assassination ring was conducted out of Joint Special Op

[seemslikeadream]

The Man Who Knew Cheney's Secret?

.The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh was mocked in March when he referred to Dick Cheney’s secret squad of CIA assassins. Now, he talks to The Daily Beast about the next shoe to drop.

Reporting legend Seymour Hersh raised eyebrows back in March when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that Dick Cheney ran a secret hit squad that he kept hidden from Congressional oversight.

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," Hersh said at the time. He added: "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."

"I said what I said, they can always say what they say," Hersh told The Daily Beast. "The last time they said the government doesn’t torture, this time it's the government doesn’t assassinate."

Some observers accused him of rumor-mongering and a top former military official threw cold water on the story, but with the recent news that the CIA allegedly kept Congress in the dark on a covert program, Hersh's words suddenly look more and more prescient. Yesterday, the New York Times reported the hidden program in question was a death squad authorized by Dick Cheney without Congressional approval.

Now, there are key differences between Hersh's reporting and the Times' latest piece. Hersh suggested that the assassination ring was conducted out of the Joint Special Operations Command rather than the CIA. Moreover, according to Hersh's sources the program was operational, leaving a trail of bodies, while The Times cited officials saying that the CIA hit squad never actually carried out a mission. The Times and Hersh could conceivably be reporting two distinct squads.

The Daily Beast tracked down Hersh in South Asia, where he says he has not been able to read the New York Times piece but has received calls buzzing about the report. Asked about the officials quoted in the Times' report who claimed that Cheney's assassination ring never became operational, Hersh offered a skeptical response.

"I said what I said, they can always say what they say," Hersh told The Daily Beast. "The last time they said the government doesn’t torture; this time it's the government doesn’t assassinate."

Hersh said that his words in Minnesota were exaggerated in the press, since he had already previously reported on covert operations that he alleged were out of Congress' view. In February 2005, he published a report the President had authorized Donald Rumsfeld to organize special operations in South Asia and the Middle East without going through the CIA, and thus having to report them to Congress. In July 2005, he wrote that the White House circumvented Nancy Pelosi to organize covert operations led by retired CIA officers and non-government personnel to influence the Iraqi elections.

"In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush administration’s increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals," he wrote in the July 2005 piece. "This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders

As recently as July 2008, Hersh published a report that the White House was exploiting technical differences between defense and intelligence operations in order to get around briefing Congress on pursuing "high value targets" in Iran through covert action.

"There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing," he wrote then.

Beyond his own reporting, Hersh said President Bush's own speeches provided evidence of secret assassinations.

"Go read George Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech," he said. "He's talking and he says we've captured and detained 3,000 Al Qaeda members and other terrorists—crazy numbers—and said some of them will never bother us any more. And Congress cheers."

Bush's full quote then was:

"All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

This article was updated to reflect differences between Hersh’s story and The New York Times’.
[/url]

[Nordic]

Why in the FUCK does anyone still give the NYTimes any credibility?

[American Dream]

It Wasn't Only Cheney Who Had Assassination Programs: Clinton Did It, and Obama Does It, Too
By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports
Posted on July 16, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/141337/


Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the "secret" CIA assassination program that former Vice President Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress.

But this program -- and the media descriptions of it -- sounds a lot like the assassination policy implemented by President Bill Clinton, particularly during his second term in office.

Partisan politics often require selective amnesia. Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President George W. Bush's most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats.

It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and -- particularly these days -- Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty. The fact is that many of Bush's worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy, or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes.

To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA's extraordinary-rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in U.S. war zones and warrantless wiretapping.

Regarding the Bush-era assassination program, there is great reason to be skeptical the program that CIA Director Leon Panetta alleges was concealed from Congress is actually the program the public is being led to believe it is.

Why would the CIA need to conceal a program that never was implemented and, if it never was implemented, why did Panetta need to shut it down? Moreover, who was running this inactive program from the minute Barack Obama was sworn in until June 24, when Panetta supposedly announced its cancellation?

This program -- as it is currently being described -- should hardly be a major scandal to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, as some are now treating it. As they well know, Obama has continued the Bush targeted-assassination program, using armed drones and Special Forces teams to hunt "high-value targets."

Former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and others have pointed out, "The CIA runs drones and targets al-Qaida safe houses all the time." Cannistraro told Talking Points Memo that there is no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.

Now, if it turns out that the actual plan Cheney allegedly concealed is something other than what has been publicly described, that will be a different matter. For instance, if the CIA had a secret post-9/11 program planning assassinations on U.S. soil or of U.S. citizens, and it was ordered concealed by Cheney. Or, if it was a plan to target in other ways "enemies of the state" within the U.S., as Seymour Hersh has suggested.

"The Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state," Hersh said in March. "Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet. That does happen."

