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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (8826)	10/28/2001 1:55:01 AM
From: Glenn Petersen	Respond to of 27666

CIA Weighs 'Targeted Killing' Missions Administration Believes Restraints Do Not Bar Bush From Singling Out a Terrorist Part II washingtonpost.com Hitz, who supervised wide-ranging internal reviews of the lapses of the clandestine service, said he doubts the agency is prepared for orders to kill. "After fifty-plus years, the CIA is an organization of bureaucrats," Hitz said. "This is not what intelligence officers do. They're not trained for it. And the intermediary stuff is what went to hell in times past. If you go out and hire a bunch of brass knuckles types . . . it strikes me that throws in the hopper all the things we learned about this bit of business in the Church committee investigations." The Church committee, for example, exposed eight distinct plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro's life from 1960 to 1965, some of them comically inept. One effort, strongly resonant in the context of recent events, contaminated a box of Castro's favorite cigars with botulinum toxin in February 1961. Another laid plans to place an exploding seashell at Castro's customary skin-diving venue; still another infected a wet suit with poison fungus and proposed that U.S. negotiator James B. Donovan present it to the Cuban leader as a gift. Today the Directorate of Operations, which runs the clandestine service, retains a "special activities" branch, but case officers who retired recently said it has had neither status nor funding in recent years. "The paramilitary part of the directorate has atrophied," one case officer said. 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. "As a force multiplier," one source said, "we can use Jordanians and Sudanese and Egyptians that are willing to do this for us." The legal basis for Bush's order is perhaps its least controversial aspect, at least among government lawyers who have studied the question. Since the late Clinton administration, executive branch lawyers have held that the president's inherent authority to use lethal force -- under Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution -- permits an order to kill an individual enemy of the United States in self-defense. In 1998, an interagency group led by then-Assistant Attorney General Randy Moss produced a highly classified memo of law on assassination. The group concluded that recent presidents -- from Reagan in Libya to Bush in Iraq -- had been needlessly cautious in ordering broad attacks against enemy headquarters if their real objective was to kill an individual leader. Because executive orders are entirely at the discretion of the president, they wrote, a president may issue contrary directives at will and need not make public that he has done so. Under customary international law and Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, according to those familiar with the memo, taking the life of a terrorist to preempt an imminent or continuing threat of attack is analogous to self-defense against conventional attack. That interpretationwon out over a proposal by Walter Dellinger, Moss's predecessor, who wanted to amend Executive Order 12333. Dellinger proposed to forbid assassination "without the prior written express authorization of the president." Presidential "findings" on lethal force, he said, were too often drafted overbroadly simply "to avoid calling what we're doing 'assassination.' " The Bush administration's update of that analysis is strengthened by the Joint Resolution of Congress of Sept. 14, which gave the president authority to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against "persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." The prospect of extrajudicial killings by the U.S. government is a departure from one of the touchstone intelligence restraints of the post-Vietnam era. It inspires strong qualms among some of those who have thought about it professionally. "In my heart I am often for assassination, but in my head not," said Anthony Lake, Clinton's first national security adviser, reaching back toan Italian Renaissance family notorious for murder and fratricide for an analogy. "Until you can show me the firewall between those whose deaths you're positive would save a large number of lives, and those about whom you're not positive, then I think you're on a slippery slope to becoming the Borgias." Staff researchers Mary Lou White and Margaret Smith contributed to this report.