I don’t mean to conjure conspiracies with tin foil on my head, but I’ve always had a dark feeling in the pit of my stomach, a gnawing question about how far Bush and Cheney would go to advance their agenda.

When did Paul Wellstone die and when were these Executive Orders handed down?

Domestic spying? Assassination squads?

Is there a link?

… and what about thaose anthrax attacks? Cheney, et al using fear to “pacify” the electorate?

How about the so-called suicide of Dr. David Kelly, the British doctor who was found dead shortly after exposing falsehoods about the justification for the Iraq war.

13 doctors are challenging the coronor’s results in Dr Kelly’s death. Kelly had been working on a tell-all book about the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the existence of “germ warfare plans.”

Curiouser and curiouser…

I go with the Time theory that it involved domestic action.

I mean we were renditioning people off the streets of Milan already.

Panetta knew about that, it was in all the papers, he ‘didn’t’ know about this.

There is money to be made here. How dare anyone stand in the way of free enterprise.

May I be the first to appear on Attackerman and say BLOWJOB!

It seems the Repugs find themselves Tripp-ing over that term; sort of like the Lindy Tripp!

This is a slippery slope, EO or no EO. If you’ve tracked the planners of 9/11 in hot pursuit to Pakistan, it’s one thing. Tracking members of the Taliban who harbored those planners in Afghan to hiding places in Pakistan is another level. And targeting members of Pakistani tribes who may sympathize with some elements of Taliban is yet another.

Is there something in the AUMF wrt to al Qaeda that extends to 2nd, 3rd and 4th degrees of separation — and on to Muslims in Indonesia who see this as an attack on Islam, so therefore drone attacks on them there is okay too? Or to Muslims in America, who have a different perspective on this from Donald Rumsfeld. Where are the principles to hold on to, the lines that can’t be crossed. America has chosen to be at war with radical Islam and its sympathisers, and to claim the privileges of war.

We have no information on who we’re actually targetting and no reason to believe those who do know care about such distinctions.

This targeted assassination stuff is troubling. On one hand, we can’t be sure we know who is a member of Al Qaeda, on the other, we claim to be at war with Al Qaeda.

In the end, the problem seems to be the war metaphor. If we used policing as a metaphor, we wouldn’t have this problem. It would certainly not be acceptable to kill people.

blowjob – it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

here at the dainty progressive teaparty, one can vilify Bush/Cheney as evil 24/7/365, but when it comes to 9/11, anthrax, and Wellstone, then suddenly their word is as good as gold – nothing to see here, move along!

I don’t know about the sudden spate of assassination stories. As Digby reminds us, crazy Pete Hoekstra said this about the program:

Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House intelligence committee, said last week that he believed Congress would have approved of the program only in the angry and panicky days after 9/11, on 9/12, he said, but not later, after fears and tempers had begun to cool.

Admittedly Crazy Pete speaks before he thinks, but the stuff that dribbles out of his mouth usually dribbles towards the other – albeit, crazy – direction.

Paul Wellstone. Died October 25, 2002.

watertiger is upstairs!
Late Night: Fetch MSNBC the Smelling Salts, It’s Seeing Stars!

when Bush and Cheney started denying that the Earth was flat, I knew that I was on to something.

We know from several decades of practice after World War Two that covert ops easily get out of control and lead to assassinations that aren’t authorized. When you change policy and authorize assassinations – ignoring the Cold War notion that what goes around comes around – that they will include targets other than al Qaeda figures seems a foregone conclusion.

Who thinks Dick Cheney, a man for whom everyone is a potential enemy, wouldn’t readily inflate the list of targets? I think the odds are about as good that Karl Rove absolutely positively kept his hands off the illegally obtained surveillance data on Democrats and the odd recalcitrant Republican.

I was being rhetorical, I know when Wellstone’s plane crashed.

But it is in the timeline of these most recent revelations.

Wellstone more than likely died simply in a place crash… anthrax and Dr Kelly’s death; a bit of uncertainty there.

I don’t see how assassinations of al qaeda figures, even in ‘non-permissive’ countries could be seen as so alarming, given, as someone noted, the whole Milan abduction was done sans Italy’s permission. And the U.S. handed over detainees to countries like Syria, not exactly best friends or rule-abiding for years. And also, given that the drone attacks in Pakistan are also done without permission or notice, and are technically supposed to be assassination attempts against militants. And Congressional leaders didn’t bat an eyelid authorizing the illegal wiretapping.