Let's look at the program the Democrats claim was kept secret. The Bush administration reportedly authorized the CIA to use small paramilitary teams to hunt down and assassinate "al-Qaida" leaders around the world. It is currently being reported that this plan was never implemented and was born after 9/11. Both of these assertions are very, very doubtful.

The plan, as currently described in the media and by Democrats, is one that continues to exist under the Obama administration. In fact, this program has been part of official U.S. policy -- under Democratic and Republican administrations -- for decades.

By way of background, technically, there is a U.S. ban on assassination that dates to President Gerald Ford in 1976. "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," states Executive Order 11905. That was updated by President Jimmy Carter, who dropped the term "political," simply prohibiting "assassination." The current Executive Order, 12333, was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and has remained on the books through every administration since.

What is brutally ironic about Reagan signing this ban was that he authorized repeated assassinations, notably the 1986 attempt on Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi, which failed to kill Gadhafi, but killed his infant daughter.

But in that brutal apparent contradiction is the truth: The U.S. does not have a ban on assassinations as long as government lawyers can figure out some legal acrobatics for the president to use in sidelining the ban. Every president from Reagan to Obama has reserved the right to assassinate "terrorists" by claiming it as a military operation or a pre-emptive strike.

It is pretty clear that when the Bush administration took over, it picked up the Clinton administration's assassination policy and ran with it -- albeit with more of a missionary zeal for killing, and a removal of some of the layers of lawyering. In short, the Bush team expanded and streamlined the longstanding U.S. government assassination program.

Throughout the 1990s, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House, and it is clear assassinations were attempted with presidential approval.

Newsweek magazine reported on how, in 1995, U.S. Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan "terrorist" in Bosnia, saying, "American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 'lethal finding' signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists."

A former senior Clinton official, speaking shortly after the 9/11 attacks, called on the Bush administration not to escalate the U.S. assassination program, saying, "We have a war on drugs, too, but we don't kill drug lords." But then, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the official added, "we have proxies who do."

Clinton-era officials' attempt to hide behind "proxies" is a stunning trampling of the assassination ban as it exists. Not only does it ban U.S. government personnel from engaging in, or conspiring to engage in, "assassination," it also bans "indirect participation": "No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order."

The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn't just proxies authorized to do the assassinations.

The Clinton White House worked for years with the CIA to craft an assassination policy -- specifically relating to al-Qaida in general, and Osama bin Laden and his top deputies specifically.

CIA operatives such as Billy Waugh complained in the early and middle years of the Clinton presidencies that they were lawyered to death by Clinton's attorneys in their attempts to get the green light to kill bin Laden in Sudan.

"[I]n the early 1990s, we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders," recalled Waugh. Among Waugh's rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, and dump his body at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran. Eventually, however, Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders. That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton's signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations.

George W. Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Panetta was then Clinton's chief of staff, from 1994 to 1997, and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue.

Under Clinton, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to "military targets or "to attacks carried out in pre-emptive self-defense," according to Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars.

Shortly after 9/11, Clinton stated this position publicly, supporting the Bush administration's "war on terror" targeted-assassination policy, saying on NBC News, "The ban that was put in effect under President Ford only applies to heads of state. It doesn't apply to terrorists." That is a stunning statement that is a true legal stretch given the explicit language of the ban.

Moreover, Clinton did, in fact, try to kill a head of state, on April 22, 1999, when he ordered a NATO air strike on the home of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark also authorized an assassination attempt on Serbian Information Minister Aleksander Vucic, bombing Radio Television Serbia when Vucic was scheduled to appear via satellite on CNN's Larry King Live. Vucic was not killed, but 16 media workers were.

Clinton also publicly acknowledged his administration's attempt to assassinate bin Laden. "I worked hard to try to kill him," Clinton said. "I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since."

Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said after Clinton issued his 1998 "lethal finding," U.S. operatives worked with Afghan rebels for two years in an attempt to kill bin Laden. "There were a few points when the pulse quickened, when we thought we were close," Berger later recalled. Among the alleged attempts on bin Laden's life by Clinton was the 1998 bombing of Afghanistan (which was coupled with a massive strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan).

Coll observed of the Clinton policy: "Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest."

After 9/11, the CIA, which had been frustrated by some of the hurdles to assassination posed by the Clinton administration's legal team, now had the conditions and the commander in chief it needed to take its assassination program to the next level.

The main operations were run out of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) headed by J. Cofer Black, who had served as Clinton's CIA station chief in Sudan when bin Laden was there in the 1990s. After 9/11, Black's division at the CIA was authorized by Bush -- with the consent of Congress -- to hunt down bin Laden and others alleged to be responsible for 9/11. As I describe in my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army:

Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed [to Afghanistan] on Sept. 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. "Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the president, and he is in full agreement," Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. "I don't want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead … They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden's head to the president. I promised him I would do that."
Schroen said it was the first time in his 30-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. "Perfectly clear, Cofer," Schroen told him. "I don't know where we'll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field." Black later explained why this would be necessary. "You'd need some DNA," Black said. "There's a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you'll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!"
The actions of the teams run by Black were certainly known to Congress. In fact, Black testified in front of Congress in 2002 about what he called the new "operational flexibility" being employed in the "war on terror."

