Cheney, Hersh and The CIA's Assassination Squads

By Steve Hynd

Back in March, Sy Hersh caused a storm with some remarks at a University of Minnesota discussion.

the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven�t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it�s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It�s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it�s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush�s authority, they�ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That�s been going on, in the name of all of us."

A lot of people were skeptical - myself included. Yet now mainstream outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are reporting a story that's at least halfway there. The Washington Post summarizes:

The CIA ran a secret program for nearly eight years that aspired to kill top al-Qaeda leaders with specially trained assassins, but the agency declined to tell Congress because the initiative never came close to bringing Osama bin Laden and his deputies into U.S. cross hairs, U.S. intelligence and congressional officials said yesterday.

The plan to deploy teams of assassins to kill senior terrorists was legally authorized by the administration of George W. Bush, but it never became fully operational, according to sources briefed on the matter. The sources confirmed that then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney had urged the CIA to delay notifying Congress about the diplomatically sensitive plan -- a bid for secrecy that congressional Democrats now say thwarted proper oversight.

The program, which was terminated last month, touched off a political firestorm last week when several Democrats said the CIA had misled Congress by not disclosing its existence. CIA Director Leon E. Panetta gave lawmakers their first overview on June 24, within hours of learning about it, the officials said.

Some officials familiar with the program said certain elements of it were operational and should have been disclosed because they involved "significant resources and high risk," as one intelligence official described it. But others said the initiative never advanced beyond concepts and feasibility studies.

I have to say, I've no problem with tightly controlled targeted assassinations of the leaders of hostile terrorist groups if it's done with a strategy in mind, one where the idea is to "hothouse" more moderate leaders by removing their rivals and making the moderates fearful for their own safety if they don't "jaw, jaw instead of war, war". I've argued for exactly that in the past and, after all, the only differences between a special forces bullet and a Predator-launched missile are that the bullet is cheaper and doesn't also hit dozens of civilians. But such a program shouldn't be secret - in fact it relies for some of its efficacy on being publicly known.

And the problem with secret assassination orders is mission creep.

 it's not at all clear why this particular program would be so radioactive -- compared to what the U.S. was, and still is, doing more or less openly -- that (1) Cheney would demand the CIA not brief Congress about it for eight years; (2) Panetta would cancel it immediately upon learning of it; and (3) Democrats would howl quite so loudly when finally informed.

Or to think about it another way, put yourself in the seat of a Democrat on one of the intel committees after 9/11. If you had any doubt about whether the intel agencies were targeting al Qaeda leaders, wouldn't you have demanded that they show you proof they were? And if you didn't have any doubt that they were, why are you complaining now about not being briefed?

It doesn't add up. There's more to this story to be told.

So is the rest of Sy Hersh's story about to emerge into the light?

It's not that controversial to have a team ready to kill or capture Bin Laden or other senior Al Qaeda operatives. It is controversial to have a team ready to kill ... other targets.

Remember, the Bush administration told us that their warrantless wiretapping program was aimed only at Al Qaeda affiliates and we found out that was nowhere near the case. There were guys listening in on phone sex calls of innocent Americans by the time we found out about that program.

So, I have to ask what I previously thought unimaginable. Who exactly were the assassination squads supposed to assassinate?

I really don't want to get into crazy speculation. I certainly don't think this program would be turned inward as well. And it is eminently possible that it was just aimed at senior Al Qaeda guys, as I explained above. But given the history of the Bush administration and what has been less than honest explanations in the past, one has to ask - who were the targets under consideration?

If as a journalist, you don't ask this question, then you're not doing your job. It would be hard to argue this isn't relevant.

Dick Cheney hid this program from Congress (under what authority could he order a program like this in the first place?) and ordered the CIA to lie about it to the rest of the government (including large portions of the FBI and CIA). Is it not conceivable that as Cheney worked the "dark side," he gave other unimaginable orders? Did Bush even know what orders Cheney was giving? Did Bush know who was on the assassination list? If they had a program, they had a list, right? Who's on the list?

If they bothered to have assassination squads, it seems inconceivable that they didn't make a list. Does anyone have that list? Where is it now? And who's on it?

And if the CIA program didn't get fully going was there a parallel military program, still secret, that did?