CIA "Concealed Information And Misled Lawmakers Repeatedly Since 2001"

House Dems: Panetta testified CIA has misled Congress repeatedly

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/08/cia.congress/

4/9/2009

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- CIA Director Leon Panetta recently testified to Congress that the agency concealed information and misled lawmakers repeatedly since 2001, according to a letter from seven House Democrats to Panetta made public Wednesday.

Seven House Democrats say CIA Director Leon Panetta recently testified that the CIA has misled Congress.

The letter to Panetta, dated June 26, was published on the Web site of Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-California.

"Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all members of Congress, and misled members for a number of years from 2001 to this week," said the letter, signed by Eshoo and six other House Democrats -- Reps. John Tierney of Massachusetts, Mike Thompson of California, Rush Holt of New Jersey, Alcee Hastings of Florida, Adam Smith of Washington and Janice Schakowsky of Illinois.

The letter contained no details about what information the CIA officials allegedly concealed or how they purportedly misled members of Congress.

On February 11, 2003, CIA Director George Tenet told a Senate committee that U.S. intelligence indicated al Qaeda planned to attack targets in the United States and in the Middle East, perhaps with chemical weapons or radioactive materials.

On May 15 of this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA of misleading Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.

The CIA responded that Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.

However, the June 26 letter from the seven House Democrats noted that Panetta told CIA employees in a letter dated May 15 -- in response to the Pelosi allegation -- that it was not CIA policy to mislead Congress.

"Let me be clear: It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and values," the House Democrats quoted Panetta's letter as saying.

The letter from the House Democrats asked Panetta to correct his May 15 statement "in light of your testimony."

Asked about the Democrats' letter, CIA spokesman George Little said Panetta "stands by his May 15 statement."

"This agency and this director believe it is vital to keep the Congress fully and currently informed. Director Panetta's actions back that up," Little said in a statement. "As the letter from these ... representatives notes, it was the CIA itself that took the initiative to notify the oversight committees."

The Democrats' letter became public the night before the House is scheduled to vote on an intelligence spending measure that includes a provision to expand the number of House and Senate members privy to the kind of secret briefing that Pelosi received.

The White House opposes the provision to expand the number of briefing participants from the current eight to 40 members of Congress.

A White House memo warned President Obama's senior advisers would recommend a veto of the bill if it contained the expanded briefing provision.

Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/politics/12intel.html?_r=5&hp

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 11, 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency's director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.

The question of how completely the C.I.A. informed Congress about sensitive programs has been hotly disputed by Democrats and Republicans since May, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to reveal in 2002 that it was waterboarding a terrorism suspect, a claim Mr. Panetta rejected.

The law requires the president to make sure the intelligence committees "are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity." But the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done "to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters."

In addition, for covert action programs, a particularly secret category in which the role of the United States is hidden, the law says that briefings can be limited to the so-called Gang of Eight, consisting of the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees.

The disclosure about Mr. Cheney's role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general's report underscored the central role of the former vice president's office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency's program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

Democrats in Congress, who contend that the covert action provision was abused to cover up programs under President Bush, are seeking to change the law to permit the full committees to be briefed on more matters. President Obama, however, has threatened to veto the intelligence authorization bill if the changes go too far, and the proposal is now being negotiated by the White House and the intelligence committees.

A spokesman for the intelligence agency, Paul Gimigliano, declined on Saturday to comment on the report of Mr. Cheney's role.

"It's not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing," Mr. Gimigliano said. "When a C.I.A. unit brought this matter to Director Panetta's attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect."

Bill Harlow, a spokesman for George J. Tenet, who was the C.I.A. director when the unidentified program began, declined to comment on Saturday, noting that the program remains classified.

Intelligence and Congressional officials have said the unidentified program did not involve the C.I.A. interrogation program and did not involve domestic intelligence activities. They have said the program was started by the counterterrorism center at the C.I.A. shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.

"Because this program never went fully operational and hadn't been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial," one intelligence official, who would speak about the classified program only on condition of anonymity. "That's worth remembering amid all the drama."

Members of Congress have differed on the significance of the program, whose details remain secret. Most of those interviewed, however, have said that it was an important activity that they felt should have been disclosed.

