The assassination program -- revealed to Congress in June by CIA Director Leon Panetta -- was initially launched in 2001 as a CIA-led effort to kill or capture top al-Qaeda members using the agency's paramilitary forces. But in 2004, after briefly terminating the program, agency officials decided to revive it under a different code name, using outside contractors, the officials said.

"Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong," said a retired intelligence officer intimately familiar with the assassination program.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/19/AR2009081904315.html?nav=hcmodule

Still not how sure this matters much. It was a program that never came to fruition, and was already actively implemented in the "Special OPs" teams. About the only thing of an interesting nature here is that "it has been reported" that Cheney was involved with telling them to not report anything at the time.

Quote

...
The CIA -- and Blackwater -- were not the only agents that sought to covertly kill key members of al-Qaeda using small, highly trained teams. A similar effort, officials say, was undertaken by U.S. Special Forces.

"The targets were generally people on a kill or capture list," said a source familiar with Special Forces operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "How did people get on the list? Well, if we knew that people were involved in planning attacks, they got on the list. More than half were generally captured. But the decision was made in advance that if they resisted, or if it was necessary for any reason, just kill them."
...

Also, this was news like 2 weeks ago. Why did the Post wait until today to post an article basically rehashing what we already knew? I would think them doing something to save American and civilian lives was well worth the effort. Blackwater seems to be the ones who had issues - and I haven't seen Panetta come out and say that the CIA directed Blackwater to go out and kill civilians...

*shrug*

On a side note, Blackwater's new name "XE" is kinda weird. I guess they wanted something generic sounding so people would forget about their past troubles in Iraq.

They've spent millions of dollars on outsourcing and nothing has come of it. Most time to penetrate an organisation like Al Qaeda takes years. It's not something that can be easily outsourced and should remain a government function. They shouldn't worry about assassinating Al Qaeda members as they are not a recognised government entity.

??? That really made no sense. None of it other than the time to penetrate Al Qeada.

I never penetrated Al Qaeda but I once penetrated my neighbor Al Williams. Sweet, sweet @ss.

I bet it didn't take years either :)

eesh Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> On a side note, Blackwater's new name "XE" is
> kinda weird. I guess they wanted something generic
> sounding so people would forget about their past
> troubles in Iraq.

Hell, AirTran changed names to avoid stigmas and it has worked wonders. USAirways more or less did it too.