I wrote about this a little here: Partisan Blindness and Extrajudicial Killings

This was the weird story about a supposedly unimplement program that was kept from Congress and when discovered caused a bit of a kerfuffle.

What fascinates me is that the only thing that both left and right agree on is that the NYT story on this is, at best, incomplete.

Conservatives believe that the whole “controversy” was invented by CIA Director Panetta in order to pull Nancy Pelosi’s chestnuts out of the fire after she claimed — falsely in their opinion — that the CIA had lied to her and the Congressional leadership.  So, in this narrative, Panetta tracked down a “program” that never got past the discussion stage to help her out.

Liberals on the other hand seem to believe that the reaction of Panetta and the Congressional Democrats suggests that there was more to the story.  They argue that we’ve been targeting AQ leaders with Predator strikes for years, and that anyway, there is nothing particularly controversial about killing AQ leaders.  Bush for years bragged about it.  So, why the strong reaction?  In this narrative, Panetta discovered something really horrifying — maybe the organization of death squads on U.S. soil — but consistent with Obama preference to let bygones be bygones, they made up a cover story to distract attention from the real program that was shut down.

Neither one of these explanations makes a ton of sense to me.  I can’t see Panetta doing what he is accused of to his own organization.  He’s been around the block too often to think he can survive/thrive if his people think that he is willing to sacrifice them for such a silly political reason.  Similarly, while I don’t doubt that the CIA was up to its neck in illegal activities under Bush, the more extreme notions of domestic death assassination teams strikes me as over-the-top absent more solid evidence.

My guess is that the liberal argument is closer to the truth.  The program went further than the discuss phase, and they may even have had some sort of screw-up associated with it that led to it being cancelled and then covered up.  The Israelis mistakenly killed some innocent people when they were avenging Munich, and since this initiative looks like it was patterned on that, I’d suspect something similar happened to us.  Anyway, I really don’t know.  Pure speculation, but it is interested that basically no one believes that the “official” version is the true story.