Seymour Hersh Describes American Government Murder System At
a “Great Conversations” event (MP3) 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.” 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 [
CIA ] 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 [ sic ] 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.” 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: (“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. 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: 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.” UPDATE:
The CIA responds to Seymour Hersh (via MinnPost)
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes
'executive assassination ring'
By Eric
Black | 03/11/09
“Under the Bush
Administration’s interpretation of the law,
clandestine military activities, unlike covert
C.I.A. 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.”