In the eight years of his vice presidency, Mr. Cheney was the Bush administration's most vehement defender of the secrecy of government activities, particularly in the intelligence arena. He went to the Supreme Court to keep secret the advisers to his task force on energy, and won.

A report released on Friday by the inspectors general of five agencies about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program makes clear that Mr. Cheney's legal adviser, David S. Addington, had to personally approve every government official who was told about the program. The report said "the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program" frustrated F.B.I. agents who were assigned to follow up on tips it turned up.

High-level N.S.A. officials who were responsible for ensuring that the surveillance program was legal, including the agency's inspector general and general counsel, were not permitted by Mr. Cheney's office to read the Justice Department opinion that found the eavesdropping legal, several officials said.

Mr. Addington could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Questions over the adequacy and the truthfulness of the C.I.A.'s briefings for Congress date back to the creation of the intelligence oversight committees in the 1970s after disclosures of agency assassination and mind-control programs and other abuses. But complaints increased in the Bush years, when the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies took the major role in pursuing Al Qaeda.

The use of harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, for instance, was first described to a handful of lawmakers for the first time in September 2002. Ms. Pelosi and the C.I.A. have disagreed about what she was told, but in any case, the briefing occurred only after a terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah, had been waterboarded 83 times.

Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat of Illinois on the House committee, wrote on Friday to the chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, to demand an investigation of the unidentified program and why Congress was not told of it. Aides said Mr. Reyes was reviewing the matter.

"There's been a history of difficulty in getting the C.I.A. to tell us what they should," said Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington. "We will absolutely be held accountable for anything the agency does."

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the committee's top Republican, said he would not judge the agency harshly in the case of the unidentified program, because it was not fully operational. But he said that in general, the agency has not been as forthcoming as the law requires.

"We have to pull the information out of them to get what we need," Mr. Hoekstra said.

It's time for another Church Committee.

Report: CIA plan to seize, kill Al Qaeda chiefs at heart of Congress controversy

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/07/report-cia-plan-to-seize-kill-al-qaeda-chiefs-at-heart-of-congress-controversy/

Daniel Tencer
7/13/2009

The controversy over claims the CIA lied to Congress by withholding information about a counter-terrorism program centers around an "attempt" by the agency to seize and kill Al Qaeda leaders in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

According to the story, the CIA program that agency director Leon Panetta learned of last month, and then disclosed to the House Intelligence Committee, was "an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives."

The Journal cites unnamed "current and former government officials" who reportedly said the program had never become fully operational before Panetta ordered it shut down last month.

Cryptically, the paper states: "Republicans on the panel say that the CIA effort didn't advance to a point where Congress clearly should have been notified." No explanation is given as to why only Republicans on the committee would have been privy to this information.

The paper also states:Last week, Democrat members of the House Intelligence Committee released a letter stating that Panetta informed them the CIA had kept a program concealed from Congress for some six or seven years. That spawned a flurry of speculation as to what the program may have been, including questions about whether it was, in effect, a "secret CIA army" that assassinated individuals abroad and was run directly by then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

The controversy grew this past Saturday when the New York Times reported that Cheney may have directly given the order to keep the program concealed from Congress -- a violation of the National Security Act, if proven true.

The Journal's report implies the program may have never become fully functional, but questions still remain about the specific details of the program, whether Cheney ran it directly, and whether he ordered the CIA to keep it from Congress.

The Journal writes:CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the agency "has not commented on the substance of the effort." He added that "a candid dialogue with Congress is very important to this director and this agency."

The official noted that Congress had long been briefed on the [presidential finding ordering the CIA to hunt and kill Al Qaeda agents], and that the CIA effort wasn't so much a program as "many ideas suggested over the course of years." It hadn't come close to fruition, he added.

CIA planned al-Qaida assassinations in friendly countries, officials say

• Friendly countries in the dark about assassination plans
• US military killed al-Qaida activist in Kenya
• Congress concerned over covert surveillance of US citizens

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/13/cheney-cia-al-qaida-assassinations

7/13/2009

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate of al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

Former counter-terrorism officials who retain close links to the intelligence community say that the hidden operation involved plans by the CIA and the military to launch operations, similar to those by Israel's Mossad intelligence service, to hunt down and kill al-Qaida activists abroad without informing the governments concerned, even though some were regarded as friendly if unreliable.

