Victoria Toensing, a conservative former lawyer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, makes a lame and unprovable analogy to the Valerie Plame leak:

“Unlike the Valerie Plame matter, where the cocktail circuit knew she worked for the CIA, these people … Blackwater, were covert,” said Victoria Toensing, a former chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committe. “Every fact that I know points to a violation unlike the Valerie Plame matter. The identifier, the exposer, has to know the relationship is covert.”

First of all, no, “the cocktail circuit” didn’t “know” Plame worked for the CIA. That construction makes it seem like Plame’s identity was an open secret, which is a constant meme simply invented by the right out of thin air in 2003 to minimize the impact of the Bush administration’s leaking of Plame’s identity as a covert agent to discredit her war-critic husband Joseph Wilson. There’s also no way of falsifying it, since — well, who’s the “cocktail circuit” anyway? Toensing knows full well what she’s doing — she’s a lawyer — and she discredits herself by her deceit. Second of all, her point about knowing the Blackwater relationship being covert is surely correct. But isn’t there a difference in the fact that the program was never operative? As a different intelligence official acknowledges to Lake and Carter:

“These leaks, unlike others in the past, didnt cost the country a viable collection or counterterrorism capability,” the official said. “There were different concepts considered and tested over the years, but they always ran into problems.They never proved themselves, so its not a big loss.”

Nevertheless, the two reporters quote the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), as saying:

“They foil our attempts to carry out classified missions,” Sen. Christopher S. Bond said in an interview. “They tell our intelligence community: We don’t have your back; we’re stabbing you in the back. Our allies ask us, ‘How can we trust you to deal in classified matters in private, when the details are leaked to the press?’”

I suppose in a general sense the point is arguable, but in this particular case, there was never an operational program, so the damage can’t be as bad as Bond portrays. But still: it’s possible the law was broken by this leak, and an investigation into whether that was in fact the case is most certainly appropriate.

“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.

According to a story on Thursday in the Washington Post, you stated that the failure to notify the congressional intelligence committees about a program recently cancelled by CIA Director Leon Panetta did not violate the law. I disagree and believe that the program in question fit squarely within the notification requirements of the National Security Act. I therefore request that you provide me with your analysis, and any analysis by the DNI General Counsel, supporting your conclusion.

One thing worth noting here: Feingold is saying that the lack of Congressional notification on the program is legally problematic, not necessarily the program itself. He issued a statement on July 13, shortly after the barest outlines of the program became public knowledge, striking a similar tone:

The failure to notify the congressional intelligence committees of the program prior to last month was a violation of the National Security Act and individuals who ordered that Congress be kept in the dark should be held accountable. I also have deep concerns about the program itself and have conveyed those concerns, along with a request for a thorough investigation, in a classified letter to the president.

“Deep concerns about the program” is what precedes an investigation into the program’s legality, as the House intelligence committee is now pursuing. But it’s not a conclusion about whether the program is itself illegal, as that doesn’t seem to be a conclusion any member of Congress is presently in a position to make.

“The content of the briefing was serious,” said Holt, speaking about the June 23 briefing when Panetta told the House Intelligence Committee about a still-secret program begun after 9/11. “I don’t think he would’ve launched into this if it were just a trivial matter. It was serious.” (Holt would not discuss the content of the classified activities Panetta recently canceled, but reporting has linked them to an inchoate effort to bolster the CIA’s assassinations capabilities. See this Newsweek story for some of the latest.)

That said, Holt, one of the seven signatories of the congressional letter that announced the program to the public, expressed deep concerns about the fact that the CIA withheld the program from Congress, and put that secrecy on par with the substance of the program itself. “The issue here, as much as anything, is just how far can we let the intelligence [community] go in unexamined activities, dangerous activities. It’s been going on for years and years, and not just under the Bush administration.” He added that since it’s been three and a half decades since the comprehensive congressional reviews of the intelligence community known as the Church and Pike commissions, “I think the public would find some other jawdropping revelations” about what the CIA has committed with minimal oversight.

