The CIA Is Keeping Secrets. Hello?

President Bush, flanked by CIA Director Michael Hayden, right, and Deputy CIA Director Stephen Kappes, makes a statement after participating in a briefings on terrorism and the Russian-Georgia conflict, Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008, at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Image from Daylife

From Time Magazine:

On June 24, CIA Director Leon Panetta made a confession. For the past eight years, the agency has been running a top-secret unit to assassinate or grab members of al-Qaeda. The program was deliberately kept from Congress — supposedly on former Vice President Dick Cheney's orders — and Panetta stopped it as soon as he heard about it.

Sounds alarming. But like many of these stories, there's less to it than meets the eye. The unit conducted no assassinations or grabs. A former CIA officer involved in the program told me that no targets were picked, no weapons issued and no one sent overseas to carry out anything. "It was little more than a PowerPoint presentation," he said. "Why would we tell Congress?"

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My Comment: Robert Baer is probably right that the recent uproar over CIA Assassination teams ares probably overblown, but his analysis on the impact that these continual attacks from Congress will have on the CIA's effectiveness in the future is spot on. Who in the CIA will now be aggressive against terror groups like Al Qaeda when they now know that they may be brought in front of a Congressional panel in the future for the actions that they do today.

Answer .... no one.