The CIA apparently did not put the plan in to operation but the US military did, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the programme.

A former intelligence official said the plan was hatched in the cauldron of the September 11 attacks when officials were pushing various forms of unilateral action and some settled on the Israelis as an example.

"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."

Another former senior intelligence official responsible for dealing with al-Qaida said that assassination plans were reined in after similar covert operations by the military were botched and proved to be embarrassing, particularly the killing in Kenya. He did not give details of the operation.

The official said he believes from conversations with serving members of the CIA that the area of real concern in Congress is that the planned operations may also have involved the covert surveillance of American citizens, a particularly sensitive subject in the US.

There appears to be common agreement among knowledgeable former intelligence officials that the controversy goes beyond the immediate question of assassination and capture of al-Qaida operatives as there have been numerous killings and detentions since the 9/11 attacks. One former official said that the Bush administration discussed the assassination question in the context of a ban introduced in the 1970s in response to several failed CIA attempts to murder Fidel Castro and concluded that as the US had declared itself at war with al-Qaida and the Taliban the ban did not apply.

Peter Bergen, a senior security analyst at the New America Foundation, said that the secret operation must have gone further than that to have created such a backlash in Congress. "If it's an assassination programme of al-Qaida leaders that is hardly surprising. Clinton had an assassination programme against Bin Laden. There have been 27 drone missile strikes against al-Qaida alone this year," he said.

The CIA has declined to comment and members of Congress who were finally briefed about the issue by the CIA director, Leon Panetta, last month are bound by confidentiality.

Some former intelligence officials and Republicans have attempted to portray the programme as barely getting out of the planning stages but others in the intelligence community have said it is highly unlikely that the CIA would have kept such an operation going for eight years without advancing it.

The evident anger in Congress is fuelling demands for a full blown investigation in to the CIA's failure to disclose the programme and Cheney's role in the cover up. The Senate majority whip, Dick Durbin, said the programme could have been illegal. "The executive branch of government should not create programs like these programs and keep Congress in the dark. To have a massive program that was concealed from the leaders in Congress is not only inappropriate, it could be illegal," he said.

Anna Eshoo, a senior Democrat on the House of Representatives intelligence committee, is also calling for a probe. "We, by no means, have the full story. We don't know who gave the order. We don't know where the money came from. We don't know all the people who were involved," she told Politico. "We need a full investigation. My preference is that we hire an attorney to come in and run this, someone that is known for their prosecutorial knowledge as well as their knowledge of this particular area of the law."

Something Not Adding Up

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/07/something_not_adding_up.php

7/14/2009

The New York Times is also reporting now that the secret Bush-era CIA program kept from Congress and terminated last month by CIA Director Leon Panetta was a plan to assassinate top al Qaeda officials that was never implemented. This is additional confirmation of the Wall Street Journal story that essentially reported the same basic outlines of the still-classified program.

The Times compares the program to drone attacks against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "This was another effort that was trying to accomplish the same objective," Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), ranking member on the Senate intel committee, tells the paper.

But as a former CIA counterterrorism chief told TPMmuckraker today:So regardless of how you might feel about targeted assassinations, it's not at all clear why this particular program would be so radioactive -- compared to what the U.S. was, and still is, doing more or less openly -- that (1) Cheney would demand the CIA not brief Congress about it for eight years; (2) Panetta would cancel it immediately upon learning of it; and (3) Democrats would howl quite so loudly when finally informed.

Or to think about it another way, put yourself in the seat of a Democrat on one of the intel committees after 9/11. If you had any doubt about whether the intel agencies were targeting al Qaeda leaders, wouldn't you have demanded that they show you proof they were? And if you didn't have any doubt that they were, why are you complaining now about not being briefed?

It doesn't add up. There's more to this story to be told.

Don’t Shoot
The CIA's kill teams were modeled on Israel's hit squads

http://www.newsweek.com/id/206607

7/13/2009

A ferocious dispute between the CIA and congressional Democrats centers on an ultrasecret effort launched by agency officials after 9/11 to draw up plans to hunt down and kill terrorists using commando teams similar to those deployed by Israel after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, according to a former senior U.S. official.

