Did the CIA program that Dick Cheney hid from Congress authorize the CIA to assassinate enemies located in friendly foreign countries? A report by the Guardian says the answer is yes:
Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate of al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.
First, a little background...
Like many of you, today's report in the Wall Street Journal about the nature of the secret CIA program didn't ring true for me. If the program were simply an "attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives," there would have been no need for Dick Cheney to order the CIA to hide the program from Congress. In fact, it has been widely known for years that the CIA was targeting Al Qaeda leaders. The New York Times reported in 2002 that George W. Bush had authorized the CIA to kill or capture high-value Al Qaeda targets:
President Bush has provided written legal authority to the C.I.A. to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation. Some officials said the terrorist list was known as the "high-value target list."
So why did Dick Cheney insist that this program be kept secret if this was already public knowledge? To try to find the answer, I looked back at comments made by New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh regarding the existence of an assassination ring, subject to no Congressional oversight, that was controlled by Dick Cheney. What Seymour Hersh described bears a striking resemblance to the program described in the Wall Street Journal. However, unlike the WSJ article, which makes no mention of where these assassinations took place, Seymour Hersh pinpointed what is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the program:
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.
This implies that the CIA was, without any kind of permission or authorization, sneaking into countries with which we have healthy diplomatic relations and killing people without even the slightest pretense of due process. Indeed, buried deep in the Wall Street Journal article was this hint that the assassinations were not limited to terrorist leaders in Afghanistan or Iraq:
Amid the high alert following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.
"It was straight out of the movies," one of the former intelligence officials said. "It was like: Let's kill them all."
Anyone who has seen the movie Munich knows that it is about a team of Israeli assassins who hunted down suspected members of Black September, a terrorist group responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. And those who are familiar with the movie also know that these assassinations occurred without the permission of any foreign government all over Europe and the Middle East, in places such as Rome, Athens, Cyprus and Beirut.
With these two pieces of information, I ventured a guess about why Dick Cheney felt so strongly that this program be kept secret. Now the Guardian seems to confirm my suspicions:
Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.
The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.
Again, this seems to confirm Seymour Hersh's comments about the assassination ring, which he said had been stopped "because there were so many collateral deaths." If Seymour Hersh is correct, then the CIA program was only the tip of the iceberg. According to Hersh, many of the actions of this assassination ring were carried out by members of the Joint Special Operations Command, which reports to the Pentagon, in order to avoid the mandatory Congressional oversight of the CIA.
There are more questions than answers at this point. Why did the CIA seemingly abandon this program? How long was this program operational? How many people were killed? Who knew of its existence? Why was it kept secret for so long? How will the American public react? What will the response of our international allies be?