Time's Karen Tumulty: The CIA: What Was It Up To?

[flpoljunkie]

The CIA: What Was It Up To?

Posted by KAREN TUMULTY
Monday, July 13, 2009 at 3:13 pm

It is the biggest mystery in Washington at the moment. Here's what our colleague Bobby Ghosh says his sources are telling him:

Speculation abounds about the nature of the secret program Dick Cheney asked the CIA to keep from the Congressional oversight committees. The most sensational reports suggest it was plan to find and kill top Al Qaeda leaders – like the covert Israeli campaign to take out the perpetrators of the Munich killings.

But two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job – and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

“People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that's very unlikely,” says one official. “More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI.”

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/07/13/the-cia-what-was-it-up-to/#more-14537

[Jane Austin]

1. This makes much more sense

than that WSJ story.

[tridim]

2. Why does everyone assume that "program" means "focused program"?

Why couldn't it be an all-encompassing program that covered all of The Dick's evil ideas?

[PretzelWarrior]

3. of course it was. we will probably find out it helped Bush get the win in 2004 also

because with the divided country Rove only had to have a few areas of the country to disrupt.

My question is why that damn hurricane if it had to happen couldn't have happened a year earlier. Then there would have been no Bush II. Then again, we'd be looking at President Kerry going for reelection in 2008 with a financial disaster on his hands.

[flpoljunkie]

4. More on this theory from Talkingpointsmemo and former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro

CIA Vet: Agency Doesn't Need Secret Program To Target al Qaeda

By Zachary Roth - July 13, 2009, 3:57PM

Earlier today, we raised a few questions about the notion that the secret CIA program that Dick Cheney reportedly withheld from Congress concerned an effort to kill or capture al Qaeda leaders. And now a top counter-terror expert is doing the same.

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization.

Since the war on terror began, said Cannistraro, the CIA has routinely conducted operations targeting top Qaeda leaders. "The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time," said Cannistraro, explaining that there's no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.

Cannistraro said the Defense Department has also conducted such targeted efforts, under an initiative that New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh has written about.

But Cannistraro cautioned that that DOD program has nothing to do with the secret, unidentified CIA program which Cheney is said to have hid from Congress, and which CIA director Leon Panetta ended last month.

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn't acting alone. "The approval was from the president," said Cannistraro.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/cia_vet_agency_doesnt_need_secret_program_to_targe.php?ref=fpa

[Adelante]

5. That's what I was thinking about earlier

Killing or capturing A-Q leaders would be expected. Spying or worse on Americans, now that's a CIA scandal.

[Cha]

6. Whatever it is..the fucking bush vp

dick cheney shouldn't have been sneaking around like some evil lurker taking things into his own dirty hands.