Officials of the CIA's undercover spying branch, then known as the Directorate of Operations, on and off over the last several years repeatedly floated and revised plans for such operations, which would involve sending squads of operatives overseas, sometimes into friendly countries, to track and assassinate Al Qaeda leaders, much the same way Israeli Mossad agents sent assassins to Europe to kill men they believed responsible for murdering Israeli Olympic athletes, the former official said. But several former and current officials said the highly classified plans, which last week provoked bitter argument between Congress and the CIA, never became "fully operational," and CIA Director Leon Panetta put an end to the program in June.

According to two former officials—who, like others quoted in this story, asked for anonymity to speak about sensitive matters—shortly after 9/11, the Bush White House consulted with the Directorate of Operations about expanding the agency's powers to track or lure terrorists. Top CIA officials ultimately concluded the program posed an unacceptable risk of failure or exposure, according to another former official. As a result, the initial plans proposed by officers of the Directorate of Operations—now known as the National Clandestine Service—were put on hold by CIA Director George Tenet before he left office in 2004, former officials said. Tenet's two successors, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, kept the plans in the deep freeze. But a former official said that until Panetta killed the program outright last month, the CIA never totally abandoned the plans for kill teams; agency personnel believed it was important to have them ready as an option for the president to use, and they continued to try to refine the idea.

Over the last two years, agency officials held at least three high-level meetings about the program. But they did not make much progress, an official said. The most recent discussions were so tentative, said the official, that the agency did not believe it was necessary to inform Congress or senior White House officials, including the president, vice president, and national-security adviser, about them.

The extreme secrecy surrounding the program led seven Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee to publicly accuse top CIA officials of concealing "significant actions" from the Congress dating back to 2001. The members have refused to give details about the plans, which remain classified. But The New York Times reported this weekend that Vice President Dick Cheney directed the CIA to withhold information about the program from the House and Senate intelligence oversight panels.

Cheney has not commented. Two former officials familiar with Cheney's role in the scheme maintained that the program was not the former vice president's idea; one of the officials said that when discussion about the program surfaced at the CIA during the final years of the Bush administration, Cheney was not involved in any way and that Cheney was not, at least late in the administration, responsible for ordering the agency to continue to withhold information about the program from Congress. Instead, the agency itself decided to withhold congressional briefings because it did not believe that the program had become operationally advanced enough to warrant them. But other officials confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Cheney was involved in discussions about the program and had pressed the CIA not to inform Congress about it. Some of the officials said that Cheney's involvement may turn out be the most politically explosive aspect of the controversy.

Government officials say that neither the intelligence community nor the White House was especially concerned about whether the proposed kill teams violated the law. Several officials familiar with the dispute say there is no reason to believe setting up special CIA squads to track and kill Al Qaeda terrorists overseas went beyond broad legal authorities that President Bush granted to the CIA after 9/11. Those powers had been tested before. In November 2002, the CIA sent a drone to launch Hellfire missiles on a jeep in Yemen, killing Qaaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a top Al Qaeda operative, as well as Kamel Derwish, a U.S. citizen who was traveling with him. "Why would anyone be shocked or surprised by plans to pursue terrorists overseas?" said one official. "That's part of the CIA's mission. This particular program never went fully operational, but others—duly briefed to the Congress—certainly have."

According to the 9/11 commission, in December 1998, four months after Al Qaeda attacked two U.S. embassies in Africa, President Clinton signed a "memorandum of notification" that first authorized the CIA to use Afghan tribesmen to kill Osama bin Laden, if it became necessary during an operation intended to capture him. Clinton later softened that directive in a subsequent February 1999 memorandum, which led to confusion about how far the agency could go in hunting Al Qaeda's top operative, according to the commission report.

At the time, agency officials under Clinton were reluctant to conduct operations that might result in the killing of top terrorist leaders overseas, according to Richard Clarke, who served as Clinton's top counterterrorism adviser. "They just didn't want to do it," said Clarke. But all ambiguity about the agency's "kill" authority was eliminated after 9/11. On Sept. 25, 2001, President Bush approved revised orders that were as "as broad a brush to kill Al Qaeda" as any intelligence program in U.S. history, said one official. White House officials and intelligence agencies drew up lists of names of terrorists targeted for attack, according to current and former officials.

