By Steve Hynd
When Sy Hersh told listeners back in March that an assassination ring had been run out of Dick Cheney's office without congressional oversight, many pundits wrote him off as a raving conspiracy theorist. Even the Bush administration wouldn't have done such a clearly illegal thing, they said. Most echoed Will Bunch when he wrote:
Why would the Bush administration have thought there'd be such negative reaction from Congress, which was rubber-stamping everything with the word "terror" attached to it after 9/11, that it felt the need to essentially break the law by keeping it secret.
Then we heard in July that such an assassination ring had been discussed but not approved by the Bush White House. Back then, I wrote that the problem with such plans is mission creep - who exactly were the assassination squads supposed to assassinate, maybe not just Al Qaeda leaders - and "if the CIA program didn't get fully going was there a parallel military program, still secret, that did"?
Now, we have the answer.
The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
Blackwater's mercs "helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance" according to Mark Mazzetti in the NY Times, but it was all done off the books with no formal contracts, just handshakes between Bush officials and Erik Prince. Yes, the same Erik Prince who has been accused in sworn statements to a US court of of using murder to silence witnesses to criminal acts by Blackwater, of smuggling weapons into Iraq to sell for profit, of destroying evidence of criminal acts and lying to federal agencies.
An executive order signed by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 barred the C.I.A. from carrying out assassinations, a direct response to revelations that the C.I.A. had initiated assassination plots against Fidel Castro of Cuba and other foreign politicians.
The Bush administration took the position that killing members of Al Qaeda, a terrorist group that attacked the United States and has pledged to attack it again, was no different from killing enemy soldiers in battle, and that therefore the agency was not constrained by the assassination ban.
The decision to not brief Congress on all this was made by Dick Cheney, according to Jeremy Scahill at The Nation who quoted Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
"What we know now, if this is true, is that Blackwater was part of the highest level, the innermost circle strategizing and exercising strategy within the Bush administration," Schakowsky told The Nation. "Erik Prince operated at the highest and most secret level of the government. Clearly Prince was more trusted than the US Congress because Vice President Cheney made the decision not to brief Congress. This shows that there was absolutely no space whatsoever between the Bush administration and Blackwater."
Scahill also notes that an awful lot of Bush counterterrorism officials have ended up working for Blackwater/Xe. And that the company expects the US government to hold the bag for any and all of its wrongdoings.
All this clearly shows that Hersh was on to something real, and that he only had to fill out some of the details. He stands exonerated. The NY Times report today says that the Blackwater assassination squads never actually got around to killing anyone on the CIA's behalf. Back in March, Hersh clearly thought that they had. I'll be waiting to see what else emerges on this story, especially from Hersh, because I don't think it's over yet.
"Then we heard in July that such an assassination ring had been discussed but not approved by the Bush White House."
ReplyDeleteNo, we didn't.
"Now, we have the answer."
No, we don't.
"All this clearly shows that Hersh was on to something real, and that he only had to fill out some of the details. He stands exonerated."
No, he doesn't.
Both of the stories you point to as somehow relating to Hersh's claims concern CIA programs. Hersh on the other hand claimed no such thing. He was very specific in claiming that the assassination ring he was referring to was operated by the non-CIA, Joint Special Op Command.
If I claimed in 2004 that the Navy SEALs were tapping your phones, I don't get to claim that Risen's NYT reporting on the NSA exonerated me a year later. There's simply no connection.
Even if you didn't understand the differences between the organizations you were reading about, the one detail that got everyone's attention from Hersh was that this military asset was supposedly tasked directly to the VP. So ask yourself if the guys carrying out this program were run directly from the VP's office, the CIA is not only involved but actually running it, how?
ie. That would exonerate Cheney, not Hersh.
"Yes, the same Erik Prince who has been accused in sworn statements to a US court of of using murder to silence witnesses to criminal acts by Blackwater"
Yes, the same testimony that claimed every single Blackwater shooting incident is captured on video, apparently only so that Blackwater can also be accused of destroying said evidence.
Presumably this video is captured either on installed cameras that investigators and hundreds of thousands of military personnel and journalists have all failed to notice so far, or via a space-wasting, ride-along Blackwater cameraman who's presumably brought along on every escort just so he can tape what nobody wants taped and so this guy could make ridiculous claims in court that don't survive any amount of scrutiny.
"Hersh was on to something real, and that he only had to fill out some of the details."
ReplyDeleteHe also said in March that he wasn't ready to publish yet, as he had to fill out those details. Prince, being ex Special Forces, is the common denominator between what hersh had heard and what is emerging now. Hersh was premature in saying anything publicly but he wasn't out-and-out wrong.
"the one detail that got everyone's attention from Hersh was that this military asset was supposedly tasked directly to the VP."
No, the details that got most people's attention were that Cheney had ordered plans for an assasination goon squad, in flagrant contravention of the law, concealed from Congress.
Regards, Steve
Oh sorry, I thought this was a serious blog.
ReplyDeleteI just told you that you've gotten wrong ALL of the basic details of Hersh's statements, making everything you've written here incorrect. I was sort of expecting you to at least acknowledge that information, if not confirm it and then make the appropriate corrections based on it, rather than pretending it doesn't matter.
Here's a thought, you could be the first blogger to break the story that the current commander of the ISAF in Afghanistan used to work at the CIA. A worldwide scoop that only fact-checking has prevented from being told until now.
Campbell, that level of snark is really unneccesary.
ReplyDeleteYou've explained why I got the details wrong, even though I didn't. I can read. Go back and tell me where I mentioned JSOC in the post (although I definitely did so on my post about Hersh's comments at the time, linked in the post).
I explained in turn why my comments aren't about the details but about the broad thrust of Hersh's allegations, which almost everyone decried as purest conspiracy nutbar stuff at the time.
We have a difference of opinion about what's important in the story, that's all. No worries. But if you still plan to throw a snit about it that's OK too. No one forces you to read Newshoggers.
Regards, Steve