"President Bill Clinton lifted the ban on CIA assassinations in 1998"

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The Church Committee was a special Senate investigation led by Idaho Senator Frank Church. It was formed in 1975. Their work took nine months and 150 staffers. They produced a two-foot-thick report in May 1976 that said, among other things, that we need Congress to oversee intelligence in this country.

The way we are overseeing it now is not working. And you know why we can tell that oversight is not working? Because the CIA keeps killing people, or trying to kill people in other countries that we are not at war with. The CIA at the time had taken it upon itself, it wasn`t clear if they were acting alone or at various presidents` direction, but they had taken on the job of assassinations in foreign countries, assassinations and attempted assassinations.

And the Senate said that was not cool.

This from the Church report: "The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots. The committee believes that short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy."

The Church Committee report came out, said that. Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. The select committees on intelligence were formed in the House and the Senate to exert oversight over the CIA. Since the Armed Services Committees who had been supposedly overseeing them had fallen down on the job -- actually, they`d never seen all that interested in that part of the job in the first place.

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http://www.nbcnews.com/id/50771795/ns/msnbc-rachel_maddow_show/

Rutilio Grande García, S.J. (1977), Roman Catholic priest
Alfonso Navarro Oviedo (1977), Roman Catholic priest
Ernesto Barrera (1978), Roman Catholic priest
Octavio Ortiz Luna (1979), Roman Catholic priest
Rafael Palacios (1979), Roman Catholic priest
Alirio Napoleón Macías (1979), Roman Catholic priest
Óscar Arnulfo Romero (1980), Archbishop of San Salvador, by right-wing death squad
Enrique Álvarez Córdova (1980) and five other leaders of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Front ("FDR," for its Spanish initials), captured and killed by government aligned security forces.
Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan (1980), Roman Catholic nuns, by the National Guard of El Salvador

"The fact was, the assassinations ban never really existed, so Clinton didn't really lift it other than as a statement of official policy."

Letelier was killed by a car bomb explosion on September 21, 1976, in Sheridan Circle, along with his US assistant, Ronni Moffitt. Her husband Michael Moffitt was injured but survived. Several people were prosecuted and convicted for the murder. Among them were Michael Townley, a DINA U.S. expatriate who had once worked for the CIA; General Manuel Contreras, former head of the DINA; and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza, also formerly of DINA. Townley was convicted in the United States in 1978 and served 62 months in prison for the murder; he is now free as a participant in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program. Contreras and Espinoza were convicted in Chile in 1993. General Augusto Pinochet, who died on December 10, 2006, was never brought to trial for the murders, although Townley implicated him as being responsible for them.