Can We Get Somebody To Call This Muthafuka Out?

Uhmmm when exactly are the Democrats planning on nailing the low hanging fruit that is Pete Hoekstra to teh damn wall? Between him and Tom Coburn Democrats should have had people wanting to storm the offices of the RNC by now. I mean seriously, what the fucking fuck?!

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Show Me Whatcha Workin Wit

Ladies and Gentlemen, there shall be an investigation!

This release just out from House Intel committee chair Silvestre Reyes, which says that House Dems have decided to probe the secret CIA program that had been concealed from Congress and was revealed the other day by CIA director Leon Panetta, is a big deal:

“After careful consideration and consultation with the Ranking Minority Member and other members of the Committee, I am announcing an official Committee investigation into possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1974.

“This investigation will focus on the core issues of how the congressional intelligence committees and Congress are kept fully and currently informed. To this end, the investigation will examine several issues, including the program discussed during [CIA] Director [Leon] Panetta’s June 24th notification and whether there was any official decision or direction to withold information from the Committee.”

Now the funny thing about investigations is that when you start pulling back the covers sometimes you find something you weren't even looking for.

Oh I don't know, like some skeletons that Dick Cheney is trying to keep buried.

Nope Not Buying It

Zachary Roth of TPM isn't buying the Wall Street Journal's Al Qaeda assasination ring story either:

But there's reason to believe we still don't have anything like the full story. First of all, according to one of the Journal's sources, both Cheney and President Bush opposed what seems to be a particularly aggressive iteration of the program, involving using "teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks," by carrying out targeted assassinations.

That doesn't appear to line up with the Times' report that Cheney was behind the decision to keep Congress in the dark about the secret program, though strictly speaking it doesn't contradict it.

But there are other reasons to keep asking questions:

Perhaps most importantly, a program, launched immediately after September 11 to capture or kill top al Qaeda operatives just doesn't seem sufficiently radioactive to have provoked the kerfuffle it has. To be sure, Congress outlawed targeted CIA assassinations in the 1970s in response to the excesses of 50s and 60s, and the issue played a key role in the move during the same period to give Congress greater powers to oversee the agency. And if the program allowed CIA to act without the consent or knowledge of liaison services in the countries where the targets were located, that's obviously a big deal.

Still, the US military has openly been trying to get Osama bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders "dead or alive" since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Would CIA involvement in that effort be so explosive that it would not only need to be kept from Congress in the first place, but would also have been shut down by Panetta as soon as he learned about it?

By the same token, it was Democratic lawmakers who brought the issue into the news last week by complaining that they had for years been kept in the dark on the unidentified program. Would they have chosen to initiate that spat when it seems to allow them to be portrayed as opposing an effort to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists?

Exactly!

I can't wait till the REAL story comes out.

Hypothetical...

Ok I am not saying its for sure, but how likely is it that this story that Spencer Ackerman is working on, dovetails with the previous story about a CIA program that Leon Panetta had to recently brief Congress on?

Cheney's Assasination Ring?

Since last night news of a letter that House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee sent to CIA Director Leon Panetta has created a strong buzz. Evidently last month Panetta testified to the committtee about a covert program which had been going on reportedly since 2001 until now and which members of Congress had never been briefed on. Clearly such testimony was at odds with Panetta's much ballyhooed statement on May 15 of earlier this year where he claimed that it is not the policy of the CIA to mislead members of Congress.

That statement was used as a club by the House Republicans to beat up on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her earlier remarks that the CIA lied to her on a regular basis. So obviously this letter was in many ways a political move. But there is a high possibility that it was a policy move as well meant to underscore the need to include a provision in the new Intelligence funding bill set to be voted on in the House in the next few days which would require that the WhiteHouse brief more members of Congress on covert actions. The WhiteHouse has reportedly threatened to veto any bill with such a provision.

But now a possibly more important story is emerging. Above and beyond the question of whether or not Congress was properly briefed on this covert program the bigger deal may be what the program is in the first place. Could it be that this covert program is the same one that Seymore Hersch previously referred to as an assassination squad? Sam Stein of HuffPo examines the possibility.

So what are the "significant actions" that these seven lawmakers insist were kept from Congress? Another theory being bandied about concerns an "executive assassination ring" that was allegedly set up and answered to former Vice President Dick Cheney. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, building off earlier reporting from the New York Times, dropped news of that ring's apparent existence in a March 2009 discussion sponsored by the University of Minnesota.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," Hersh said. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it," he added. "It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths. Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."

Asked if this was the basis of her letter to Panetta, Eshoo said she could not discuss what was a "highly classified program." She did, however, note that when Panetta told House Intelligence Committee members what it was that had been kept secret, "the whole committee was stunned, even Republicans."

Panetta himself was kept in the dark about the program -- whatever it was -- having only been told about the classified activity on June 23. "His own top leadership didn't even brief him that this program existed," said Eshoo.