Legal News

Bottom Line: Can the CIA Kill Bin Laden If It Ever Finds Him?

By Dionne Searcey

Another day, another legal controversy brews at the CIA. Today the Journal's Siobhan Gorman reports the CIA didn't mention to Congress a secret initiative that was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

Siobhan reports: "According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time (Director Leon) Panetta ended it."

Several Democratic lawmakers have said Panetta (pictured) acknowledged the CIA effort wasn't properly vetted by Congress. Should it be so shocking that an agency whose business it is to keep secrets is so, well, secretive? Congress has been pushing for more oversight since the whole waterboarding fiasco came to light, and the current and past presidential administrations have been generally opposed to that.

The whole kerfuffle over disclosure skirts the legal elephant in the room in the most recent revelation: if our CIA's shaggy assassins (trust us, we've seen those secret agent types on the Iraqi battlefield and they appear to never, ever shave) came across Osama bin Laden in a cave, can they legally kill him on the spot?

This report from the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress outlines the legal murky areas surrounding our government's rules for assassination. President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order in 1981 prohibiting assassination, directly or indirectly – and specifically singled out the "Intelligence Community." Some have interpreted the order to refer to only heads of state, and it's murky whether that was the intention.

Regardless, three days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, House and the Senate passed joint resolutions authorizing the President to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

If one considers Reagan's assassination ban to cover U.S. responses to terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, "the breadth of the authority provided by these joint resolutions might be viewed as sufficient, insofar as U.S. responses to the events of September 11, 2001 are concerned, to encompass actions that might otherwise be prohibited under the assassination ban," the report states.

Photo: AP

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 13, 2009 (boomark / email).