Too Late!

The Daily Beast’s Daniel Klaidman reports that the Obama Administration is giving the military exclusive control of drone murders, instead of sharing with the CIA. Quoting one of several faceless and ballless sources, Dan comes up with the following:

“Barack Obama has got to be concerned about his legacy,” says one former adviser. “He doesn’t want drones to become his Guantánamo.”

Am I the only one who thinks it’s a little late for that? Isn’t, you know, killing someone with zero due process worse than locking them up with zero due process?

Afterwords
Dan presents the change as a step upwards, because CIA operations are “covert” (that is, you can lie about them), while military operations are “clandestine” (you’re not supposed to talk about them but you’re not supposed to lie about them either). Well, if Klaidman really thinks that the military won’t lie, he’s pretty stupid. And since it appears that the Obama Administration chose to give this as an exclusive to Dan, maybe I’m right.*

The politics behind all this are pretty interesting. As Bob Woordward informed us back in December, Gen. Patraeus took the CIA job because he saw the Agency as ascending while the military was descending.

He went on to say, “We’re going to be retrenching militarily.” In contrast, the CIA and the intelligence agencies, “I think, are going to be a growth industry,” Petraeus said.

But now, Klaidman reports, John “Speak No Evil” Brennan, the CIA’s new head, wants out of the murder business—the visible part of it, at least. “Brennan has publicly stated that he would like to see the CIA move away from the kinds of paramilitary operations it began after the September 11 attacks, and return to its more traditional role of gathering and analyzing intelligence.” What Broadwell hath wrought, eh?

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