significant actions

The CIA is none too happy about the recent disclosure of apparently inchoate “significant actions” canceled by Director Leon Panetta. After the activities’ initial disclosure to Congress in late June, additional reporting determined that these actions were a never-operational effort at assassinating members of al-Qaeda and were contracted to the controversial firm Blackwater. Now, Eli [...]

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 [...]

Greg Sargent reports that Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) is calling out Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, for implying to The Washington Post that there was nothing illegal about keeping Congress in the dark for the past eight years about secret CIA “significant actions” that may have been some kind of nascent assassination program. [...]

After interviewing Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) a few minutes ago, I think I want to revise and extend my comment this morning that most members of Congress alarmed over the revelation of “significant actions” by the CIA that Director Leon Panetta recently stopped were more concerned with not being briefed than by the actions themselves.
“The [...]

It comes in this Washington Post story about the aforementioned CIA “significant actions“:
“Why would you cancel it?” asked Sen. Christopher S. Bond (Mo.), the ranking Republican on the Senate intelligence committee. “If the CIA weren’t trying to do something like this, we’d be asking ‘Why not?’ “
Well, yeah. We don’t yet know what “this” [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

So we don’t know exactly what “significant actions” CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged to the House intelligence committee were not properly briefed to Congress. Marc Ambinder tries to sort through the possibilities but understandably has to go a bit meta because — well, because he, like the rest of us, doesn’t know, really.
Among the [...]