On September 16, 2001, Counterterrorist Center Director Cofer Black delivered a proposal which “included the inauguration of secret paramilitary death squads authorized to hunt and kill prime terror suspects anywhere on earth. A week earlier, these deaths would have been classified as illegal assassinations. …Black’s proposal was nothing less than a global plan for a secret war, fought not by the military, with its well-known legal codes of conduct and a publicly accountable chain of command, but instead in the dark by faceless and nameless CIA agents following commands unknown to the American public. …To give the President [Bush] deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to [CIA Director George] Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how. …It authorized the CIA’s officers to break and enter into private property, and to monitor the communications and financial transactions of suspected terrorists, even inside the United States when necessary, as well. …the CIA’s lawyers floated the suggestion that the spy agency should no longer be banned from conducting espionage inside the United States. Since the Agency’s inception in 1947, the curb on domestic spying had been an ironclad rule, deliberately written into the Agency’s founding statute in order to ensure that America would never have a secret police service like the all-powerful and corrupt gestapos of Communist East Germany and Soviet Union. …the proposal revealed a glimpse at the scope of the CIA’s ambitions. Virtually every other item on the CIA’s wish list was approved.”
– Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, Pages 38-39