Today's Wall Street Journal has posted an article about the CIA plan to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives which was ended by Director Leon Panetta when he took charge of the agency.. According to the article:
"According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn't become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it."
I'm a little confused by all this ruckus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is citing the plan as an example of the fact that the CIA kept information from Congress. Let's consider two facts, one, the plan never actually reached a point where it was going to be implemented, and two, Congress has had some leakage problems in national security areas. The first fact makes the briefing of Congress unneccessary, and the second fact makes briefing Congress a risk to national security. This is another example of the House Speaker trying to blame the CIA for the fact that she approved of waterboarding.
I seem to remember that one of the charges by the Democrats against George W. Bush was that he hadn't yet caught Osama Bin Laden. This is a November 16, 2008, quote from Barack Obama from MSNBC:
"In his first television interview since his historic election, Obama said he has spent the days since the election on short- and long-term issues, from doing "whatever it takes" to stabilize the economy, restore consumer confidence and create jobs, to getting sound health care and energy policies through Congress. The president-elect also said that as soon as he takes office he will work with his security team and the military to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq, shore up Afghanistan and "stamp out al-Qaida once and for all.""
So why was the program to 'stamp our al-Qaida once and for all' shut down, and why is Congress screaming that they were not informed of a program that was never implemented? This is another example of politics being more important than national security. If you beleive that the program needed to be stopped, that is fine, but then why does Congress need to know about everything the CIA decides not to do? If you believe the program would have been valid in ending terrorism, why was it stopped? You can't have it both ways.
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