Cheney Is Linked to C.I.A. Concealment of Terror ProgramThe Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency's director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.
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Sy Hersh:
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.”
The Nation reporting on Hersh's investigation:
Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country.UPDATE: This report that Cheney's Death Squad killed Bhutto and/or Al-Hariri has now been denied by Sy Hersh, May 19, 2009 in Lahore Pakistan's Daily Times,
The squad was headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of US army in Afghanistan. It was disclosed by reputed US journalist Seymour Hersh while talking to an Arab TV in an interview.
Hersh said former US vice-president Cheney was the chief of the Joint Special Operation Command and he clear the way for the US by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA. General Stanley was the in-charge of the unit.
Seymour also said that Rafiq Al Hariri and the Lebanese army chief were murdered for not safeguarding the US interests and refusing US setting up military bases in Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister of Israel, was also a key man in the plot.
The award-winning journalist described as “complete madness” the reports that the squad headed by General Stanley McChrystal – the new commander of US army in Afghanistan – had also killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafique Al Hariri and a Lebanese army chief. “Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Mrs Bhutto,” Hersh said. “I have never said that I did have such information. I most certainly did not say anything remotely to that effect during an interview with an Arab media outlet.” He said Gen McChrystal had run a special forces unit that engaged in “high value target activity”, but “while I have been critical of some of that unit’s activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Mr Cheney, as the published stories state.”The problem with a story like this is that because it is so secret it's impossible to know the details without a comprehensive investigation. New Report from the AP here. In a situation like this it's tough to tell the information from the disinformation, but after The Gulf of Tonkin incident, (it's common knowledge that the US fabricated evidence to invade Vietnam, and lied about it), Iran-Contra, and all of the undemocratic activities we've secretly employed the CIA to do in our name with our tax dollars, I'm not surprised by much. This is an organization that tested LSD on Americans called Project MKUTRA.
Project MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used United States citizens as its test subjects.[1][2][3] The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function.
Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MK-ULTRA files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.[4]
Although the CIA insists that MK-ULTRA-type experiments have been abandoned, 14-year CIA veteran Victor Marchetti has stated in various interviews that the CIA routinely conducts disinformation campaigns and that CIA mind control research continued. In a 1977 interview, Marchetti specifically called the CIA claim that MK-ULTRA was abandoned a "cover story."[5][6]
On the Senate floor in 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy said:
The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an "extensive testing and experimentation" program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign." Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to "unwitting subjects in social situations." At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers.[7]
I am never surprised to hear that the CIA has engaged in some horrible, creepy, misuse of funds, but it's important to point out when contradictory evidence shows up, I hope we find out what is true and what is false.
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Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters.
His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.
OK, this is a problem. Technically Cheney should be extradited to the Hague, and tried as a war criminal, but that's unlikely for domestic US political reasons. Cheney will hide behind Executive Privilege, The War Powers Act, and the bizarre theory that the Bush Administration held such that the President had unlimited power during war time. Make no mistake, these are unconstitutional actions, and the rest of the world will be watching to see if we stand up for the rule of law, or if we have politicians who continue to protect each other so that subsequent administrations are unhindered. This is a special case, the facts of the case are so severe that the US can and should try former President Bush, as Cheney was working on his behalf, Cheney, and all the principles involved.
President Obama please appoint an independent Special Prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate and prosecute former President Bush, Cheney, and all involved Bush administration principles for their extra-constitutional actions.
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 Timesthat 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.”
Amy Goodman: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.
Seymour Hersh: Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it's been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It's been going in -- under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.Amy Goodman: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney's former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh's claim.
Wolf Blitzer: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?John Hannah: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.Wolf Blitzer: And so, this would be, and from your perspective -- and you worked in the Bush administration for many year-- it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack 'em.John Hannah: There's no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know -- there's no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.Amy Goodman: That's John Hannah, Dick Cheney's former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called "Syria Calling: The Obama Administration's Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace."
OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.
Seymour Hersh: Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven't written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him -- he had come a long way … since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just -- I am looking into stuff. I've done -- there's really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven't written in the (New Yorker). Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.
And just to go back to what John Hannah, who … I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost -- if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected -- that was the word he used -- of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there's an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the '70s, forbidding such action. It's not only contrary -- it's illegal, it's immoral, it's counterproductive.
The problem with having military go kill people when they're not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we're going into, and it's far more than just in combat areas. There's more -- at least a dozen countries, and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They've been -- our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that's simply -- there's no legal basis for it.
And not only that, if you look at Guantanamo, the American government knew by -- well, let's see, Guantanamo opened in early 2002. "Gitmo," they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It's amazing to me.
And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything's sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said -- I'm paraphrasing, but this is pretty close -- he said that we've captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, "And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position." He's clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.
So, there we are. I don't back off what I said. I wish I hadn't said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we're going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they're very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you're not as precise.
Amy Goodman: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.
Seymour Hersh: Well, it's a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op -- JSOC. It's a special unit. What makes it so special, it's a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force -- what we call our black units, the commando units. "Commando" is a word they don't like, but that's what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It's a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course. Because it's basically devised -- it's been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.
And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring -- I actually said "wing," but of an assassination wing -- that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President's office. He's not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he's certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there's no information provided by the executive to Congress.
Amy Goodman: What countries, Sy Hersh -- what countries are they operating in?
Seymour Hersh: A lot of countries.
Amy Goodman: Name some.
Seymour Hersh: No, because I haven't written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it's far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about -- Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing, I mean, taking out enemy. That's war. But when you go into other countries -- let's say Yemen, let's say Peru, let's say Colombia, let's say Eritrea, let's say Madagascar, let's say Kenya, countries like that -- and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you're violating most of the tenets.
We're a country that believes very much in due process. That's what it's all about. We don't give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war -- and it's a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It's not as if we're at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It's a very complicated war we're in. And with each of those actions, of course, there's always collateral deaths, and there's always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That's the tragedy of Guantanamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they've been there three or four months, they're dangerous to us, because of the way they've been treated …
Amy Goodman: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?
Seymour Hersh: How do I know? I hope not.
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