Seymour Hersh: Secret US Forces Carried Out
Assassinations in a Dozen Counties, Including in Latin
America
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh
created a stir earlier this month when he said the Bush administration ran an
“executive assassination ring” that reported directly to Vice
President Dick Cheney. “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,” Hersh said. Seymour
Hersh joins us to explain.
Guest:
Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative journalist for The New Yorker. His latest
article is titled “Syria Calling
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
years—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 in—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 York
Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint
Special Operations Command.
And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—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
evidence—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, our—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. But I’d
love to move on to what I wrote about in The New
Yorker.
AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the assassination
wing continuing under President Obama?
SEYMOUR HERSH: How do I know? I hope not.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Sy Hersh. We’re
going to go to break, and then we’ll be back with him, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist. His piece in The New Yorker is
called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage
in a Middle East Peace.” Stay with us.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/31
