Investigative Reporter Seymour Hersh Describes 'Executive Assassination Ring'
by Eric Black

March 11 2009

from MinnPost Website

 

 

REUTERS/Fadi Al-Assaad

Journalist Seymour Hersh speaking in Doha at an Al Jazeera forum on the media in 2007.
 

At a “Great Conversations” event (click below image) 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.”

 

 

 

to listen "Great Conversations" click above image

 

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

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.”

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government official who had experience with many of the crises.

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out.

 

Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Vietnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

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?”

Replied Hersh:

“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 going to get before a committee.”

Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:

“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert CIA operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”

(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.)

Here is a tape of the full Mondale-Hersh-Jacobs colloquy, a little over an hour, without the audience Q and A. If you want to look for the Hersh statement quoted above, it’s about at the 7:30 mark.

 

 

 

from CollegeOfContinuingEducation-UniversityOfMinnesota Website


The rest of the evening was, as expected, full of worry and wisdom and quite a bit of Bush-bashing.


Jacobs walked the two elder statesmen through their experiences of:

  • The My Lai massacre, which Hersh first revealed publicly and which he last night called “the end of innocence about us and war.”

     

  • The Pentagon Papers case, which Mondale called the best example of the “government’s potential for vast public deception.”

     

  • Henry Kissinger’s secret dealings, mostly relating to the Vietnam War.

    Hersh, who has written volumes about Kissinger, said that he will always believe that whereas ordinary people count sheep to fall asleep, Kissinger “has to count burned and maimed Cambodian babies.”

     

  • The Church Committee investigation of CIA and FBI abuses, in which Mondale played a major role.

    He talked about the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover not only spied on Martin Luther King but literally tried to drive him to suicide.

     

  • The Iran Contra scandal.

    Hersh said the Reagan administration came to office with a clear goal of finding a way to finance covert actions, such as the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, without appropriations so that Congress wouldn't know about them. Mondale noted that Reagan had signed a law barring further aid to the Contras, then participated in a scheme to keep the aid flowing.

     

    Hersh said that two key veterans of Iran-Contra, Dick Cheney and national security official Elliot Abrams, were reunited in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key lesson from Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration knew about it.

     

  • And the Bush-Cheney years.

    Said Hersh:

    • “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extraordinary.”

    Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney, and his inner circle:

    • “they ran a government within the government.”

    Hersh added:

    • “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.”

    Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain,

    • "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table."

Jacobs pressed both men on the question of whether the frequent abuses of power show that the Constitution fails, because these things keep happening, or whether it works, because these things keep coming to light.

Mondale stuck with the happy answer.

“The system has come through again and again,” he said.

Presidents always think they will get away with it, but eventually reporters like Hersh bring things to light, the public “starts smelling this stuff,” the courts and the Congress get involved.

 

Presidents,

“always, in the long run, find out that the system is stronger than they are.”

Hersh seemed more troubled by the repetitions of the pattern.

The “beautiful thing about our system” is that eventually we get new leaders, he said. “The evil twosome, Cheney and Bush, left,” Hersh said. But he also said “it’s really amazing to me that we manage to get such bad leadership, so consistently.”

And he added that both the press and the public let down their guard in the aftermath of 9/11.

“The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team,” Hersh said.

Top editors passed the message to investigative reporters not to “pick holes” in what Bush was doing. Violations of the Bill of Rights happened in the plain sight of the public. It was not only tolerated, but Bush was re-elected.

And even Mondale admitted that one of his greatest successes, laws reforming the FBI and CIA in the aftermath of the Church Committee, were supposed to fix the problem so that,

“we would never have these problems again in the lifetime of anyone alive at the time, but of course we did.”

 

 

 

 

Video

Hersh - Cheney Ordered Liquidations

from Javno Website

 

Hersh claims Cheney headed a special unit that sought out ‘public enemies’ and executed people around the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seymour Hersh, an American investigative reporter, openly accused the former US vice-president, Dick Cheney at the Minnesota University for callous liquidations of potential enemies of the country.

I did not write about it after September 11, but the CIA was deeply involved in activities directed against people who were considered to be enemies of the country without any trials, Hersh said, alluding to abuse of power.

He went on to explain that an organization called Joint Special Operations Command acted independently and they only had to answer directly to Dick Cheney. Their operations took place across the world, without consulting the authorities of the countries and they did not even look to the CIA for advice.

Under Bush’s orders they entered various countries without informing the ambassadors or directors of CIA’s headquarters. They found the people on their list, executed them and left them there. That took place on behalf of all of us, Hersh said.

He said that he was planning to publish this information in his book and said it would take him two years at the most to collect enough evidence that will convince even the most skeptical that he is right.
 

 


Kucinich seeking an investigation

Dennis Kucinich, a Croat-born politician known for his liberal stances and a former democratic presidential candidate, thinks it is too long to wait two years for Hersh to collect evidence and that an investigation should be launched right away.

He sent a letter to the chairman of the supervisory committee for the U.S. lower house, demanding that Hersh’s information be checked out, stating that the operations, if they truly did take place, disturbed the foundations of America’s politics.

