Inability of Democrats to keep their mouths shut when it comes to the country’s secrets

Democrats Want to Prosecute CIA for Thought Crimes?

By Fred Dardick
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

In yet another example of the inability of Democrats to keep their mouths shut when it comes to the country’s secrets, news of a top secret meeting between CIA Director Leon Panetta and House and Senate intelligence committees last week concerning a discussed, but never operational, program was promptly - and I would think illegally - leaked to the media.

Apparently for the past 8 years the CIA had been fooling around with the idea to assassinate high value Al Qaeda targets with a small team of operatives on the ground, bullet to the brain kind of thing, rather than with missiles from the air, which tend to cause quite a lot more collateral damage.

Sounds reasonable to me.

However the program never went very far. It turns out putting together a traveling hit squad and getting them in place isn’t as easy as it may seem.

Under orders by Vice President Dick Cheney, Congress was never briefed on the program.

Even though it never got beyond an early planning stage, the fact that the CIA, and we are talking about the CIA here, not Boy Scouts of America, even considered the targeted killing of Al Qaeda leadership without say so from Congress has gotten Democrats up in arms.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called on Monday for the House Intelligence Committee to investigate “whether the intelligence community was directed by the vice president to create a program and intentionally withhold that information from Congress.â€