Two officials familiar with details noted that none of the Democrats on Capitol Hill who have stoked the uproar over the program have alleged it was illegal. But even if it was legal under post-9/11 authorities, it is not hard to understand why a "kill" squad comparable to the Mossad's "Wrath Of God" teams, which were dispatched to kill terrorists throughout Europe after the Munich Olympics, were a touchy subject within the agency. Aside from the risk of exposure, there was also the risk of mistakes or collateral damage. As part of the Israeli operation, for example, one Mossad team mistakenly assassinated an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway whom they mistook for a top Palestinian terrorist. The hit resulted in the capture and imprisonment of some of the Mossad agents.

It's not the legality or wisdom of the program that has many members of Congress angry at the CIA—it's that they say they were kept in the dark about it. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials asserted that, had the agency briefed Congress about the program, the legislators likely would have supported the additional efforts to kill terrorist leaders. Both the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as congressional intelligence committees, have been strong supporters of an ongoing campaign by the Pentagon and CIA that uses unmanned drone aircraft to track and kill suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It was CIA Director Panetta who inadvertently touched off the current controversy on June 24 when he gave what one official described as "emergency briefings" to House and Senate Intelligence Committee members. Panetta described how he had recently learned about the program and issued an order terminating it. Officials said Panetta also told the committees that Cheney had ordered the agency not to share information with Congress about the program. Now some former officials and agency supporters on Capitol Hill are accusing Panetta of maladroitly handling the controversy by exaggerating Cheney's role, thereby feeding red meat to the agency's enemies and dealing a self-inflicted wound to an agency already besieged over allegations of other Bush-era lapses, including the use of harsh interrogation techniques on captured terror suspects.

Despite the drama and finger-pointing, the details of the program remain largely unknown. The CIA, not surprisingly, is doing its best to keep it that way. Said spokesman Paul Gimigliano: "The agency has not commented on the substance of the effort, which is still, at this stage, highly classified."

It's code name was Box Top. I found that on page 35 of my copy of James Risen's State of War.

Looking at how it came about, it seems to have been proposed by our old friend Rich B - curious, huh? And how about this (albeit indirect) link between Rich B and Cheney? Been looking for that for a long time.

Seymour Hersh stands by Cheney hit squad claim

http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/07/seymour-hersh-stands-by-cheney-hit-squad-claim/

7/13/2009

Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who said that former Vice President Dick Cheney ran a secret assassination ring outside the purview of Congress, is standing by his claim in light of a recent New York Times report that appears to cover similar ground.

Benjamin Sarlin at The Daily Beast spoke with the veteran reporter, who is presently in South Asia, for a Tuesday report. When asked about US officials playing down the functionality of the hit squad in the Times article, Hersh replied tersely.

"I said what I said, they can always say what they say," Hersh told Sarlin. "The last time they said 'the government doesn't torture'; this time it's 'the government doesn't assassinate.'"

Hersh noted that "his words in Minnesota were exaggerated in the press" and didn't break any news he hadn't already reported himself earlier.

Beyond his own reporting, Hersh added that President Bush's own speeches provided evidence of secret assassinations.

"Go read George Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech," he said. "He's talking and he says we've captured and detained 3,000 Al Qaeda members and other terrorists—crazy numbers—and said some of them will never bother us any more. And Congress cheers."

And Hersh's summary is just about right. The Daily Beast notes Bush's full statement, via CNN:

"All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries," the former president said. "And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

-- Mike Sheehan and Stephen C. Webster

Kevin Fenton said:

It's code name was Box Top. I found that on page 35 of my copy of James Risen's State of War.

Looking at how it came about, it seems to have been proposed by our old friend Rich B - curious, huh? And how about this (albeit indirect) link between Rich B and Cheney? Been looking for that for a long time.

Click to expand...

Sounds to me like someone needs to write an article.

The Origins of the CIA’s Assassination Program: Who Proposed It, What Its Code Name Was

hcgroups.wordpress.com

Kevin Fenton
7/14/2009

The CIA assassination programme that was recently in the media was actually first partially revealed by the Washington Post in 2005, when details enabling his originator to be identified were published. The programme made news in the last few days as CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that the agency withheld information about it from Congress, although the CIA never actually used it to assassinate anybody. Nevertheless, the programme’s “duties” seem to have been taken over by something journalist Seymour Hersh called an “executive assassination wing” that was run out of the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney, and this grouping did go on missions and kill people.
The programme was first mentioned in Dana Priest’s groundbreaking article that highlighted the existence of the CIA’s network of black sites, CIA Holds Terror Subjects in Secret Prisons, which was published in November 2005. Priest wrote of the programme:


This section of the article was ignored at the time in the storm that grew over the CIA’s rendition programme and complicity in it by US allies.

