It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified “threat.” This is the most recent consequence of a troublingly overbroad interpretation of Congress’s 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. This sweeping interpretation envisions a war that knows no borders or definable time limits and targets an enemy that the government has refused to define in public. This policy is particularly troubling since it targets U.S. citizens, who retain their constitutional right to due process even when abroad.

His colleague Jonathan Manes wants to know more:

The American people have a right to know more about a policy that grants the president the unilateral authority to approve the killing of U.S. citizens. It is essential that more information be made available about who can be targeted for killing, who makes these decisions and on the basis of how much evidence, and whether lethal force can be used if arrest or capture are possible or have not been attempted. While there is little doubt that a U.S. citizen fighting for an enemy army could lawfully be killed on the battlefield in the course of fighting, this policy goes far beyond the ordinary parameters of battlefield combat. It appears to allow for the deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is.

“What the agency was doing with Blackwater scares the hell out of me,” said Jack Rice, a former CIA field operator who worked for the directorate of operations, which runs covert paramilitary activities for the CIA. “When the agency actually cedes all oversight and power to a private organization, an organization like Blackwater, most importantly they lose control and don’t understand what’s going on,” Rice told The Nation. “What makes it even worse is that you then can turn around and have deniability. They can say, ‘It wasn’t us, we weren’t the ones making the decisions.’ That’s the best of both worlds. It’s analogous to what we hear about torture that was being done in the name of Americans, when we simply handed somebody over to the Syrians or the Egyptians or others and then we turn around and say, ‘We’re not torturing people.’”

But perhaps the most rococo aspect of Scahill’s piece is unrelated to the assassination program. In a federal court case brought by family members of the victims in Blackwater’s 2007 shootings in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, the company is asking the Justice Department to view the U.S. government, and not Blackwater, as the real defendant in the case.

In his motion, Blackwater lawyer Peter White of the powerhouse firm Mayer Brown argued that the company was working for the State Department in Iraq and therefore was on official business when the alleged killings and injuries of Iraqis took place. White cites the 1988 Westfall Act, which prohibits suits against government employees for their actions on behalf of the government and states that the government will assume liability for any lawsuits against employees.

I went into the wrong business.

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 scandal — by a special committee headed by U.S. Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat.

Holt is basically thinking out loud here. He said similar things to me on Tuesday, referencing the Church and Pike commissions of the 1970s. He’s got no proposal — yet — for launching an “intense and comprehensive” probe of secret CIA activities like the assassination thing. (Oh yeah, and that was apparently getting revived inside the agency when Director Leon Panetta shut it down.) And who knows whether other members of Congress would be interested in reviving such a probe.

But this would cause the CIA to hyperventilate. The scandal-revealing Church and Pike commissions divided the history of the CIA into before and after epochs, with the post-Church/Pike period being one of much greater congressional scrutiny. (There weren’t any intelligence committees, for instance, before the investigations.) The biggest thing the CIA fears is another 9/11. The second biggest thing the CIA fears is another Church/Pike.

There’s an irony that needs to be pointed out. People like Dick Cheney watched Church/Pike with horror, considering the increased congressional scrutiny to be disastrous for CIA morale and efficacy. Cheney set to work in the Bush administration pushing the CIA out from the strictures of the post-Church/Pike era. But the results of actions could very well be a second Church/Pike.

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One thing The Times doesn’t report is the newest speculation/rumor: that this effort would have included hunting al-Qaeda domestically, where the CIA is not not not supposed to act. Some sources of Time’s Bobby Ghosh — who seem not to have first-hand information — are musing along those lines. I have no information for this proposition, but we’re too early in this to rule anything decisively out. The Guardian reported yesterday that the teams were intended to operate in allied countries where a U.S. spray-and-leave capability would be, at a minimum, diplomatically problematic.

But would that really have freaked Congress out? The Bush administration had the CIA abduct people like Abu Omar off the streets of Milan with minimal congressional opposition. An effort to assassinate him, to be macabre about it, is the next logical step. And Congress has no problem assassinating suspected members of al-Qaeda from the air.

So clearly there’s more here, though I have no idea as yet what the additional ‘there’ is. One striking thing about this is how comic-book-y it all seems: trying to create teams of assassins to gallavant around the world killing terrorists in stealthy ways. I think this is the plot of the new “G.I. Joe” movie.

“One of the most sensitive areas has been what we do in friendly countries that don’t want to cooperate or maybe we don’t have enough confidence to entrust them with information. If you have an al-Qaida guy wandering around certain bits of the world we might decide that we need to deal with that ourselves, directly, without making a lot of noise,” he said. “There was a plan to deal with that. It was much talked about in the CIA and the military had its own operation.”

My quest to elaborate on this took a revealing turn when I asked a currently-serving intelligence official whether the Guardian had it right. “This effort has been briefed to the Congress,” the official replied. “They know what this was and what it wasn’t.” So I asked a congressional staffer, who answered, “Like Congress can talk about it.” This is what it’s like reporting this story, folks.

Here’s a description of the program, as Gorman reports it:

Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.

“It was straight out of the movies,” one of the former intelligence officials said. “It was like: Let’s kill them all.”

Two things. First, we’ve known for years that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld endeavored to move Special Forces in the direction of traditional CIA covert operations. In 2005, the Pentagon acknowledged creating so-called “Strategic Support Teams” of military and civilian personnel for unspecified and hairy operations. I’d check out this briefing for a suggestion of what these things might have been, or might have tried to be:

Q: Have they been deployed anywhere besides Iraq and Afghanistan thus far?

SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Well see, we really haven’t deployed teams as — you know, as described here as these Strategic Support Teams. Up until now, we have been deploying from the larger base of those capabilities and Defense HUMINT services, as I said earlier, sort of individual augmentations drawn broadly from our capabilities.

Whether this sort of thing is a cousin to the “significant actions” emerging here remains to be seen, but I wonder.

Second, this really ought to quiet all talk that Panetta was just trying to mend fences with congressional Democrats after the fracas with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over whether CIA lied to Congress about torture briefings. For about 30 years, the CIA has been barred from conducting assassinations. It makes all the sense in the world for Panetta to disclose to Congress a newly-discovered program to build up an assassinations capability. If he discovered the effort and didn’t tell Congress, it would be cause for the oversight committees to rake him over the coals, even if he scuttled the program.