Hersh has written about<\/strong><\/a>… The Rumsfeld initiative seems to be the subject of this report<\/a><\/strong> from a few hours ago in The Guardian<\/em><\/strong>… <\/p>\n
But Cannistraro cautioned that that DOD program has nothing to do with the secret, unidentified CIA program which Cheney is said to have hid from Congress, and which CIA director Leon Panetta ended last month. As for what the program did<\/em> involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate.<\/strong> He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn’t acting alone. "The approval was from the president<\/strong>," said Cannistraro…<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nBy modern standards, this is one rather slow leak. Valerie Plame’s leak took years to make it into the sun, but Governor Sanford took a few days. This one is dribbling at a snail’s pace. We should have a contest with prizes. Cannistraro goes out of his way to throw Bush in the mix. I wonder what "… it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance…<\/strong>" could possibly mean. I’m drawing a blank so far, but it doesn’t sound good. That fishy smell I thought I smelled might be smoking gunpowder…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CIA Vet: Agency Doesn’t Need Secret Program To Target al Qaeda TPMmuckracker By Zachary Roth July 13, 2009 Earlier today, we raised a few questions about the notion that the secret CIA program that Dick Cheney reportedly withheld from Congress concerned an effort to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. And now a top counter-terror […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}