Killer drones 1, human assassins 0, it seems. The CIA tried - but wasn't able - to assemble hit squads, to go after Al Qaeda bigwigs. "It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do, it it’s not that easy," one former intelligence official tells the New York Times. "Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?"
So instead, the agency has relied, in part, on Predator drones to take out jihadists. All those questions of basing and of readiness are easy to answer, when your pilots-turned-assassins are sitting thousands of miles from their targets. But it also means that many, many more civilians being killed, along with the extremists, one intelligence official tells the *Wall Street Journal's *Siobhan Gorman.
"We're talking about the difference between two feet and 50,000 feet," the official said. "Do you want the collateral damage of 50,000 feet or two?"
UPDATE: So if this program was simply an aborted attempt to assemble hit squads, Josh Marshall asks, why all the fuss? "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."
[Photo: U.S. Army]
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