http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090715/ap_on_go_co/us_cia_secret_programWASHINGTON – The CIA spent at least $1 million on the secret intelligence program that aimed to develop hit squads to kill al-Qaida leaders but never went beyond the planning stage, a congressional official said Tuesday.
The highly classified program, which never became operational but remained in existence until it was shut down by CIA Director Leon Panetta in June, is expected to trigger a congressional investigation, other officials said.
The House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA to provide documents about the now-canceled program to kill al-Qaida leaders, and agency officials said it would comply with the request, congressional officials said Tuesday.
According to one official, the agency spent at least $1 million over the eight years that the CIA considered launching the hit teams. The official would not detail the exact amount or its uses. The official and others spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The House request for documents is likely a precursor to what would likely become a full-blown investigation into the secret operation and why the program was not disclosed to Congress. Panetta, meanwhile, has ordered a thorough internal review of the program, agency spokesman George Little said.
The House Intelligence Committee will try to establish how much was spent on the effort, whether any training was conducted and whether any officials traveled in association with the program, a committee official said. Those factors would determine whether the program had progressed enough to warrant congressional notification, the official said.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, is expected to decide as early as this week whether to press ahead with a full investigation into the CIA operation.
Panetta told Congress on June 24 that he had canceled the effort to kill al-Qaida leaders with hit teams soon after learning about the operation. Panetta also told lawmakers that former Vice President Dick Cheney directed the CIA not to inform Congress of the specifics of the secret program.
President George W. Bush authorized the killing of al-Qaida leaders in 2001. Congress was aware of that notification.
A congressional official said the secret CIA program was meant to carry out ground attacks with hit teams. Most attempts to kill al-Qaida's leaders, believed to be hiding in Pakistan's troubled western border region, have used armed drone aircraft because it is difficult terrain controlled by sometimes hostile tribes. But those strikes have sometimes killed and injured innocent civilians and caused outrage in Pakistan.
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Monday that the CIA's failure to brief Congress violated the law.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., the senior GOP member of the committee, said he would support an investigation. But from what he knows now, Hoekstra said, he does not believe the effort merited congressional notification.
Like many other Republicans, Hoekstra believes the Democratic anger about not being notified of the program sooner is meant to bolster House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who came under an avalanche of GOP criticism in May for saying she believes the CIA lied to her about its harsh interrogation program in 2002.
The House has delayed floor debate on an intelligence bill that would require the president to expand the number of members of Congress briefed on covert operations; that is, secret missions undertaken in foreign countries to affect their political, military or economic situation.
The White House has threatened to veto that bill if it includes the notification requirement. Current law allows the president to notify top members in the House and Senate and on the intelligence committees on the most sensitive operations
What they are not telling you is that the original Presidential Finding was signed NOT by Bush, but by Bill Clintonhttp://www.volokh.com/[Jim Lindgren, July 14, 2009 at 12:14pm] Trackbacks
That CIA Had Plans to Kill or Capture Bin Laden Was Public Knowledge.
Today at NRO, Andrew McCarthy comments on the revelation that the CIA was plotting to kill Osama Bin Laden.
Yet the existence of a CIA program to capture or kill Bin Laden was public knowledge. Iraq-War critic Michael Scheuer, who ran the Bin Laden tracking desk at CIA, talked widely about it. Buzz Patterson in his book Dereliction of Duty tells one particularly disturbing story. In 1998 when Bin Laden had been located by the CIA and the US had a 2-hour window to kill him, Sandy Berger was waiting in the Situation Room in the White House for an OK to send a Tomahawk missile to try to kill Bin Laden. But President Clinton was too indecisive to act.
Clinton defended his actions to get Bin Laden, saying in 2002 that during his administration, we trained people to kill Osama:
Now, if you look back - in the hindsight of history, everybody's got 20/20 vision - the real issue is should we have attacked the al-Qaeda network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan.
Here's the problem. Before September 11 we would have had no support for it - no allied support and no basing rights. So we actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this. We trained people.
But in order to do it, we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat - maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval. And we would have had to do a refueling stop.
That there was extensive planning within the CIA to capture or kill Osama was so well known that I blogged about it in 2005:
The latest set of lawyers' restrictions to be alleged grew out of a plan to capture Bin Laden. So great was the lawyers' concern for Bin Laden's comfort that a special chair was built to hold him and they were concerned whether the tape used to hold him would hurt his beard. This latest nonsense was revealed by the man who for 10 years headed the CIA's desk tracking Bin Laden, Michael Scheuer, interviewed by Nora O'Donnell on Hardball. . . .
But we had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act. . . .
The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers.
When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.
Here are Andrew McCarthy's views about the current flap:
Democrats have trumped up a charge that the CIA, on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney, failed to notify Congress that it was contemplating — not implementing, but essentially brainstorming about — plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures.
This is their most ludicrous gambit in a long time —
and that’s saying something. Given their eight years of complaints about President Bush’s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and given President Clinton’s indignant insistence (against the weight of the evidence) that he absolutely wanted the CIA to kill bin Laden, one is moved to ask: What did Democrats think the CIA was doing for the last eight years?
And if Democrats did not believe the CIA was considering plans to kill or capture bin Laden, why weren’t they screaming from the rafters about such a lapse?
Certainly the existence of a CIA program to capture or kill Bin Laden was well known since late 2001. Of course, that does not mean that Congress was adequately briefed on what that program entailed or how it might have differed from the program that was publicly known.
UPDATE: Today's Washington Post has a bit more, but not much:
Some details about the CIA's newly disclosed program were first described in an article on the Wall Street Journal's Web site Sunday night. Yesterday, former and current intelligence officials characterized the initiative as a series of discrete attempts to locate and kill bin Laden and his top deputies as new leads surfaced about their possible whereabouts. Bin Laden is believed to be living in a rugged area along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
U.S. officials have said they think bin Laden is in Pakistan, so any attempt to kill him using ground forces probably would require an incursion into Pakistani territory.
One current intelligence official said the program was always small, but over time the agency considered different approaches that took advantage of evolving technical capabilities. Options were being actively weighed as recently as this spring, said the official, who added that Panetta learned of the program during a briefing that described new CIA proposals for going after bin Laden.
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