Kucinich is known to the wider public for his demands for the impeachment of Dick Cheney in 2007, as well as the impeachment of George W. Bush in July 2008. Hersh, who works for the New Yorker, is known for his claims that America is planning an attack on Iran.

Immediately after the inauguration, Dick Cheney started a forceful public campaign against Barack Obama. He accused him on several occasions of bringing the US in danger with his democratic politics.

 

He reiterated that several days ago during an interview with the CNN.

 

 

 

 

Cheney Ran SS-Style Political Assassination Unit

Vice-President Had His Own Military Hit Squad That Carried Out Executions Abroad
by Paul Joseph Watson
March 12, 2009

from PrisonPlanet Website

 

Award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped another bombshell this week when he revealed that former Vice-President Dick Cheney had his own SS-style political assassination unit that reported directly to him.

Hersh told a University of Minnesota audience on Tuesday,

“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.”

Hersh then went on to describe how the Joint Special Operations Command was an executive assassination unit that carried out political assassinations abroad.

“It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”

The revelation that Cheney had his own private assassination unit is not too far removed from Hitler’s notorious SA (Sturmabteilung), the much feared para-military wing of the Nazi party who were used to beat, torture and kill political opponents of the Nazi party in 1930’s Germany and the Waffen SS, who were later used in the war to carry out executions and war crimes.

The SA were later targeted by Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives, a brutal purge to eliminate political adversaries both inside and outside of the Nazi party. Hundreds of people were executed in cold blood by the Gestapo and the SS.

Tellingly, German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extra-judicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to Hitler. The Waffen SS was deemed beyond prosecution despite it blatantly being involved in egregious and ongoing war crimes, as well as domestic assassinations.

The Joint Special Operations Command, Cheney’s assassination unit, is also described as an area of ‘extra-legal’ operations.

“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “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.”

And it’s still going on.

 

None of Obama’s reversals of Bush executive orders say anything about abolishing the Joint Special Operations Command.

 

Indeed, the specialist unit is an integral part of Obama’s vastly expanded bombing raids and other incursions in Pakistan.

 

 

 


Hersh - 'Executive assassination ring' reported directly to Cheney
by Muriel Kane
March 11, 2009

from RawStory Website

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

Hersh replied,

"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."

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command.

"It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," he explained. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," Hersh stated. "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."

Hersh told MinnPost.com blogger Eric Black in an email exchange after the event that the subject was "not something I wanted to dwell about in public." He is looking into it for a book, but he believes it may be a year or two before he has enough evidence "for even the most skeptical."

Stories have been coming out about covert Pentagon assassination squads for the last several years. In 2003, Hersh himself reported on Task Force 121, which operated chiefly out of the Joint Special Operations Command. Others stories spoke of a proposed Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group.

As Hersh noted in Minnesota, the New York Times on Monday described the Joint Special Operations Command as overseeing the secret commando units in Afghanistan whose missions were temporarily ordered halted last month because of growing concerns over excessive civilian deaths.

However, it appears that Hersh is now on the trail of some fresh revelation about these squads and their connection to Vice-President Cheney that goes well beyond anything that has previously been reported.

 

 


 

 

 

 

El Reportero Seymour Hersh Afirma Que...

Cheney Dirigió Un Comando De Asesinos Al Estilo de Las SS
por Admin

Marzo 17, 2009

del Sitio Web Rafapal


Ante el silencio de los medios de comunicación, nos enteramos a través de Prison Planet de las incendiarias declaraciones del afamado periodista de la revista New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, ante la Universidad de Minnesota en las que afirma que “el vicepresidente Dick Cheney dirigió un escuadrón de asesinos, al estilo de las SS nazis, al margen de la CIA, que quitaba de en medio a elementos considerados ‘enemigos del estado”. Hay que recordar que las SS, al mando del vice-führer Himler, asesinó a miembros de las SA, otra unidad del régimen nazi.

Estas declaraciones podrían aclarar la cantidad de muertes extrañas de militares, investigadores en armas biológicas, periodistas y agentes de inteligencia acaecidas en los años de la era Bush.

Sin embargo, el equipo de Alex Jones llega más lejos al afirmar que esa unidad, dependiente del “Comando del Norte” lleva funcionando desde hace décadas, haciendo al régimen de los Estados Unidos definitivamente heredero del nazismo, pues la propia CIA fue fundada por el nazi Eric Gehlen, y los programas secretos de armas biológicas y control mental MK Ultra, así como la propia NASA, tuvieron a científicos nazis como sus máximos responsables, tras ser exonerados del Juicio de Nuremberg y captados por el Programa Paperclip.

Esta tremenda noticia todavía ignorada por los medios de comunicación masivos, que coloca al responsable del 11-S, Dick Cheney, en la picota de la Justicia, se completa al conocer que el congresista del partido demócrata por Ohio, Dennis Kucinich, ha pedido la apertura de una investigación sobre estos hechos.

 

¿Cuánto tardarán los medios de comunicación en contaros esta DESCOMUNAL noticia?

Tic, tac, tictac, tictac…

PD: Digo yo: ¿No será “Al Qaeda” una extensión de este comando de asesinos paramilitares?; Grabas unos vídeos con unas proclamas musulmanas, les pones unas barbitas y unas ropas árabes…


 

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