CIA Demilitarization Has Stalled

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/232974/cia-demilitarization-has-stalled/

Obama’s strategy of transferring control of drone strikes to the Pentagon is facing challenges from reticent interns, operational differences and a divided Congress.

CIA Demilitarization Has Stalled
El País, Spain
By Joan Faus & Eva Saiz
Translated By Catriona McDermid
15 February 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

In May 2013, in one of his most significant speeches on defense, U.S. President Barack Obama advocated an overhaul of the anti-terrorist strategy that had been in place since the 9/11 attacks. The outlines of the new plan centered on a directive that would, among other initiatives, gradually transfer control of the drone attack program from the CIA to the Pentagon, a sign of the general consensus within the administration on the need for greater transparency in relation to drone use and the need to demilitarize the intelligence agency.

Nine months later, however, most attacks are still controlled from the CIA’s drone operation center in Langley. Divisions in the Senate, reticence on the part of certain sections of the agency itself and, most of all, operational, legal and even cultural differences between the programs operated by the CIA and those run by the Pentagon are the main obstacles standing in the way of the smooth transition for which the Obama administration had hoped.

“There are practical questions about the jurisdiction of the armed forces and how intervention should be limited in different parts of the world. Then there are the problems associated with an intelligence agency that is able to carry out executions,” explains Paul Pillar in a telephone conversation.* Pillar was a CIA analyst for 29 years, until 2005, and is now a senior research fellow in national security at Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution. The CIA was the first to implement drone strikes against al-Qaida militants in Pakistan in 2001, while the Pentagon carried out its first attack in Yemen in December 2009, just three days after al-Qaida’s Arabian Peninsula branch was declared a terrorist organization. The CIA joined the attacks in Yemen in 2011, killing U.S. cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who had managed to elude the armed forces, in its first incursion.

Although the objectives are the same, the ways in which the two institutions determine, develop and carry out drone strikes are very different, as is the legal cover under which they operate. “In the military context there are much stricter legal and institutional requisites that must be met before an operation can be carried out,” explains Christopher Swift, adjunct professor of national security studies at Georgetown University, who lived in Yemen for several years.*

[GoneFishin]

1. Maybe there are very good reasons for this : "stricter legal and institutional requisites"

“In the military context there are much stricter legal and institutional requisites that must be met before an operation can be carried out,”

[tech3149]

2. Absolutely!

The CIA has been a rogue operation almost from its inception. Truman knew it and admitted as much after Kennedy was killed.

[MisterP]

3. this in fact happened TO the CIA with Iran-Contra: the NSC was much more

able to create a financing-and-purchasing system that stood on its own without even the Black Budget (hence all the cocaine, which Langley balked at, 'cos the desk jockeys actually know about blowback unlike the in-field crusaders)