Word: programer
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...June 24, CIA Director Leon Panetta made a confession. For the past eight years, the agency has been running a top-secret unit to assassinate or grab members of al-Qaeda. The program was deliberately kept from Congress - supposedly on former Vice President Dick Cheney's orders - and Panetta stopped it as soon as he heard about...
...Sounds alarming. But like many of these stories, there's less to it than meets the eye. The unit conducted no assassinations or grabs. A former CIA officer involved in the program told me that no targets were picked, no weapons issued and no one sent overseas to carry out anything. "It was little more than a PowerPoint presentation," he said. "Why would we tell Congress?" (See the top 10 Secret Service code names...
...That's a good question, especially since the program was an open secret. On Oct. 28, 2001, the Washington Post ran an article with the title "CIA Weighs 'Targeted Killing' Missions." And in 2006, New York Times reporter James Risen wrote a book in which he revealed the program's secret code name, Box Top . Moreover, it is well known that on Nov. 3, 2002, the CIA launched a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone over Yemen, killing an al-Qaeda member involved in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. And who knows how many "targeted killings" there have been...
...Commandments. So I can imagine the sensitivities in the Clinton White House when it heard rumors that the CIA was planning to assassinate Saddam. It did not want to face the furor that would follow a failed attempt to kill anyone.(Read "Should Panetta Have Disclosed the CIA Secret Program...
...think we're going to find out that the CIA's assassination program was dealing in pure hypotheticals, ones it intended to tell Congress about if they became real possibilities. (I won't try to guess what Cheney would have done.) Yet however overblown the story, if a full-fledged investigation into it does occur, it could be the last nail in the CIA's coffin. This Congress could succeed where the Church Committee failed. Even if things are not that dire - people are always talking about abolishing the CIA - it will undermine morale for years. Congress, no doubt, will...