1 Boring Old Man

Cheney’s Assassination Squads
By: emptywheel
March 11, 2009

emptywheel points us to this little bombshell…

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes ‘executive assassination ring’

By Eric Black
March 11, 2009

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring”…

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.” Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical”…

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
"I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’
"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Throughout the last eight years, we’ve heard Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, David Addington, John Yoo, John Bolton [it feels like a specific "group"] speak to us about the evil out there, and our need to take extreme measures in the face of it. They speak with conviction, and make fun of us for being naive if we react negatively. They remind us of how we felt on September 11th, 2001, as we watched our television sets in horror. They ask us to think about what we would have done had we been in their position – responsible for dealing with that monsterous attack. It’s not just a spurious argument they make. I do remember how I felt then. I do wonder how I would have reacted had I been in their shoes. I do watch Action Movies that depict such things, trying to put human faces on suicide bombers, or put Delta Force Types in impossible circumstances pitted against insane religious zealots or power crazy sadists.

I know that I feel sympathetic towards the Delta Force types, the Navy Seals, the Special Forces. We ask them to live in situations where the currency is life and death – a world where whatever the term "Civilization" means is suspended, and they enter that uniquely human space where killing is not part of the search for food, but something else that only humans do – kill each other. And while I don’t feel particularly close to the suicide bombers, I do have some vague understanding that they see themselves as patriots to their cause – caught up in the same world as the kid from some farm in Nebraska with a beret on his head who leads a charge across a battlefield to a sure death.

But I don’t feel sympathetic to Osama Bin Laden or the group mentioned above, the people at the top who play chess using living pieces and talk about evil. I wonder about that sometimes. Would I feel differently about "the group" had they "won?" In this case, I know the answer. In the early days after 9/11, I was all for going after Bin Laden, and later, the Taliban who supported him. I guess I still feel that way. It’s sort of like I feel about the death penalty. I don’t like it, but it’s the only solution for people who are driven to kill others and will do it again if given a chance. But the minute Bush began to talk about the Axis of Evil, I thought he’d gone insane and opposed everything he said after that. Still do. I know that whatever the outcome of the Iraq misadventure, I would have been just as negative about that group of people.

So when I read about an Executive Assassination Squad reporting only to Vice President Cheney, I know what I feel. I agree that our adversaries are incorrigible and need to be stopped, but I don’t see "the group" as defenders. And I don’t see Gitmo, Torture, Abu Ghraib, the Invasion of Iraq, or Executive Assassination Squads as the same thing as the Delta Force types, the Navy Seals, and the Special Forces. In my book, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, David Addington, John Yoo, and John Bolton are perpetrators who let our real soldiers down. They took the easy road at great expense to our country and the children we sent off to fight. Only one of them was in the Service himself, Donald Rumsfeld, and he served as a peacetime Flight Instructor.

In releasing these memos, the Obama administration may be attempting to appease its antiwar base – which won’t bother to read the memos in full – or trying to look good for the chattering classes.