During a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10, 2009, Seymour Hersh created a stir when he reported that the Bush Administration established an assaination ring that reported directly to Vice President Cheney. From the Mineapolis Post
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.
More below the fold.
Amy Goodwin from Democracy Now! did a followup interview with Hersh.
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.
Sound familiar? We have the Vice President allegedly closely involved in what is essentially a "Death Squad" program that is so covert, Congress has not been informed. It doesn't take too big of a leap to conclude that this is the secret program that new CIA director Leon Panetta put a stop to. If it isn't the program, then maybe there is another shoe to drop.
How did we get here? How did we end up with the Vice President able to develop a secret program with no oversight? Post 9/11 the Right was determined to dismantle the reforms implemented as a result of the findings of the Church Commission. Less than a month after the attack Stephen F. Knott writes in an article entitled Congressional Oversight and the Crippling of the CIA:
This cautious, legalistic attitude has crippled the agency’s effectiveness and will not change unless the oversight committees of Congress acknowledge the uniquely executive character of intelligence and covert operations, and start to dismantle the cumbersome oversight apparatus erected during the last twenty five years
In November 2001, Chris Mooney's article entitled Back To Church details the mood at the time.
In the wake of September 11, we've been hearing "rogue elephant" again. The hawks have flung blame all around for the massive intelligence failure that permitted the September attacks, targeting Bill Clinton, CIA Director George Tenet, and the defenseless Frank Church. September 11 was Church's fault, these critics explain, because his bipartisan committee--which probed not just CIA assassination plots but covert operations, domestic-mail-intercept programs, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's hounding of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other abuses--broke the spirit of the nation's intelligence community by exposing its embarrassing missteps.
The Church bashing began the day of the World Trade Center massacre on ABC, when former Secretary of State James Baker said that Church's hearings had caused us to "unilaterally disarm in terms of our intelligence capabilities." The allegation was soon repeated by Republican Senator Christopher "Kit" Bond of Missouri and numerous conservative commentators. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called the opening of Church's public hearings "the moment that our nation moved from an intelligence to anti-intelligence footing." And the spy-mongering novelist Tom Clancy attacked Church on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor: "The CIA was gutted by people on the political left who don't like intelligence operations," he said. "And as a result of that, as an indirect result of that, we've lost 5,000 citizens last week."
Roger Burbach connects the dots between two September 11 events, one from 1973 and the other 2001. Concerning the 9/11 aftermath, he writes:
In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, former US government officials and conservative pundits attempted to completely rewrite this sordid history. Instead of acknowledging that past CIA operations had gone awry, they insisted that bin Laden's international terrorist network had flourished because earlier U.S. collaboration with terrorists had been constrained or curtailed. Henry Kissinger who was in Germany on September 11, 2001, told the TV networks that the controls imposed on US intelligence operations over the years facilitated the rise of international terrorism. He alluded to the hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1975 headed by Senator Frank Church, which strongly criticized the covert operations approved by Kissinger when he headed up the National Security Council. The Church hearings lead to the first legal restrictions on CIA activities, including the prohibition of US assassinations of foreign leaders.
Other Republicans, including George Bush Sr. who was director of the CIA when the agency worked with many of these terrorist networks, pointed the finger at the Clinton administration for allegedly undermining foreign intelligence operations. They argued vehemently against the 1995 presidential order prohibiting the CIA from paying and retaining foreign operatives involved in torture and death squads.
In the paranoia after 9/11, sitting in an undisclosed location, the monster of Dick Cheney's id was unleashed. Warrantless wiretaps, massive collection of personal data, rendition, torture, and now reports of death squads. Who knows what else is left to be revealed? At this point, nothing should surprise us. The biggest failure of 9/11 is that few people did anything to stop any of this. Ben Franklin said it best, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."