All of these reporters benefited from journalists, stringers, government employees, activists, and other sources on the ground in the countries where targeted killings take place, providing information and logistics support to Western journalists, often at great personal risk. On a related note, sometimes foreign reporting compels American reporters to redirect their attention to a little-known program; for example, in November 1986 the Lebanese weekly Al-Shiraa first revealed aspects of what would become known as the Iran-Contra scandal. At other times, attentive reporters accidentally learn of covert programs in the public domain, like in April 1984 when Senator Barry Goldwater spontaneously read aloud a classified CIA memo on the Senate floor about the agency's direct role in mining Nicaraguan harbors. Though Goldwater's comments were soon excised from the Congressional Record, reporter David Rogers caught wind of it and wrote the story in the Wall Street Journal.
Since targeted killings are highly classified operations with the lead executive authority split between the CIA and JSOC, some reporting is assuredly incomplete and, at times, factually incorrect. Many current administration and congressional officials vow that some of the allegations I mentioned above are flat-out wrong. A retired senior intelligence official told me that he believed roughly 50 percent of initial reporting on classified programs is erroneous, although the stories become increasingly accurate as affected staffers and officials feel compelled to leak whatever side of the story best represents themselves or their agency; former Pentagon official Douglas Feith described this process as "policy arguments conducted through the press."
One former senior counterterrorism official notes that whenever staffers would propose a clandestine operation that pushed the boundaries of existing policy or legal authorities, he would first require them to include a strategic communications plan for when it inevitably landed on the front page of the Washington Post. It is unclear how seriously this practice was taken given that -- except when the White House and Pentagon have themselves notified sympathetic reporters or editors about a program's existence -- successive administrations have struggled to provide plausible responses or defenses, beyond the habitual non-denial denials. The favored White House tactic is to approve selective leaking by anonymous officials to defend or justify a controversial program. However, these efforts are now immediately scrutinized and dismantled by analysts in the blogosphere who have the institutional memory to place the anonymous comments in their proper context: see Marcy Wheeler's blog posts that have already demolished Sunday's New York Times piece purporting to describe how the Office of Legal Counsel found a legal justification for President Obama to authorize the killing of U.S. citizens who are suspected of terrorism.
Beyond targeted killings, we also know about the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques and torture thanks to Dana Priest and Barton Gellman (2002), the CIA's extraordinary rendition to black sites thanks to Priest (2005), and the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program because of James Risen (2005). Only through exposure and subsequent public outcry were these controversial or illegal government activities ultimately terminated or significantly curtailed. This pattern of uncovering the embarrassments and scandals of secret domestic and foreign national security programs has always been the most reliable means of checking executive branch abuses, by forcing policymakers to openly acknowledge and debate what they previously overlooked or ignored. As the official CIA history of "Intelligence Reform in the Mid-1970s" acknowledged:
Had Seymour Hersh not written his CIA domestic surveillance stories for the New York Times in December 1974... there seems little doubt that there never would have been a Rockefeller Commission, a Pike "Report," a Church Committee, or an Executive Order 11905.... Hersh alone, caused the President, and then Congress -- put in the position where it could not allow the Executive Branch alone to be the investigator -- to make intelligence a major issue of 1975. His stories, combined with a presidential reaction that gave the stories great credibility, took a long smoldering collection of problems and put them on the nation's front burner.
After the leaked Department of Justice white paper and Senator Rand Paul's marathon filibuster, several senators last week expressed a sudden interest in discussing whether the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force is still applicable, if targeted killings should fall exclusively under the military rather than the current CIA-Pentagon split, and the process by which the executive branch decides to use lethal force. These senior policymakers, including Senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, and John McCain, called for a serious and comprehensive set of hearings. Journalists will have provided the fuel for these long-overdue discussions by seeking out current and former government employees who felt compelled or obligated to speak out (despite the Obama administration's unprecedented efforts to prosecute alleged leakers).
If you value the work of these journalists and others, you should support them by paying for their content. Or, for publications that are still freely provided, bypass parasitic websites that aggregate and repackage the work of others, and seek out the original reports. During Sunshine Week, which began on Sunday, you could also support the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which funds the journalism and transparency organizations of your choice. Without your support, investigative journalists cannot adequately do their job, and you will remain in the dark about what your government doesn't want you to know.
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