Summary
The shocked reaction of Congressional intelligence committee members to revelations of a secret CIA hit squad suggests there had to be more to the story than what the media are reporting, says an international affairs expert.
Analysis
Michael Brenner, an international relations professor at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested that killings on the soil of allied countries or “accidents” such as assassinating the wrong person may be among the things lawmakers and government officials are trying to keep quiet.
Brenner also says it’s unlikely that the CIA assassination program authorized by former Vice-President Dick Cheney never went into operation.
Late last month, CIA Director Leon Panetta told members of Congress’s intelligence committees that the CIA had been running a secret assassination program since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. A July 13 report in the Wall Street Journal said that the assassination program “hadn’t become fully operational at the time Panetta ended it” in late June.
The idea that a CIA hit squad remained inactive for seven years after the vice-president ordered its creation “strains credulity,” Brenner writes in an article at the National Journal.
Brenner says that if even the Republicans on the intel committees were appalled by what they heard, then it couldn’t have been simply news of a purely theoretical plan to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders.
“It is likely to Panetta gave some details about another, operational program lodged in the Pentagon. His shocking testimony may have been about: killings on the soil of friendly countries; ‘accidents’ in the form of misidentifications and/or collateral damage; kidnappings, incarceration at ‘black sites, torture; free-lancing, inter alia.”
Brenner also says there is “considerable evidence” that Donald Rumsfeld, during his tenure as Secretary of Defense, instituted an “executive assassination ring.”
“It supposedly was a dedicated unit (Task Force 121) based in the Joint Special Operations Command,” Brenner writes.
Brenner also points to then-President George W. Bush’s off-the-cuff comment from his 2004 inaugural address about Al Qaeda leaders “who never will be heard from again,” in Brenner’s words, as evidence that the CIA hit squad program — or some assassination program — had to have been active at the time.
