“On orders from President Obama,” writes Tim Weiner in The Nation, “to dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda, the CIA is killing suspected terrorists with remote-controlled missiles fired from drone aircraft above Pakistan and Afghanistan. The CIA decides if it has hit the right targets and whether civilian deaths are acceptable. Do we want to live in a world where the CIA’s clandestine service has the authority to decide who lives and who dies?” (Emphasis added.)

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent charge that the CIA lied to her about the torture of suspected terrorists under President George W. Bush has started a whirlwind of spin. The big lie—President Bush said the United States didn’t torture, though we did—has been lost in the maelstrom. So has a harsh truth: yes, the CIA has stonewalled and deceived Congress in the past, but Congress is stone deaf and derelict in overseeing the CIA.”

As the article cites in passing, it is well known that the CIA has been in the busines of killing innocent civilians for some time:

• US President “Gerald Ford, let slip that the CIA had run lethal plots against foreign leaders, which would tarnish every president since Harry Truman.”
• Regarding the Warren Commission, which looked into the assassination of President Kennedy, Ford reflected on “CIA’s keeping secrets from the commission—notably its plots against Fidel Castro. It was ‘unconscionable’ that the CIA was ‘not giving us the full story,’ Ford said.”
• Another, was “the Iran/Contra affair, which blew up in late 1986. The spectacle of the United States caught shipping weapons to Iran, skimming the profits and slipping the money to anticommunists in Central America came close to wrecking Reagan’s presidency.”
• “Starting in 1995, the CIA used the Peruvian air force to shoot down airplanes suspected of carrying cocaine. In April 2001, the operation attacked a plane carrying a family of Michigan missionaries over the Amazon. Veronica Bowers, 35, and her daughter, Charity, seven months old, were killed… Seven years after the shoot-down, [Congressman] Peter Hoekstra [provided] evidence that the CIA ‘operates outside the law and covers up what it does and lies to Congress.’ That’s what Pelosi said about torture.”

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent charge that the CIA lied to her about the torture of suspected terrorists under President George W. Bush has started a whirlwind of spin. The big lie—President Bush said the United States didn’t torture, though we did—has been lost in the maelstrom. So has a harsh truth: yes, the CIA has stonewalled and deceived Congress in the past, but Congress is stone deaf and derelict in overseeing the CIA.”