so wait... now we're OUTSOURCING assassination attempts?

The CIA has a long and glorious history of flouting international law by engaging in state-sponsored assassinations. (Apparently, those crazy folks at the United Nations think that people, EVEN people the U.S. government doesn't particularly like, deserve a fair trial before being summarily executed.) So, when Leon Panetta finally told Congress that the CIA had been developing plans to assassinate senior Al Qaeda operatives since 2001, it really shouldn't have come as much of a surprise. However, news broke yesterday that the CIA had actually hired Blackwater USA (yes, that Blackwater USA) to assist with these attempts to locate and kill high-level terrorists. That's right, the CIA is now outsourcing assassinations.

Furthermore, this was all part of a "top secret" operation--so secret, in fact, that Cheney ordered that it had to be kept hidden from lawmakers (you know, like the ones on the Congressional Intelligence Committee). Yet, despite falling into the Bush administration's grossly expanded category of things that must be concealed from the legislature, the CIA, in its infinite wisdom, decided that large parts of this ultra-secret plan could not only be revealed to but also carried out by a private corporation with an (at best) contentious human rights record.