When thou criest let thy companies

Via.

You know how President Obama has been trying to get the CIA under presidential control for the first time in the agency's history and get it to act as an intelligence service instead of an Organisation de l'Armée Secrète? You don't? Well, it's not my fault.*

Anyway the keystone of the job, after installing the president's own personal creature to head the CIA (first Petraeus, whose specialty is to kiss up and smack down, and to implement an idea fanatically as if to prove that it was his own; and then after that flameout the [jump]
rather better choice of Father Brennan), was to "migrate" the drone program from the CIA to the Department of Defense, and this project has now stalled, according to Foreign Policy:

the complexity of the issue, the distinct operational and cultural differences between the Pentagon and CIA and the bureaucratic politics of it all has forced officials on all sides to recognize transferring drone operations from the Agency to the Defense Department represents, for now, an unattainable goal.....

while the platforms and the capabilities are common to either the Agency or the Pentagon, there remain distinctly different approaches to "finding, fixing and finishing" terrorist targets. The two organizations also use different approaches to producing the "intelligence feeds" upon which drone operations rely. Perhaps more importantly, after years of conducting drone strikes, the CIA has developed an expertise and a taste for them.

Landscape in Haraz Mountains, Yemen. Photo by ai@ce at HappyTelus.

That view of the Company's superior skill might surprise the human rights groups that have been reporting recently on the murder of civilians by drone, specifically in Pakistan and Yemen (and not Iraq or Afghanistan, where the Pentagon is in charge), and the family of Mamana Bibi. It is the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen, not the Pentagon in Iraq and Afghanistan, that conducts the infamous "signature strikes" that are basically the stop-'n'-frisk of international murder—identifying targets by their "signatures" or profiles (male, and between the ages of something like 16 and 60) and insisting afterwards that they were militants.

(Bold because it occurs to me as I type that I've never heard anybody saying this, that the Company has basically cornered the US war crimes market ever since Obama took office—that the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports are totally about CIA activities. I was mistakenly under the impression until recently that the Pentagon ran the Yemen drone operations, so I never saw the connection before.)

One problem that isn't a bureaucratic issue at all lies in the very nature of the drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen in particular, which is their awkward relationship with the local governments, which permit them to exist and even welcome them while publicly denying it:

For years, the Pakistani government has given tacit approval to CIA-led strikes. But they were conducted as covert actions under U.S. law, meaning they were never officially acknowledged by U.S. officials. That gave the Pakistanis some wiggle room to tell an angry public, which would never tolerate American troops on the ground, that Pakistani leaders had nothing to do with the strikes on their territory.

You know, there's a simple way—not easy, but simple—of resolving this difficulty. That would be to cancel them. Sorry, Prime Minister Sharif, but if you cannot acknowledge the drone strikes we cannot perform them, as the CIA has gone out of the business and the Defense Department is not allowed to carry out black operations.

Please, Mr. President. I get the idea, as I've said before, that drone strikes are a kind of humanitarian improvement on combat, in that they're capable of killing far fewer people and especially fewer noncombatants. But you know what option kills still fewer?

Sunrise, Sana'a. Photo by Don Whitebread.

BTW, we're not supposed to fear that the project of getting the CIA under control has failed:

Another U.S. official emphasized that the transfer is still continuing. "This is the policy, and we're moving toward that policy, but it will take some time," the official said. "The notion that there has been some sort of policy reversal is just not accurate. I think from the moment the policy was announced it was clear it was not something that would occur overnight or immediately."

For what it's worth. Under the Obama administration, things take a really long time, but they do, after a fashion, tend to happen eventually.

*Also see here. Whose fault is it, I wonder? I sometimes think it's the White House, which wouldn't mind so much if the general population found out, but doesn't somehow want the press to know, because of the stupid White House press corps questions it would lead to:

Potentially there was a national security breach with your CIA director. Do you believe you should have known sooner? ....

I want to follow up on a personal … can you get stuff done with Russia, big stuff done, without having a good personal relationship with Putin?