Lawmaker: Panetta terminated secret program

[Liebling:-)))]

Lawmaker: Panetta terminated secret program

Program existed for eight years without the knowledge of Congress

WASHINGTON - CIA Director Leon Panetta has terminated a "very serious" covert program the spy agency kept secret from Congress for eight years, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a House Intelligence subcommittee chairwoman, said Friday.

Schakowsky is pressing for an immediate committee investigation of the classified program, which has not been described publicly. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has said he is considering an investigation.

"The program is a very, very serious program and certainly deserved a serious debate at the time and through the years," Schakowsky told The Associated Press in an interview. "But now it's over."

Democrats revealed late Tuesday that Panetta had informed members of the House Intelligence Committee on June 24 that the spy agency had been withholding important information about a secret intelligence program begun after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Schakowsky described Panetta as "stunned" that he had not been informed of the program until nearly five months into his tenure as director.

Panetta had learned of the program only the day before informing the lawmakers, according to a U.S. intelligence official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity Friday because he was not authorized to discuss the program publicly.

Internal probe
Panetta has launched an internal probe at the CIA to determine why Congress was not told about the program. Exactly what the classified program entailed is still unclear.

The intelligence official said the program was "on-again/off-again" and that it was never fully operational, but he would not provide details.

Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that the CIA and Bush administration consciously decided not to tell Congress.

"It's not as if this was an oversight and over the years it just got buried. There was a decision under several directors of the CIA and administration not to tell the Congress," she said.

Schakowsky, who chairs the Intelligence subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a Thursday letter to Reyes that the CIA's lying was systematic and inexcusable. The letter was obtained by The Associated Press on Friday.

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She said Reyes indicated to her the committee would conduct a probe into whether the CIA violated the National Security Act, which requires, with rare exceptions, that Congress be informed of covert activities. She told AP she hopes to conduct at least part of the investigation for the committee.

She said this is the fourth time that she knows of that the CIA has misled Congress or not informed it in a timely manner since she began serving on the Intelligence Committee two and half years ago.

In 2008, the CIA inspector general revealed that the CIA had lied to Congress about the accidental shoot-down of American missionaries over Peru in 2001. In 2007, news reports disclosed that the CIA had secretly destroyed videotapes of interrogations of a terrorist suspect.

She would not describe the other incident.

Schakowsky said she thinks Panetta is changing the CIA for the better, adding that the failure to inform Congress was indicative of "contempt" the Bush administration and intelligence agencies under him held for Congress.

"Many times I felt it was an annoyance to them to have to come to us and answer our questions," she said. "There was an impatience and a contempt for the Congress."

Intel authorization bill
The House is expected to take up the 2010 intelligence authorization bill next week. It includes a provision that would require the White House to inform the entire committee about upcoming covert operations rather than just the "Gang of Eight" — the senior members from both parties on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the Democratic and Republican leaders in both houses.

The White House this week threatened to veto the final version of the bill if it includes that provision.

Democratic aides said the language may be softened in negotiations with the Senate to address the White House's concern.

But Schakowsky said the wider briefings are the best remedy to avoiding future notification abuses.

Republicans charge that Democratic outrage about the Panetta revelation is just an attempt to provide political cover to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who in May accused the CIA of lying to her in 2002 about its use of waterboarding.

What Pelosi knew about the CIA's interrogation program and when she knew it — and why she did not object to it sooner — is expected to be emphasized by Republicans during debate over the intelligence bill.


Lawmaker: Panetta terminated secret program - Capitol Hill- msnbc.com


Well, Nancy Pelosi was right all along that the CIA continue lies to Congress.
Pelosi was telling the truth after all. It´s not a surprise that the CIA did not tell the truth and also Republicans tried to cover up Bush's crimes as well.

 

[Jiro]

C.I.A. Had Plan to Assassinate Qaeda Leaders

WASHINGTON — Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.

The plans remained vague and were never carried out, the officials said, and Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, canceled the program last month.

Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?

Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved because the Bush administration sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret C.I.A. jails.

Mr. Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The program was designed in the frantic weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks when President George W. Bush signed a secret order authorizing the C.I.A. to capture or kill operatives of Al Qaeda around the world. To be able to kill Osama bin Laden or his top deputies wherever they might be — even in cities or countries far from a war zone — struck top agency officials as an urgent goal, according to people involved in the discussions.

But in practice, creating and training the teams proved difficult.

“It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do, it it’s not that easy,” said one former intelligence official. “Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?”

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

There has been intense speculation about the nature of the program since members of the House Intelligence Committee disclosed last week that Mr. Panetta had put an end to it. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the secret program was intended to capture or kill senior Qaeda leaders.

Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more “surgical” solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties.

“The Predator strikes have been successful, and I was pleased to see the Obama administration continue them,” said Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “This was another effort that was trying to accomplish the same objective.”

Mr. Bond would not discuss specific details about the terminated C.I.A. program.

It is not clear why Mr. Panetta decided to cancel the program. The C.I.A. never proposed a specific operation to the White House for approval, said the officials, who would only speak anonymously because the program had been classified.

Because the program never carried out any missions and because Congress had already signed off on the agency’s broad authorities after the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials and some Republican legislators said that the C.I.A. was not required to brief lawmakers on specifics about the program.

But Congressional Democrats were furious that the program had not been shared with the committees. The Senate and House oversight committees were created by law in the 1970s as a direct response to disclosures of C.I.A. abuses, notably including assassination plots against Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Fidel Castro in Cuba and other foreign politicians. President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 issued an executive order banning assassinations.

That ban does not apply to the killing of enemies in a war, government officials say. The Bush administration took the position that killing members of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group that has attacked the United States and stated that its goal is to attack again, is no different than shooting enemy soldiers on the battlefield. The Obama administration, which has continued to fire missiles from Predator drones on suspected Qaeda members in Pakistan, has taken the same view.

Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University who has studied targeted killings, said the United States first made the argument in 1989 that killing terrorists would not violate the assassination ban and would be a legal act of self-defense under international law.

Such killings would be premised on the condition that authorities in the country where the terrorist was located were unable or unwilling to stop the terrorist, he said.

In legal terms, Mr. Anderson said, there is no real difference between killing a terrorist with a missile or with a handgun. “In political terms, there’s a real difference,” he said. “The missile feels more like regular warfare, even if it’s carried out by the C.I.A.”

But any targeted killings make many international law specialists uneasy. Hina Shamsi, an adviser to the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at New York University, said that any calculation about inserting a kill team would have to consider: the violation of the sovereignty of the country where the killing occurred; the different legal status of the C.I.A. compared with the uniformed military; and whether the killing would be covered by the law of war.

“The issue is a complex one under international law, and it encompasses all of the contentious issues of the years since 2001,” Ms. Shamsi said.

In his 2006 book “State of War,” James Risen wrote that the C.I.A. set up paramilitary teams shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks to hunt down top Qaeda operatives. Mr. Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote that the operation was soon disbanded before the C.I.A. carried out any operations. But the spy agency continued to develop plans to focus on Qaeda operatives, and top C.I.A. officials were briefed periodically about the progress of these efforts, the officials familiar with the program said.

In the spring of 2008, Michael V. Hayden, then the agency’s director, and his top aides were told about one aspect of these plans that involved gathering sensitive information in a foreign country, according to a former senior intelligence official.

Mr. Hayden ordered that the operation be scaled back and that Congress be notified if the plans became more fully developed, the official said.