Assassinations R Us

Along with Glenn Greenwald and PZ Myers, Talking Points Memo is one of the blogs in which the comments are not to be missed.

Zach Roth's piece today on the CIA's secret assassination program got speculation running rife about likely victims over the last eight years.

The Washington Post reports today on how the program had been revived and then put on hold several times since 2001. But it also says, referring to the "presidential finding" with which President Bush authorized the program in 2001:

The finding imposed no geographical limitations on the agency's actions, and intelligence officials have said that they were not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.

"No geographical limitations" presumably means that operations could potentially be carried out in countries, friendly or unfriendly, that are far from any war zone -- including even the US itself. And it seems likely that they would be carried out without notifying the foreign country in question.

Of course, we've frequently, and quite openly, used the military to carry out attacks on specific Qaeda leaders -- even before 9/11. But using the CIA to do so, and with such broad authority to operate anywhere in the world, as this program seems to have given the agency, would appear to take things into a different realm.

Zach didn't know the half of it.

Commenter FPN:

How about some of the people targeted may not have "just" been "high value" Al Qaeda, but high ranking members of a royal family/intelligence:

"On July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 43, and on July 23, 2002, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud was killed in a car accident at the age of 41. A week later, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir was found dead, having "died of thirst" at the age of 25. Prince Turki was fired from his position as head of Saudi Intelligence on September 1, 2001, and became the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain in 2002.

On February 20, 2003, Pakistani air force chief Mir, his wife, and fifteen others were killed in a plane crash.

None of this appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report, though it might have been planned for that document. This is because the Bush administration censored 28 pages of material about Saudi connections to 9/11 from the report on the grounds of national security."

Commenter martin dreadnought:

Again, the crux of this entire story is not that Cheney himself was involved, it's a question of who was targeted and why.

We already know of many deaths which came at convenient times for the Bush administration. I'm not sure I need to go through all of these again, but just a few of them would be Paul Wellstone, Pat Tillman, Dr. David Kelly, Bruce Ivins, and the DC Madam Debra Palfrey.

All of these people had the ability to cause significant damage to the Bush administration and every one of them died a suspicious death. I think the chances of all of these deaths happening in a vaccuum are close to nil.

Commenter danger:

Could also include Nicola Calipari, Benazir Bhutto, the guy at Minot AFB in the nuke transport snafu, and to a lesser extent Rafik Hariri and even Alexander Litvinenko.

Should also point out that in the case of Calipari, the real target would have been Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who as a feminist, pacifist communist who openly sided with the Iraqi people before she was kidnapped would have definitely been a thorn in the side to the administration.

Commenter MyMY:

This clearly demands thorough investigation!

The last word to commenter Mr. E:

Or at the very least, I wide re-airing of Wag the Dog.