A CIA Scandal That Could Kill You

If the Progressive Democrats get away with their latest CIA shenanigans, we deserve to go socialist.

In an attempt to save Nancy Pelosi from continued humiliation, her allies in Congress have discovered a horrible scandal. It is so horrible, in fact, that I am loathe to tell you what it is lest you die a hideous death from uncontrolled laughter mixed with contempt.

Did you know that since 9-11 the CIA was secretly brainstorming methods of capturing or killing top agents of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden?

Not actually doing anything, mind you. But brainstorming was taking place. Secretly.

Horror of horrors!

Here's what NRO's Andrew C. McCarthy has to say about this today (and reading it will help you control your impulses to laugh and cry at the same time):

With Speaker Pelosi caught in the web of her own deceit over what the CIA told her about “torture,” and the Obama administration in the middle of its latest 180-degree reversal over CIA interrogators (Attorney General Holder is now considering prosecutions despite Obama’s promise of no prosecutions), Democrats have trumped up a charge that the CIA, on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney, failed to notify Congress that it was contemplating — not implementing, but essentially brainstorming about — plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures.

This is their most ludicrous gambit in a long time — and that’s saying something. Given their eight years of complaints about President Bush’s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and given President Clinton’s indignant insistence (against the weight of the evidence) that he absolutely wanted the CIA to kill bin Laden, one is moved to ask: What did Democrats think the CIA was doing for the last eight years?

And if Democrats did not believe the CIA was considering plans to kill or capture bin Laden, why weren’t they screaming from the rafters about such a lapse?

Of course the CIA has been trying to figure out how to take out top al-Qaeda leaders. One assumes — one hopes — they are also brainstorming about wiping out the Taliban, overthrowing the Iranian regime, undermining Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program, disrupting Syrian support of Hezbollah, and tackling all manner of threats to the United States. But there is no law that requires, or could practically require, the CIA to brief Congress every time some agency component considers the feasibility of some security initiative.

Gen. George Washington himself observed that “upon secrecy, success depends in most enterprises . . . and for want of it, they are generally defeated.” Washington thought it obvious that secrecy was the heart of good intelligence. That is a big part of why intelligence activities are executive in nature, a core part of what the Supreme Court long ago recognized as the “delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” Secrecy cannot be preserved in a system of national security by political committee, much less a system in which a sprawling, 17-agency intelligence community is forced to share all of its secrets, in real time, with 535 members of Congress.

There, there. Now you feel better knowing that there is at least one other sane person in this country.

If you feel a relapse coming on, perhaps you should read the entire article.