Cheney's role in the CIA-Congress fight is a sideshow

By Dov Zakheim

There are several issues at play regarding the so-called secret CIA programs to target and kill al-Qaeda leadership. The first is whether the CIA should have told the Congress what it planned prior to actually fleshing out a complete program. One could argue that the Congress, or at least its senior leaders, should have been informed immediately upon the CIA's consideration of such an effort. But one could argue to the contrary that, until the program was fully formulated -- with the various legal, international, and other concerns fully resolved -- there was nothing to inform the Congress about. Indeed, one might assert that informing the Congress -- with the attendant risk of leaks -- would have damaged that CIA program prematurely, and, far more importantly, would have sullied America's reputation abroad on the basis of a hypothetical policy that might never have come into being. The proof of this latter consideration is that, in the end, the program never got off the ground.

As for Mr. Cheney, while the press delights in attacking him, and he appears to delight in goading the press, he should not be at the center of this issue. Rather, the debate should be about both whether the United States can and should even consider a program to kill those who wish to massacre thousands upon thousands of our citizens, and at what point in the process of formulating such a program the Congress should be informed.

Reasonable people can debate these issues. For my part, I feel that with respect to sensitive programs of this nature, the probability of a leak resulting from informing the Congress about them must be balanced against the likelihood of their actually being approved for execution. When a program's fate is highly in doubt, the risk of a leak is high, and the consequences of that leak certain to be highly damaging. Thus, it may be better to wait until the program is more fully defined before informing the Congress of its existence.

Ultimately, the question of whether to mark terrorists for death will not really go away until al-Qaeda and its copycat organizations are defeated. What Mr. Cheney may or may not have done nearly a decade ago is a sideshow in this debate, nothing more.