Siobhan Gorman reports in the Wall Street Journal that the CIA program recently disclosed to Congress by Leon Panetta was designed to target high-level Al Qaeda leaders for assassination--something the CIA has been explicitly barred from doing since the Ford administration. It's worth noting however, that the CIA has attemped assassinations in the past--most infamously numerous attempts to kill Fidel Castro, at the behest of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, who played a prominent role in intelligence affairs in his brother's administration.
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.
Spencer Ackerman argues that this proves Panetta wasn't merely trying to curry favor with Congress but may have been obligated to by law, writing "If he discovered the effort and didn’t tell Congress, it would be cause for the oversight committees to rake him over the coals, even if he scuttled the program."
I would also second Ackerman's defense of the CIA, which I think is even more relevant in this context. The CIA has only ever done what the executive in charge has asked it to do--its most infamous abuses do not originate with the CIA, they usually originate with policymakers, not the agency.
I'm also going to wait to jump into the ethics of this--in a time when CIA drone missile attacks are one of the primary offensive tools against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, it's not clear to me where the line is in terms of unethical behavior of this nature. Lying to Congress is one thing, and the CIA isn't legally allowed to conduct assassinations--but if they were, how different would it be from what we're currently already doing?
Also, it looks like Seymour Hersh knew exactly what he was talking about.
-- A. Serwer
