CIA (Secret Program)Had Plan to Kill al-Qaida

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Wall Street Journal reports that the CIA program concealed from Congress was a secret plan to kill or capture al-Qaida operatives.

Former intelligence officials tell the Journal that the plan, which was ordered halted by agency Director Leon Panetta, was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential finding authorized by President George W. Bush.

Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper reported Monday that the CIA spent money on planning and maybe some training, but it never became fully operational. The plan was highly classified and the CIA has refused to comment on it.

The program remained so secret that no members of Congress were told about it, allegedly on orders of Vice President Dick Cheney.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jUYIQzuMD55oCy3UG7v6wITLOBewD99DHJTO1
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And....what else did this secret program contain?

probably not.

:(

scary stuff.

With no oversight and no need for evidence...

(We've seen how well that worked in Gitmo...not).

shinola to the public: you could spin an assasination team easilly enough, hell, we're torturing people and no one is marching in the streets about it.

I think there's more that we aren't seeing yet.

Mika mentioned Liz Cheney will be on tomorrow, probably to defend her MIA father, but I am curious to hear if she has anything to say about this since even Congress was unaware of this program.

Can we put her on a lie detector and see if we can generate a real answer sometime soon?

and the repubs are allowed to frame this as, 'we were keeping amurika safe', then this thing backfires.

If this whole thing was to rehab pelosi, and it backfires, it was a stupid thing to do. If there is more to this we don't know, and it can't come out because of national security reasons, this thing backfires.

We all know cheney was running a shadow government, exposing a CIA operative because her husband disagreed with him, visiting the CIA on several occasions, trying to churn out false intelligence to ratchet up support for the Iraqi war, meeting with oil companies to divide up the oil in Iraq, making sure Halliburton got no bid contracts.

Whatever it is, I hope they can make it stick this time. This criminal needs to be made accountable at some point.

Intended to distract and mislead people away from the actual program.

Don't chase the mother bird fluttering away, pretending to have a broken wing. Look for the nest.

The United States has said it still opposes Israel's policy of targeted assassinations, despite its apparent use of the same tactic to kill six al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen on Sunday.

"Our policy on targeted killings in the Israeli-Palestinian context has not changed," US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Mr Boucher refused to talk about the Yemen attack, but said that Washington's reasons for opposing the targeted killings of Palestinians might not apply in other circumstances.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2408031.stm

I thought that was what the US Army was doing in Afghanistan??

It's my impression that's what we're paying them and the black ops guys for.

Assassinating political opponents on the other hand, not so much.

However, there is clearly room for abuse of such a program.

is a far better method to use than our current bomb-them-back-to-the-Stone-Age campaign. I also agree that there is a chance that someone is going to abuse a program like that. But, we elect people who we hope will restrain those persons as the law demands--not Bush/Cheney types who turn that type of program into an even worse abomination than it already is.

What most of us forget in the comfort and safety of our all-American worlds is that there really are a lot of people out there, like al Qaeda, who want to kill Americans just for being Americans. I'm not interested in arguing the merits of al Qaeda's philosphy, just negating the results of their works. So, I am glad that we have people who are paid well to eliminate those kinds of enemies of Americans.

I believe that most of us thought we did our jobs well in electing President Obama. We are hoping that he and his administration will rein in some of the "off the books" programs that were the brainchildren of BushCo. Judging from Director Panetta's actions I think we are making progress.

This was an assassination program PERIOD. Not only for AQ operatives. IOW, they were assassinating whoever Cheney told them to, regardless.

were secretly rubbed out... US citizens, I believe.

of it. But as everyone here "gets," that would not have been kept secret from Congress. That's just the tip of the ice cube.

me thinks it is more than that - otherwise it would be a simple covert-ops mission which would easily be something which could be briefed since it is probably similar to operations carried out by military forces all the time

me thinks it is more