The New York Times is also reporting now that the secret Bush-era CIA program kept from Congress and terminated last month by CIA Director Leon Panetta was a plan to assassinate top al Qaeda officials that was never implemented. This is additional confirmation of the Wall Street Journal story that essentially reported the same basic outlines of the still-classified program.
The Times compares the program to drone attacks against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “This was another effort that was trying to accomplish the same objective,” Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), ranking member on the Senate intel committee, tells the paper.
But as a former CIA counterterrorism chief told TPMmuckraker today:
“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.
So regardless of how you might feel about targeted assassinations, it’s not at all clear why this particular program would be so radioactive — compared to what the U.S. was, and still is, doing more or less openly — that (1) Cheney would demand the CIA not brief Congress about it for eight years; (2) Panetta would cancel it immediately upon learning of it; and (3) Democrats would howl quite so loudly when finally informed.
Or to think about it another way, put yourself in the seat of a Democrat on one of the intel committees after 9/11. If you had any doubt about whether the intel agencies were targeting al Qaeda leaders, wouldn’t you have demanded that they show you proof they were? And if you didn’t have any doubt that they were, why are you complaining now about not being briefed?
It doesn’t add up. There’s more to this story to be told.
On TPM Reader TG’s advice, I checked out Sarah Palin’s SarahPac, her political action committee.
And it turns out he’s right. Palin does seem to have a plan for drawing a giant stencil of the state of Alaska on the mainland United States. Perhaps even removing entirely a series of midwestern and rocky mountain states.
Late Update: As TPM Reader JS points out, this may simply be an artist’s representation of a the great inland sea that will form due to expedited rising sea levels under the future Palin regime.
We knew there was a rebranding afoot. And here we have the first roll out of Sarah Palin, policy wonk. The Post agreed to run her new column on cap-and-trade.
My nominee for most absurd moment in CNBC’s checkered history was a segment late yesterday designed to mock environmentalists for thinking that Obama isn’t “radical” enough. The designated target for this “Taking Aim” segment was our buddy Chris Hayes, Washington editor of The Nation, though, as you can see, anchor Dennis Kneale couldn’t even get that part right.
Can any Republican go five minutes without bringing up Miguel Estrada.
The second day of the Sotomayor hearing just got under way. And today is the main event, the real questioning. You can watch live video and our live blogging expert legal commentary from appellate lawyer Andrew Pincus here.
Sen. John Ensign (R-NV): Not only am I not going to resign, I’m going to run again in 2012.
Mark Blumenthal has a good write up on the recent small but clear downward trend in President Obama’s approval ratings. The chief culprit: a recent spate of bad economic news. For better or worse, six months in, President Obama is starting to ‘own’ the bad economy.