The CIA spent tens of millions of dollars to hire a controversial private security firm to seek out and assassinate al-Qaeda leaders, The New York Times reports. Four years ago, the spy agency contracted Blackwater USA, which gained national attention for its aggressive tactics in Iraq and New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to help with planning, training and surveillance. However, the Times reports, the CIA got very little for the millions it spent, since Blackwater never successfully captured or killed any terrorist suspects. “The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years,” the Times writes. “It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.” Blackwater officials denied having a formal contract with Blackwater for an assassination program, but acknowledged that it had “individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune.”

Obama Says America is Safer, not Weaker
President Obama, blasted by President Bush’s former CIA director for releasing four memos outlining U.S. interrogation techniques, said Monday that the United States has to be above torture. “What makes the United States special … is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy, even when we are afraid and under threat, not just when it’s expedient to do so,” he said during a tour of the CIA headquarters. On Sunday, Michael Hayden, who headed the agency from 2003 to 2009, said that Obama had made America less safe by letting enemies of the United States see the limits of our interrogation methods. Obama countered that America will be stronger as a result. He cited the “exceptional circumstances that surrounded these memos, particularly the fact that so much of the information was [already] public. … The covert nature of the information had been compromised.” He also noted that he put an end to the controversial interrogation techniques described in the memos because the United States “is stronger and more secure” when it can deploy both power and the “power of our values, including the rule of law.”

Ex-CIA Chief Blasts Obama

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden is the second high-profile Bush administration official to accuse President Obama of making America less secure. Hayden, who served under Bush from 2006 to 2009, said that Obama has exposed the United States to potential terrorist attacks from al-Qaeda by releasing four memos detailing U.S. interrogation techniques. “What we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al-Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information,” Hayden said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Read more.

It’s clear that President Barack Obama has no intention of merely rubber-stamping everything that comes his way from within his administration. In his first major-league shoot-down in office, the president overruled his senior intelligence officials and signed a new executive order barring the CIA from using harsher interrogation methods than those allowed by the U.S. military. The rejection was part of a wide-ranging executive order that included a directive calling for the closure of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay and revamping U.S. counterterrorism policies.