One of the objections to launching another such comprehensive congressional inquiry — or even to the outrage on the Hill over withholding this current program — is the damage that it’ll do to CIA morale. Retired CIA operative Bob Baer just told ABC, “It’s going to hurt our national security.” Holt says that not only has he not heard any such concerns from inside the agency he oversees, but that expanded oversight would be a remedy for the any operative’s feelings of besiegement. “The CIA should not want to take such risks of various covert action programs over the years without [congressional] oversight,” he said. “You just do a better job when you have to justify your actions to an independent evaluator.”

President Obama, however, is threatening to veto this year’s intelligence funding bill if it doesn’t strip out a provision to expand briefings on the most sensitive CIA activities to the full committee.

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“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” is. But the preponderence of evidence so far is that it was an effort to kill members of al-Qaeda in baroque, Image Comics-like ways. If so, that would make it different only in degree from existing efforts that members of Congress do not find particularly controversial. One might fairly say that CIA trying to find new and better ways of killing al-Qaeda is exactly what you want CIA to be thinking about. If the effort is ultimately impractical, as appears to be the case here, then you scrap it and go back to the drawing board, to respond to Bond’s question. But the effort appears not to be — so far; and there’s a ton we still don’t know — any sort of strategic departure.

Inference is a crude and unreliable tool. It’s natural to infer that an illogical account is implausible. In this case, that cashes out to saying that members of Congress can’t be so exercised about a fairly-moribund effort to soup up an agreed-upon goal, and so there must be more here. Maybe so. Probably so, even. But maybe — just maybe — there’s less here than meets the eye. I’ve seen more members of Congress discuss with horror the fact that they were cut out of the loop rather than I’ve seen members alarmed at the program itself. I’m not drawing any conclusions — it’s way way way too soon for that — just adding a note of caution to everyone’s speculation.

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.

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.

Among the things known: Panetta “put a stake” in the nebulous program, according to Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the senior Republican on the committee, when he learned about it following an internal review he launched about what the agency’s been up to for the past eight years. The Washington Post’s murderer’s row of reporters report that it was an “on again, off again” attempt to create a new intelligence collection capability related to counterterrorism, and run through the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Apparently it didn’t get off the drawing board but who knows. It wasn’t a covert action, which would have, by law, required reporting to Congress. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate intelligence committee — who’s conducting an investigation of CIA interrogation after 9/11 that’s created much anxiety inside the agency — told the paper instructions were specifically given “not to brief Congress.” Panetta has created an internal review of how the CIA briefs Congress. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once remarked that most inter-office disputes occur because someone felt out of the loop; clearly that advice had more salience to him and his Bush administration colleagues before January 2001.

One Bush administration official said the whole thing was “no big deal.” That might be my favorite blind quote about the program so far.

This, however, is a worth reviewing as an explanation for Panetta’s behavior:

Some Republicans, meanwhile, privately questioned whether Panetta — who has stood with CIA officers in a dispute with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — was looking to score points with House Democrats.

Now, every CIA director is caught between three conflicting pressures: pleasing the administration; pleasing Congress; and pleasing his agency. The successful ones keep the plates spinning and find the time to focus on, like, keeping the agency collecting and analyzing vital intelligence. The unsuccessful ones tip too far in one direction or another. If Panetta really is out to make sure that the House Democrats retain confidence in him by needlessly revealing a sensitive program, then he’s kissed his credibility inside the agency goodbye. Would a longtime bureaucratic player like Panetta really do that? Would a longtime CIA veteran like Deputy Director Steve Kappes let him? I don’t know the answers, I’m just setting up the questions. Alternatively: could it be that Panetta thinks that if he doesn’t start going to Congress with accounts of mistakenly withheld programs, the public pressure to investigate the agency even further will intensify, and so he might view this disclosure as a necessary ante in order to spare the agency a deeper scrutiny?

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