There has to be something deeper.

instances of anticipatory self-defense and therefore not violative of the assassinations ban.

Definitions, standards and oversight?

From TPM:

CIA Vet: Likely More to Secret Program Than Targeting al Qaeda

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we’ve been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA program that received special legal authorization.

As for what the program did involve, Cannistraro suggested that it involved Americans as targets, and that it went beyond surveillance, but declined to elaborate. He added that, though Cheney may have directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark, the veep wasn’t acting alone. “The approval was from the president,” said Cannistraro.

talkingpointsmemo.com

This has been an outrage from the start. It’s not just done in utter contempt of others, but of Americans as well who will inevitably suffer the brunt of blowback. Only old people should wage war in the battlefield du jour. Keep the young people out of these dirty wars.

It’s not that 9/11 is off limits, it’s that the veil hiding it is impossible to completely remove, at least for us.

I’m wondering if they were planning on using unwitting journalists or others to target the the al Qaeda leadership. By placing an innocuous RFID transmitter or chip in a cell phone they might be able to locate the reporter (or lower level official or politician, or religious figure, or relative) and then assassinate the leader (and probably the reporter).

Recall that some reporters got access to al Qaeda leaders just before and after 9/ll. Also recall how al Qaeda used phony reporters to assassinate the head of the Northern Alliance. It would seem to me that this would be something that Cheney would think was a great way of “using the media”. And if it got a few “Daniel Pearls” murdered, no biggee.

In early 2002, an al Qaeda suspect was killed while driving down a Yemeni road, blown away by a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone aircraft. He was located through triangulation on his cell phone. Thus, one of the first reported instances in which the Bush administration got a telecom company to cooperate with the NSA and DOD, with the telecom company helping pinpoint the location of one of their cell phones.

Except, Osama bin Laden reportedly stopped using cell phones a couple of years earlier (before the 9/11 attacks), and started relying solely on hand-delivered messages, indicating that bin Laden must have realized that cell phone triangulation could be used to locate him, and also indicating that international telecom companies were cooperating with the NSA and DOD back in the 1990s in tracking suspected terrorists via their cell phones.

Therefore, the terrorist assassination policy of BushCo and its use of telecom company information to locate them overseas cannot be what shocked Panetta and members of Congress. These War on Terror tactics were neither new nor necessarily surprising.

Importing the use of these tactics into the United States, though, would be shocking.

Now, I’m not saying that Dick Cheney began seeing himself as some right-wing South American military junta leader during the Reagan years, ordering right-wing death squads around to eliminate all those deemed a threat to Dick Cheney, but I do believe that U.S. telecom companies were recruited by BushCo to establish a massive data-base on all U.S. citizens, but especially those of the more liberal kind, with cell phone triangulation being one of the main means of keeping track of those judged by BushCo to be a “national security” threat.

1) Telecom companies given retroactive immunity last year, stopping court cases that would have revealed the extent of their involvement in domestic spying.

2) DHS fusion centers around the country reportedly more interested in domestic crime than in counter-terrorism pursuits.

3) Former Attorney General John Ashcroft downgrading the terrorist threat level at the DOJ in 2001, focusing more on domestic crime, at the same time that Qwest reportedly was approached to participate in BushCo’s domestic spying program.

4) Predator drone aircraft squadrons being deployed around the United States.

5) U.S. spy satellites being trained on U.S. soil for the first time, something that wasn’t even allowed during the Cold War, and how the hell could a spy satellite spot an al Qaeda terrorist sleeper cell from outer space…unless this was done for some other reason.

In other words, it sounds to me like someone was trying to turn America into a fascist police state, heavily monitored, with countless American citizens deemed to be a “national security” threat by hardcore right-wing Republicans in the Bush administration. You know, immigrants, prostitutes, pornographers, cussers (heh, heh), family planning centers, NOW, ACORN, members of the Democratic Party. Who know how many made it onto BushCo’s “national security” threat list, ending up under surveillance (often with a warrant) or being placed on BushCo’s “No Fly” list. Whatever BushCo and Dick Cheney were up to, once fully revealed, it will probably make Nixon look like an amateur.

