[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Full Goodman interview of Hersh

[Patrick Bond]

Seymour Hersh: Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in "A Lot of" 
Countries, Including in Latin America

Tuesday 31 March 2009

by: Amy Goodman  |  Visit article original @ Democracy Now!

photo
Seymour Hersh talked with Amy Goodman about US government assassination 
squads. (Photo: Social PIC Collective)
The investigative journalist for The New Yorker explains his recent 
bombshell revelation about Dick Cheney's "executive assassination" squads.

    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 year- 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 ... 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 Yorker). Last summer, I wrote a long article about 
the Joint Special Operations Command.

    And just to go back to what John Hannah, who ... 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 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 - 
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 ...

    Amy Goodman: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing 
under President Obama?

    Seymour Hersh: How do I know? I hope not.

    --------

    Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news 
program, Democracy Now!