So what do you think the spy prgram Panetta just canceled was? A death squad, a surveilance method, or what?
My guess is that it was death squad authorized to kill suspected terrorist leaders in countries that were not cooperating with the US. My second guess is that it was a means for monitoring all cell phone communications in the US and doing some sort of data mining by looking at who called who and trying to tie it back to known terrorist contacts.
This is a poll, not a debate.
I am going to leave it here for a while in case a debate breaks out, but if one does not, it is off to IMHO.
[ /Modding ]
Maybe you should just close it. The newsseems to be breaking.
I don’t think a CIA plan to capture or kill Al Queda leaders was illegal, secret or controversial. So I think that the WSJ article does not reveal anything new. Panetta seems to have uncovered something that was secret, illegal and would be highly controversial if known. Seymour Hersh’s reporting on a secret assassination squad that reported only to Cheney is probably closer to being on target. And the implication is that the targets were not what would otherwise be legitimate Al Queda targets. We might see. He is going to report to Congress.
I find it mind boggling that assassination of mass murderers would be of higher questionable morality than torturing mid-level grunts.
I’d guess that the operation didn’t get off the ground because they never found anyone, not because anyone actually felt it was a bad and evil thing.
Isn’t this just the ECHELON program that’s been in place since the 90s?
Its hard to see how something like what’s being speculated on could take more than 8 years to become operational.
I agree.
I cannot see why assassinating Al Qaeda leaders would need to be kept secret from Congress. Hell, why keep it secret from the American people? Be sort of our own terror campaign back at the terrorists, win points with the public here and so on. Heck, I figured we’d be doing that all along anyway. Kind of the point being over there.
Whatever it is I think it has to be something more controversial.
But I think Echelon was restricted to foreign calls or calls in which one side was foreign.
If it was nothing but a program to assassinate AlQ leaders, they wouldn’t be hiding it, they would be flaunting it, they would be trumpeting it to the skies about how the libdems were undermining national security and were too wimpy and weak to make the hard decisions.
They’re hiding something. They wouldn’t need to keep it from Leon Panetta if thats what it was.
My thread got moved to IMHO. Like I ever had a humble opinion. Grumble, grumble.
“secret, illegal and would be highly controversial if known”? Ok, here’s my Wild-A****-Guess: A secret program of moles who were told to actually kill or help kill Americans in order to secure unquestionable cover within Al-Queda and other terrorist groups.