assassinations

Fresh off the latest revelation that the CIA contracted Blackwater for an assassination effort, here’s Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater’s most dogged pursuer, writing in The Nation to remind people about the breadth of the private military firm’s relationship with the agency. This quote in particular helps explain some of the legal backstory I wrote about [...]

Speaking to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Bob Braun, Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) goes to the absolute last place the CIA wants to go:
Holt said he believes the investigation, which he also called a review, should be as intense and comprehensive as the probe conducted more than 30 years ago — in the wake of the Watergate [...]

Here’s The New York Times’ contribution to the what-in-the-world-was-this-series-of-CIA-’significant-actions‘-disclosed-and-stopped-by Director-Leon-Panetta fracas. It backs up Wall Street Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman’s account of a nascent assassination program: like Gorman, The Times reports that the unfruitful effort was aimed to create teams to hunt and take out al-Qaeda leaders, and it adds that the idea of it [...]

The Guardian, fleshing out Siobhan Gorman’s Wall Street Journal piece today on the secret CIA “significant actions” that Director Leon Panetta cancelled last month, reports that the program was geared to assassinate members of al-Qaeda in friendly countries. Here’s what one former intel official told the Guardian’s Chris McGreal:
“One of the most sensitive areas has [...]

All credit is due to The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman, who provides the most thorough account so far of what the “significant actions” were that CIA Director Leon Panetta told the Congress about — and stopped — late last month. To make a long story short: the effort was apparently an on-again-off-again attempt to [...]