Who is the CIA allowed to kill?

Media reports recently exposed efforts by the Bush administration to create a CIA "assassination squad" so secret that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the agency to keep Congress in the dark about it.

The Wall Street Journal called it a secret plan to "capture or kill al Qaida operatives"; on Thursday, the Washington Post said the program was about to be activated when CIA director Leon Panetta pulled the plug.

But the blaring headlines, and the buzz in the blogosphere, are not just due to more evidence of the ex-veep's addiction to executive power and behind-the-scenes machinations. It's that word "assassinate." Most observers assume that assassination is specifically proscribed by U.S. policy. Except it isn't, exactly, and while the secret CIA assassination program canceled by Panetta may never have claimed a victim, the U.S. is already carrying out actions that look nearly exactly like assassinations, and doing so within the guidelines of domestic and international law. The United States has had plenty of legal latitude to carry out targeted killings during the so-called war on terror -- and has been exercising that option vigorously for the past eight years.

The United States, in fact, has been targeting and eliminating specific al-Qaida and Taliban operatives ever since Congress authorized the use of force against them in September 2001. Just the other day, what were probably unmanned CIA drones killed 43 militants in Pakistan as part of the still unsuccessful effort to assassinate just one man, Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. More