The Redhunter

Another Phony Scandal
Of course the CIA was plotting to kill bin Laden.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

With Speaker Pelosi caught in the web of her own deceit over what the CIA told her about "torture," and the Obama administration in the middle of its latest 180-degree reversal over CIA interrogators (Attorney General Holder is now considering prosecutions despite Obama's promise of no prosecutions), Democrats have trumped up a charge that the CIA, on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney, failed to notify Congress that it was contemplating -- not implementing, but essentially brainstorming about -- plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures.

This is their most ludicrous gambit in a long time -- and that's saying something. Given their eight years of complaints about President Bush's failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and given President Clinton's indignant insistence (against the weight of the evidence) that he absolutely wanted the CIA to kill bin Laden, one is moved to ask: What did Democrats think the CIA was doing for the last eight years?

And if Democrats did not believe the CIA was considering plans to kill or capture bin Laden, why weren't they screaming from the rafters about such a lapse?

Of course the CIA has been trying to figure out how to take out top al-Qaeda leaders. One assumes -- one hopes -- they are also brainstorming about wiping out the Taliban, overthrowing the Iranian regime, undermining Kim Jong Il's nuclear program, disrupting Syrian support of Hezbollah, and tackling all manner of threats to the United States. But there is no law that requires, or could practically require, the CIA to brief Congress every time some agency component considers the feasibility of some security initiative.

Gen. George Washington himself observed that "upon secrecy, success depends in most enterprises . . . and for want of it, they are generally defeated." Washington thought it obvious that secrecy was the heart of good intelligence. That is a big part of why intelligence activities are executive in nature, a core part of what the Supreme Court long ago recognized as the "delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations." Secrecy cannot be preserved in a system of national security by political committee, much less a system in which a sprawling, 17-agency intelligence community is forced to share all of its secrets, in real time, with 535 members of Congress.

Intelligence activities are not reliant on congressional authorization or supervision. Like all executive power under the Constitution, the president is checked in this area by Congress's enumerated powers, particularly the power of the purse. As is its wont, Congress tries to leverage this authority to usurp presidential prerogatives -- to make itself a partner in the actual running of intelligence activities, albeit a partner with no accountability (see Nancy Pelosi, supra).
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Most Americans assume that the CIA has been trying to get bin Laden and his top lieutenants. Moreover, Democrats have a sorry recent history of turning national security into a war crime -- a pattern seen again in this weekend's coverage, which conjured absurd images of Cheney covering up illegal assassinations even though (a) the ban on assassinations relates to heads of state, not jihadist networks, and (b) during the 2008 campaign, the press considered it a positive demonstration of Barack Obama's toughness that he said he would not shrink from striking vigorously against terrorists who'd attacked Americans. It should thus come as no surprise that the CIA -- at the direction not only of the former vice president but also of George Tenet, the Democrat holdover who was Bush's first CIA director -- decided there was no need to brief congressional leadership on notions that evidently never became concrete plans.

So, to score some political points, Democrats have put themselves in the position of opposing CIA efforts to defeat our enemies. This misbegotten strategy can only remind the public of a few unwelcome facts:

First, when Democrats were in charge in the 1990s, at the time when bin Laden declared war on the United States and then bombed our embassies and the U.S.S. Cole, the Democrats' strategy to protect the country was to file indictments -- with no meaningful effort to capture bin Laden or his top aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri, much less kill them.

Second, when opportunities to kill bin Laden arose, the CIA's hands were tied because President Clinton so muddled the rules of engagement that our special-ops agents could not be sure whether Democrats would indict them for such operations.

Third, after 9/11, even as President Bush's warfare strategy decimated al-Qaeda's top hierarchy, Democrats complained that the Bush administration had failed to kill or capture bin Laden. Now that the political winds have shifted, they have returned to their default position of complaining that government agents were trying to kill or capture bin Laden.

Fourth, this bizarre complaint comes in the form of grousing about a failure to notify Congress, voiced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, among others. But consider that back in February, Senator Feinstein publicly revealed that Pakistan's government was allowing the United States to use Pakistani territory as a base for Predator drones being used for controversial targeted assassinations. Unlike Leahy's aforementioned malfeasance, Feinstein's unfortunate revelation was doubtlessly inadvertent. But it underscores the danger of informing Congress about intelligence activities.

The last point is a critical one, showing starkly the difference between Democrats and Republicans on national security. President Obama is clearly conducting a war in Pakistan, a country with which we are formally at peace. The legitimate existence of wartime conditions is crucial: If we are not at war, there is no basis in international law for killing Pakistanis (or non-Pakistanis) in Pakistan. But the Right is not accusing the president of conducting an illegal war, of failing to seek congressional authorization, or of committing war crimes. Nor did Republicans seek to exploit Feinstein's gaffe -- while there might have been political sport in it, doing so would have made it more difficult for Pakistan to cooperate with the Obama administration in an effort that advances American security interests.

Indeed, the real scandal is that we didn't implement a program to kill top al Qaeda leaders. As the Wall Street Journal reports

The goal was to assemble teams of CIA and special-operations forces "and put bullets in [the al Qaeda leaders'] heads," one former intelligence official said.

The plan was never carried out, and Mr. Panetta canceled the effort on the day he learned of it, June 23. The next day, he alerted Congress, which didn't know about the plan.

Well why in the world did he cancel it? If they want to investigate anything, lets find out why Panetta canceled what seems to me a pretty good idea, or at least one worth investigating.

It is pretty obvious to me that the Democrats are just desperately searching for something to take the heat off of Nancy Pelosi. She is the one caught in the real lie when she said that the CIA regularly misled her, and then was confronted with documents proving that, oops, she had in fact been briefed about the enhanced interrogation techniques.

There's no scandal. No laws were broken. Our agents thought about a program but never implemented it. There was no reason to brief Congress.