David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo and I are on the same page bewildered as to why the secret CIA program that aimed to liquidate Al Qaeda operatives would be so controversial, or "radioactive" as David puts it, that Vice President Cheney deemed that it had to be concealed from Congress. Let's face it, this program is going on at the same time that extraordinary renditions were occurring and that we were detaining hundreds of "enemy combatants" in military gulags across the world. Nor is the policy seemingly different from our current use of drones to target Al Qaeda's leadership and operatives. Drones, it can be argued, are in fact worse than CIA assassination hit squads since drones have also left dozens of innocents dead. Furthermore, Al Qaeda is a military target and the Clinton Administration had concluded that killing Al Qaeda operatives was legal.

While there has been intense speculation about the nature of the CIA program since members of the House Intelligence Committee disclosed last week that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ended it upon learning of it on June 23, 2009 four months into his tenure, what remains puzzling is that nothing revealed so far seems illegal that would then necessitate concealing from the Congress.

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Yesterday after reading in the Wall Street Journal that secret CIA program whose disclosure former Vice President Cheney ordered withheld from Congress apparently involved targeting high level Al Qaeda operatives, I wondered if it wasn't already common knowledge that the United States was targeting for assassination Al Qaeda operatives. Surely, this is not Earth-shattering news that requires keeping Congressional leaders in the dark. Black operations against Al Qaeda's leadership and their rank and file has been on-going since the early days of the Clinton Administration.

Today, the UK Guardian adds more color and suggests that the CIA program that Vice President Cheney ordered concealed was a program similar to a suspected Mossad program that tracked down and killed members of the Palestinian Black September terrorist group that were involved in the attack on Israeli athletes that left 11 dead at 1972 Munich Olympics. This Mossad operation was first reported by Canadian journalist George Jonas in his book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team and later made into an Academy Award nominated film, Munich, by Steven Spielberg.

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Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace that the Bush Administration should the Congress should have been told about the secret CIA program to kill Al-Qaeda operatives that Vice President Cheney ordered kept undisclosed. Here's the exchange between Senator Feinstein and Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: In our final moments, I want to turn to another subject, and this involves your role, Senator Feinstein, as chair of the Intelligence Committee.

CIA director Panetta briefed you recently on an 8-year-old program that he had stopped but that Congress had never been told about. Now there are reports that Vice President Cheney ordered the CIA not to tell Congress about it.

One, should Congress have been told about this program, which apparently was never fully implemented? And what do you make of the vice president's apparent role in telling the CIA not to brief Congress?

FEINSTEIN: The answer is yes, Congress should have been told. We should have been briefed before the commencement of this kind of sensitive program.

Director Panetta did brief us two weeks ago -- I believe it was on the 24th of June -- said he had just learned about the program, described it to us, indicated that he had canceled it and, as had been reported, did tell us that he was told that the vice president had ordered that the program not be briefed to the Congress. This is...

WALLACE: And what do you think of that?

FEINSTEIN: Oh, I think this is a problem, obviously. This is a big problem, because the law is very clear. And I understand the need of the day, which was when America was in shock, when we had been hit in a way we'd never contemplated, where we had massive loss of life, where there was a major effort to be able to respond and -- but this -- see, I don't -- I think you weaken your case when you go outside of the law.

And I think that if the Intelligence Committees had been briefed, they could have watched the program. They could have asked for regular reports on the program. They could have made judgments about the program as it went along. That was not the case because we were kept in the dark. That's something that should never, ever happen again.

CIA Director Leon Panetta briefed Congress about the still classified program on June 24, a day after learning about it and immediately canceling the program. Intelligence sources noted that the program never got off the ground and hadn't been fully instituted.

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To quote the old Negro spiritual, your worries ain't like mine, there Dick. Can I you call Dick now that you aren't VP anymore? Here are Dick Cheney's worries:

I worry a lot that they're using the current set of economic difficulties to try to justify a massive expansion in the government and much more authority for the government over the private sector, and I don't think that's good. I don't think that's . . . (going) to solve our problems.

Let me set your mind at ease there Dick, this isn't about big government versus limited government, it's not about government issuing regulations for the sake of regulations. No, Dick, this is about a government that works, something you clearly know nothing about after a long and not so illustrious career of destroying the capacity of government. This is about tackling problems you chose to willfully ignore. This is about restoring the commons and living up to the promise of America for all its residents. It is implicitly a repudiation of Reaganism.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

That was the President in his Inaugural Address. Pretty crystal clear.

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Here's my theory on what happened the first of this year.  The military generals were asked by President Bush, VP Cheney and Karl Rove what they felt they needed to resolve the Iraq quagmire.  

The Generals said, "sir, we need to curb the violence long enough to allow the Iraqi government a chance to reconcile their differences.  Without a government in charge and with power, this war will go on forever.  There needs to be a political solution, not a military one."

The President then asked the generals, "how many more soldiers do you need to do that?" "It will take at least 30,000", they said.  "How long would it take to get the surge of troops to Iraq?" "About 6 months sir; if we start deploying in April, we should be in full swing by September of 2007."

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