Oops, correction: “Who knows how many made it onto BushCo’s “national security” threat list, ending up under surveillance (often without a warrant) or being placed on BushCo’s “No Fly” list? Whatever BushCo and Dick Cheney were up to, once fully revealed, it will probably make Nixon look like an amateur.”

The only way for the U.S. Congress can learn about the full extent of what the Cheney-Bush administration was up to for the past 8 years is to appoint a special prosecutor with directions to execute search warrants on all the files and computers owned by Cheney, Bush, Addington and Rove and their top assistants.

The illegal warrantless surveillance program was designed to circumvent the FISA court because it was targeted against those for whom no ostensible probably cause could be fabricated, targets like journalists and the leadership of the Democratic Party, and all the Congressional representatives, among others.

Given the extent of the illegalities engaged in by Cheney-Bush and the personal power they amassed by gutting our Constitution during their eight year reign, I was amazed that they actually left office when Obama was elected.

Now, given what we are learning, drip by drip, about their illegal activities, I conclude that they left office only because they had sufficient negative information on all the key Democratic actors to effectively control them. They had the extensive access to information that J. Edgar Hoover only dreamed of.

The assassination squad was likewise kept secret from Congress because at least some of the targets were likewise un-related to any war on terrorism. Reflect on how many progressive politicians and critical witnesses in the U.S. and Britain, met unfortunate ends over the last 8 years.

Why did Obama reverse his stance on the FISA amendments? Why did Obama turn over his economic policies to the very same people who have caused our economic meltdown through deregulation? Why is Obama continuing the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan? Why is Obama, a constitutional scholar, refusing to investigate the obvious constitutional illegalities of the past administration and continuing to maintain their reactionary positions on many pending detainee and surveillance cases? Obama is a very intelligent, progressive thinker. What else could explain his strange reversals? But all those reversals could be explained by simple extorsion.

Yes, this is a horrible conspiracy theory. But, given that Cheney-Bush took us to war against two countries on lies, wars which have,killed, tortured, injured and displaced millions, is it really so far fetched to think they would hesitate to blackmail anyone in the Democratic Party leadership?

I only hope that all of the foregoing is simply paranoid nonsense, but until all the relevant computers are seized and examined, how will we really know what has taken place in our country over the last nine years?

Paragraph 2 should read “probable cause” (not probably cause).

“It’s very, very easy to see how an assassinations squad let loose on the streets of Milan or Hamburg or rural Turkey or the Parisian suburbs or wherever could easily spiral out of control, in all manner of directions.”
Or in Riyadh or Los Angeles. They don’t call it the “Global” war on terror for nothing.

History suggests that we may be more often right than wrong by being “paranoid” about the spies and special ops.

Spencer Ackerman:

It was a vague and unworkable plan for overseas, not domestic, hit squads for al-Qaeda; and it continued only in theory to find an alternative to the drone strikes that my piece was about. Basically the Bush administration wanted to create superheroes.

Spencer, that still doesn’t sound like anything that would cause Congressional jaws to drop, much less shock those on the Intelligence Committees.

.

Someone above said: “This targeted assassination stuff is troubling.” Apparently so did Gerald Ford. But it seems to me facts on the ground (more precisely, in the air) have changed. We’re now routinely killing scores of innocent civilians using the most targeted killing tools at our disposal short of going down on the ground and doing the dirty work with our own two hands, as the song goes. What’s the problem with a little targeting?

Anyway, the thing apparently never went past training. Is anyone else thinking what I am: Bourne was real, in their minds at least?

Just summarizing the NYT piece buddy. There is surely much much more to the story. None of these pieces ought to be taken as comprehensive. We’re all trying to mine to the core and this story is tough.

Dude, not Bourne. Youngblood.

I am still waiting for the “rest of the story” to drop. This is just distraction so far, they cannot keep a lid on this, it is just spin leakage so far, keep us distracted, and chasing our tails.

Don’t be fooled!

So you’re saying that this was hidden because it was so embarrassingly, shockingly derivative?

Youngblood, fair enough. Also, it’s an obvious potential difference between the examples that drone strikes are limited to countries we’re at war in, plus one more whose sovereignty we have mercilessly and serially compromised. This program on the other hand — and here is one question that you’re right remains outstanding — it seems may have been envisioned to operate in allied countries without their knowledge or consent. But then, it didn’t. So it remains just an oversight story as far as I can tell.