The team was also mentioned by the New York Times’ James Risen in his 2006 book State of War:



That’s on page 35 of my copy (emphasis added).

Interestingly, Risen also mentioned the OVP/Pentagon teams that supplanted Box Top:



I found that on pages 70-71. Risen therefore described both the programmes back in 2006, although he did not make the link between the non-implementation of the CIA programme and the implementation of the OVP/Pentagon version.

Although the CIA certainly does not have lists of its office holders, certainly not Counterterrorist Center (CTC) chiefs of operations, we have a pretty good idea who the chief of operations at the time was and what else he is responsible for (9/11, Osama bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora, rendition to torture–see the timeline link below).

In January 2007, Harper’s journalist Ken Silverstein wrote an article about a CIA officer he called “James,” giving a resume that indicated he was the CTC’s chief of operations on and shortly after 9/11. Given marked similarities in the biography of James and a CIA officer who goes by a variety of aliases (Rich/Rich B/Richard)—they both served in Algeria, were close to CIA manager Cofer Black, headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit, then had another managerial position at the CTC, became station chief in Kabul after 9/11 and got involved in the rendition of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi to Egypt—it appears that they are one and the same person. Therefore, it seems that Rich B was the officer who championed Box Top.

See here for a timeline of Rich B’s activities. Don’t miss his involvement in hiding information about the 9/11 hijackers—apparently including from his own boss—what he knew before 9/11, his part in rendition to torture before and after 9/11 and his responsibility for bin Laden’s escape from Afghanistan.

This is highly intriguing as it gives us an (as-yet indirect) connection between Rich B and Cheney, a connection I’ve been trying to make for some time: when the CIA sat on the programme Rich B proposed, it was taken up by Cheney, who also prevented Box Top from being briefed to Congress. Do I think this is a coincidence? No, I don’t. We know that both Rich B and Cheney were involved in the post-9/11 rendition and torture programs – was there any link between them on that issue as well?

Ex-Powell aide suggests CIA assassination program was actually active

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/15/wilkerson-cia-program-active/

7/15/2009

The secret CIA program allegedly aimed at assassinating suspected terrorists abroad has raised the eyebrows of at least one former senior Bush Administration official who hints that the program may have actually gone into effect, despite the denials of the agency and congressional staff who have been briefed.

The aide, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, was chief of staff to Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell. He says he heard “echoes” of the program from US ambassadors abroad, who informed him that clandestine military teams were being dispatched to their countries.

“We, very early on, after 9/11, at the State Department, learned from our ambassadors in the field that there were teams being dispatched to their cities, to their countries, and these teams were clandestine and essentially aimed at capturing al Qaeda leaders or al Qaeda affiliates and interrogating them,” Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Tuesday. “So the fact that it might have gravitated over to the CIA or the CIA might have joined in, which is something that happens a lot these days with Delta Force and other special operators is no surprise to me.

“What I suspect has happened is what began to happen while I was still in the government, and that was we’re killing the wrong people,” Wilkerson added. “And we’re killing the wrong people in the wrong countries. And the countries are finding out about it, or at least there was a suspicion that the countries might find out about it, and so it was shut down. That’s my strong suspicion.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta announced this month that he’d shut down the program last month when he first learned about it.

The State Department, under Colin Powell, asked the Pentagon which countries were being targeted but found out little information from then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Wilkerson asserts.

“After some hemming and hawing, which was Rumsfeld’s forte, he finally admitted that he had dispatched some of these teams,” Wilkerson explained. “I don’t think we ever knew the full range of his deployments.” Wilkerson believes the CIA became involved in the program of targeted assassinations later.

“It’s laughable [the idea] that the CIA has never lied to Congress,” Wilkerson quipped. “They lie to Congress on a routine basis,” said Wilkerson. Historically, it’s presidents that take the fall when the CIA lies to Congress. Wilkerson says it’s unprecedented for a vice president to fill that role as Cheney appears to have done.

This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast July 14, 2009.

Video At Source