The CIA's assassination team: Dallas Morning News

Jim Mitchell

The Washington Post has a fascinating story on the CIA program that has caused such an inside the Beltway flap.
Put aside, the ridiculous Democrat attempt to help Nancy Pelosi save face by tyring to show that the CIA cheats and misrepresents (like this is news?). And while we're at it let's put aside the equally ridiculous Republican talking point that the Democrats are compromising national security and the ability to take out terrorist leaders.

Now consider the practical elements of any plan to kill anyone on foreign soil.

1) It is one thing to kill a terrorist on the battlefield, covertly or otherwise. It's quite another to kill anyone -- a head of state, a terrorist, a high-level planner in another country. And according to the order President Bush apparently signed after 9/11, the authority of hit squads to operate was not limited at all.

Let's suppose a terrorist flees to Pakistan. Right now, we're likely to use drones and maybe even uniformed special forces to track them into the border regions.

We certainly wouldn't use either to track and kill the terrorist in a major city. Why? The international political fallout would be devastating, just as it would be if an assassination team killed a Taliban leader in a major Pakistan city without informing the Pakistan government. Reverse the situation. What if someone else's civil war, political dispute or 'law enforcement" efforts resulted in a political murder on the streets in the United States. The United States quite properly would be outraged by the violence and the fact that legal means weren't used.

Now suppose a U.S. assassination team were caught or killed innocents in the effort to take out their target, the Pakistan government would have an internal crisis on their hands -- having to denounce the United States or even end cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent an internal uprising. I think Panetta and Tenet realized this wasn't worth the risk, that the short-term upside didn't outweigh the long-term downside.

2) The CIA isn't the United States' only intelligence agency. Are their similar programs underway or in the planning stages in other agencies

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