After the libs read this, where will all their outrage go?
A reader wrote to me expressing outrage over Vice President Cheney’s recently revealed order to the CIA not to tell the Congress about a secret plan to assassinate al Qaeda leaders.
Then I came upon this, by Guy Benson at NRO:
“Killing Terrorists-Gate” and Phony Outrage
House Democrats are in (cynical, calculated) high dudgeon after a shocking “revelation” was made public this week. Brace yourself, because this bombshell isn’t for the faint of heart: After 9/11, the Bush administration considered a CIA program designed to target and kill top al-Qaeda operatives. Gasp. It gets worse: Some members of Congress now say they weren’t sufficiently briefed on the then-nascent secret program (which was never actually implemented), and it’s even possible that Vice President Cheney intentionally kept lawmakers in the dark about the preliminary plans (which, again, never became operational)….
Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter feed directs us to this New York Times story from December, 2002:
The Bush administration has prepared a list of terrorist leaders the Central Intelligence Agency is authorized to kill, if capture is impractical and civilian casualties can be minimized, senior military and intelligence officials said.
The previously undisclosed C.I.A. list includes key Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, the officials said. The names of about two dozen terrorist leaders have recently been on the lethal-force list, officials said. “It’s the worst of the worst,” an official said.
Mr. Bush issued a presidential finding last year, after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, providing the basic executive and legal authority for the C.I.A. to either kill or capture terrorist leaders. Initially, the agency used that authority to hunt for Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan. That authority was the basis for the C.I.A.”s attempts to find and kill or capture Mr. Bin laden and other Qaeda leaders during the war in Afghanistan.
Hmm. The outline of this program—described for all the world (including House Democrats) to read in 2002—sounds a heck of a lot like the bombshell/revelation over which House Democrats are wetting themselves in 2009. Curiouser and curiouser. And if that’s not enough to prove how thoroughly phony their supposed indignation and demands for “truth” commissions are, check out paragraphs 11-12 of the WSJ piece linked above:
Republicans on the panel say that the CIA effort didn’t advance to a point where Congress clearly should have been notified.
One former senior intelligence official said the program was an attempt “to achieve a capacity to carry out something that was directed in the finding,” meaning it was looking for ways to capture or kill al Qaeda chieftains.
The official noted that Congress had long been briefed on the finding, and that the CIA effort wasn’t so much a program as “many ideas suggested over the course of years.” It hadn’t come close to fruition, he added.
Let’s review.
1. Democrats are “furious” that the Bush administration didn’t tell them about a never-instituted CIA plan to eliminate top terrorists, and want to use the CIA director’s formal cancelation of the program last week as an opportunity to back up the speaker’s reckless and slanderous claim that the CIA lies “all the time.”
2. But the “secret” program in question was described by The Paper of Record seven years ago, and contemporary reports on the matter include quotes from intelligence sources who say that Congress had “long been briefed” on the original presidential finding that spurred the abandoned CIA strategy.
I’m beginning to suspect that some Democrats in Congress may not be all that serious about national security.
[end of Benson article]
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2009 08:15 AM | Send