CIA Assassination Scheme No Big Deal In-House

(NEWSER) - The CIA program kept secret from lawmakers and canceled by Leon Panetta last month sought to establish paramilitary units to take out al-Qaeda leaders, former intelligence officials tell the Los Angeles Times. The officials say that while the program was never made operational, CIA chiefs continued to work on plans for it as recently as a year ago. More»

Anwar al-Awlaki may be first US citizen targeted for death

(NEWSER) - In what may be an unprecedented move, Barack Obama has authorized the CIA to assassinate an American citizen. The target: Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico, but now operates out of Yemen. Counterterror officials say he’s a member of al-Qaeda, and has been linked to numerous terrorist plots, including the attempted Christmas Day bombing and Fort Hood shooting. More»

Erik Prince's story raises security issues

(NEWSER) - Erik Prince says he and Blackwater—the defense contractor now known as Xe—got a raw deal from the government. "I put myself and my company at the CIA's disposal for some very risky missions," the firm's founder tells Vanity Fair . "But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus." More»

Cheney's secret killers likely to wind up on wrong side of history

(NEWSER) - It’s hard to imagine many Americans would object to their country assassinating Osama bin Laden, and Walter Shapiro of Politics Daily is no different. So why are he, and others, so queasy about the CIA hit squads that, we learned Monday, have been hunting terrorist leaders since 9/11? Because the CIA has a really lousy history when it comes to assassinations, targeting foreign leaders, like Fidel Castro, who were "strategic inconveniences for the United States rather than major-league war criminals." More»

(NEWSER) - The secret CIA plan sparking fury among lawmakers this weekend may have been designed to kill or capture al-Qaeda operatives, the Wall Street Journal reports. Former intelligence officials say that a 2001 legal pronouncement by President Bush led to an operation that was later axed by spy chief Leon Panetta. "It was straight out of the movies," one of the officials says. "It was like: Let's kill them all." More»