Cheney had a hit squad?
Hersh: ‘Executive assassination ring’ reported directly to Cheney
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.”</em>
I truly believe we are going to learn things about the Bush administration that are going to give even the most jaded (yes, such as myself) pause. Unchecked power is a dangerous, corrupting thing, and Cheney had been waiting since his days in the Nixon and Ford era to unleash his vision of what a presidency can and should do. We got 9-11, two wars of choice, torture, economic meltdown, and now death squads run out of the VPs office from him…what next?
My predictions? Uncovering of massive wiretapping of journalists, activist groups and private citizens, for starters. Stock market manipulation geared not toward enriching any particular group but rather to cause the exact economic condition we have now- read the Shock Doctrine as to why. Experiments on troops in Iraq and containment camps in the US. Who knows what else?
