http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63203-2001Oct27?language=printer
CIA Weighs 'Targeted Killing' Missions
Administration Believes Restraints Do Not Bar Singling Out Individual Terrorists
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 28, 2001; Page A01
Armed with new authority from President Bush for a global campaign against al Qaeda, the Central Intelligence Agency is contemplating clandestine missions expressly aimed at killing specified individuals for the first time since the assassination scandals and consequent legal restraints of the 1970s.
Drawing on two classified legal memoranda, one written for President Bill Clinton in 1998 and one since the attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush administration has concluded that executive orders banning assassination do not prevent the president from lawfully singling out a terrorist for death by covert action. The CIA is reluctant to accept a broad grant of authority to hunt and kill U.S. enemies at its discretion, knowledgeable sources said. But the agency is willing and believes itself able to take the lives of terrorists designated by the president.
Clinton authorized covert lethal force against al Qaeda beginning in 1998, and The Washington Post reported last Sunday that Bush has signed a more encompassing intelligence "finding" that calls for attacks on newly identified weaknesses in Osama bin Laden's communications, security apparatus and infrastructure.
Bush's directive broadens the class of potential targets beyond bin Laden and his immediate circle of operational planners, and also beyond the present boundaries of the fight in Afghanistan, officials said.But it also holds the potential to target violence more narrowly than its precedents of the past 25 years because previous findings did not permit explicit planning for the death of an individual.
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"There's nothing involved in this operation that isn't being debated by somebody somewhere, but our responsibilities are pretty clear to those who have the top secret code-word clearance and the need to know," said a senior intelligence official.
Botched assassinations in the 1960s and 1970s, and their airing in congressional hearings in 1974, left deep scars on the CIA. Executive orders signed by three presidents since, beginning Feb. 18, 1976, were interpreted until recently as forbidding clandestine acts of targeted killing.
It is significant that the directive Bush signed last month took the form of a presidential finding. As defined in the Hughes-Ryan amendment of 1974 and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, a finding concerns only the use of appropriated funds for covert action by intelligence agencies. The military chain of command uses separate legal instruments called operations orders, numbered sequentially and prefixed by year.
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The CIA's Directorate of Operations, which runs the clandestine service, is mindful of a traumatizing past in which assassination attempts in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East were blamed on rogue agents when they failed. The agency is determined to leave no room this time for "plausible denial" of responsibility on the part of the president and the agency's top management. That does not mean that operations will be publicly proclaimed, one source said, but that the paper trail inside government must begin undeniably with "the political leadership."
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, remembered commonly as the Church committee, reported on Nov. 20, 1975, that plots against five foreign leaders under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were deliberately organized in terms "so ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what levels assassination activity was known and authorized."
"The important thing is that the accountability chain is clear," said John C. Gannon, who retired in June as deputy director of central intelligence, the agency's second-ranking position, in comments that mirrored those of colleagues who declined to be named. "I would want the president's guidance to be as clear as it could be, including the names of individuals. You've got to have the political levels behind you so the intelligence officers are not left hanging."
With explicit authority, he said, "I think the case officers are capable (of targeted killing) and would follow instructions, and would, I think, have the capability of succeeding."
National security officials noted that the White House and at least three executive departments already maintain lists in which terrorists are singled out by name. Executive Order 12947, signed by Clinton on Jan. 23, 1995, introduced a legal category of "specially designated terrorists." The list is maintained and amended by the secretary of state and by Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Most recently the FBI named 22 men on Oct. 10 as its "most wanted terrorists," of whom 13 are linked to al Qaeda.
One view, apparently a minority position but one expressed in private recently by two senior managers in the Directorate of Operations, is that the clandestine service should target not only commanders but also financiers of al Qaeda. "You have to go after the Gucci guys, the guys who write the checks," said one person reflecting that view. It is easier to find financiers, he said, and killing them would have dramatic impact because they are not commonly prepared to die for their cause.
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Senior officials said the president's finding directs new forms of cooperation between the CIA and uniformed military commando units. Some knowledgeable sources said it is also possible that the instruments of targeted killings will be foreign agents, the CIA's term for nonemployees who act on its behalf. That is controversial, because it involves risks of betrayal and conflicting agendas on the part of the agents, but it is also seen in parts of the agency as advantageous.
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There it is. Military and CIA and foreign agent death squads. We already knew they knocked off the Pakistani Air Marshall and some sheiks, and a bunch of bioweapons scientists. So, what's all the fuss about, now? But, there's more to it than this. There's more to it than the global authorizations for "targeted killing" (they wouldn't use the term "assassination", which might violate previous Presidential Orders.
The answer to that is in other Bush Presidential Orders, the ones that authorized the military and intelligence services to watch
everyone and identify
everyone who potentially posed a threat to their plans, and to deal with
everyone in any way they saw fit. No laws. No limits. The President decides who lives and dies.
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