A couple of weeks ago, some members of Congress let it be known that Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., had confessed something to them. Panetta said that there had been a program that the C.I.A. should have told Congress about almost eight years earlier but hadn’t. He had just learned about it, and had ordered the program ended.

Naturally, people wanted to know what the big secret was. The C.I.A. and members of Congress said that they couldn’t tell, but soon enough there were reports that, as the Times put it last week,

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists.

The officials who confirmed this for the Times also told reporters that “the plans remained vague and were never carried out….Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved.”

People also remembered that Seymour M. Hersh had said or written something about this. His reference to an “executive assassination ring,” which he made at an event in Minnesota with Walter Mondale, of all people, was picked up widely. Hersh urged anyone who asked to look at what he’d actually written about the Bush Administration and assassination. That sounded useful, so I went back and read his stories again.

HUNTER-KILLER TEAMS

Let’s start with motive. In “What Went Wrong,” in the October 8, 2001, issue—on newsstands October 1, 2001, and reported as the dust was still settling at Ground Zero—a “C.I.A. man” spoke to Hersh about the need to consider tactics that “defy the American rule of law”:

“We need to do this—knock them down one by one,” he said. “Are we serious about getting rid of the problem—instead of sitting around making diversity quilts?”

Hersh picked up the story in “Manhunt,” in the December 23 & 30, 2002, issue. The piece began with the killing, by Hellfire missile, of an Al Qaeda leader named Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi. At the time, Bush Administration officials told reporters that Harethi was on a list of “ ‘high-value’ targets whose elimination, by capture or death, had been called for by President Bush.” A Yemeni official told Hersh that in the course of the operation

there had been two intelligence “mistakes” that almost resulted in targeting innocent Bedouins.

Hersh went on,

The al-Harethi operation also marked a dramatic escalation of the American war on terrorism. For more than a generation, state-endorsed assassination has been anathema in the United States. In 1975, after revelations of C.I.A. efforts in the nineteen-sixties to kill Fidel Castro and other hostile foreign leaders, a Senate committee led by Frank Church concluded that such plotting “violates moral precepts fundamental to our way of life.”… In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning political assassination, and that order remains in force. In the aftermath of September 11th, however, the targeting and killing of individual Al Qaeda members without juridical process has come to be seen within the Bush Administration as justifiable military action in a new kind of war, involving international terrorist organizations and unstable states. On July 22nd, [2002,] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld issued a secret directive ordering Air Force General Charles Holland, the four-star commander of Special Operations, “to develop a plan to find and deal with members of terrorist organizations.” He added, “The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” The manhunt would be global in its reach, Rumsfeld wrote, and Holland was to cut through the Pentagon bureaucracy and process deployment orders “in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.”

Hersh wrote that many of those he spoke to in the military and the intelligence communities