"This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11," Black said. "After 9/11, the gloves come off." By 2004, Black claimed that "over 70 percent" of al-Qaida's leadership had been arrested, detained, or killed, and "more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of an action."

The existence of this program is not secret. It has been documented in books by former CIA operatives, is discussed in public speeches by former officials and is reflected extensively in the congressional record.

Obviously, the House and Senate intelligence committees should investigate the assassination policy under the Bush administration. Cheney's role is central to that. Prosecutors should also be authorized to do the same. If there is a nefarious program the public is unaware of and it was unlawfully concealed, it should be brought out into the light.

But, the truth is that a real investigation -- one that actually seeks to get to the broader truths of these matters -- would require investigating the current assassination program under Obama and the roots of the program that preceded the day when George W. Bush took power. That means looking at the Clinton White House and further back. It means looking at both Democratic and Republican assassination teams.

The sad fact is that nobody on Capitol Hill has demonstrated in any way that he or she has the political courage to do that.

[pepsified thinker]

A few thoughts--

Seems like this story is coming out in progressively worse revelations. ...makes it less shocking/easier to digest, eh?

The idea that a secret assassination squad had to be hidden is ridiculous, if ('IF') the targets were al-Qaida leaders. How could Congress object? Heck, our predator drones are shooting up wedding parties and funerals left and right, in Afghanistan and Pakistan--so collateral damage couldn't be a factor, and killing al-Qaida chiefs certainly wouldn't make most D.C. folks pause--applaud, more likely.

And the 'it wasn't operational' thing--for how many years was it around to hide, but not opertional?

I think this is being covered-up/obfuscated because McCrystal is/was a JSOC bigwig.

(I haven't read the bit about Clinton and Obama, but I assume the assertion in its title is true--which makes the idea that this was some sort of shocking, must-hide operation even more unbelievable.)

[ultramegagenius]

Scahill and Hersh have clearly given the lie to the idea that the canceled program was the assassination squad. further evidence that said program has long been known to all can be found in this Times article from 2002:

Bush Has Widened Authority of C.I.A. to Kill Terrorists
By JAMES RISEN and DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: Sunday, December 15, 2002


WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 ? The Bush administration has prepared a list of terrorist leaders the Central Intelligence Agency is authorized to kill, if capture is impractical and civilian casualties can be minimized, senior military and intelligence officials said.

The previously undisclosed C.I.A. list includes key Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, the officials said. The names of about two dozen terrorist leaders have recently been on the lethal-force list, officials said. "It's the worst of the worst," an official said.

President Bush has provided written legal authority to the C.I.A. to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation. Some officials said the terrorist list was known as the "high-value target list." A spokesman for the White House declined to discuss the list or issues involving the use of lethal force against terrorists. A spokesman for the C.I.A. also declined to comment on the list.

Despite the authority given to the agency, Mr. Bush has not waived the executive order banning assassinations, officials said. The presidential authority to kill terrorists defines operatives of Al Qaeda as enemy combatants and thus legitimate targets for lethal force.

Mr. Bush issued a presidential finding last year, after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, providing the basic executive and legal authority for the C.I.A. to either kill or capture terrorist leaders. Initially, the agency used that authority to hunt for Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan. That authority was the basis for the C.I.A.'s attempts to find and kill or capture Mr. Bin laden and other Qaeda leaders during the war in Afghanistan.

The creation of the secret list is part of the expanded C.I.A. effort to hunt and kill or capture Qaeda operatives far from traditional battlefields, in countries like Yemen.

The president is not legally required to approve each name added to the list, nor is the C.I.A. required to obtain presidential approval for specific attacks, although officials said Mr. Bush had been kept well informed about the agency's operations.

In November, the C.I.A. killed a Qaeda leader in a remote region of Yemen. A pilotless Predator aircraft operated by the agency fired a Hellfire antitank missile at a car in which Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, also known as Abu Ali, was riding. Mr. Harethi and five other people, including one suspected Qaeda operative with United States citizenship, were killed in the attack.

Mr. Harethi, a key Al Qaeda leader in Yemen who is suspected of helping to plan the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in 2000, is believed to have been on the list of Qaeda leaders that the C.I.A. had been authorized to kill. After the Predator operation in Yemen, American officials said Mr. Bush was not required to approve the mission before the attack, nor was he specifically consulted.

Intelligence officials said the presidential finding authorizing the agency to kill terrorists was not limited to those on the list. The president has given broad authority to the C.I.A. to kill or capture operatives of Al Qaeda around the world, the officials said. But officials said the group's most senior leaders on the list were the agency's primary focus.

The list is updated periodically as the intelligence agency, in consultation with other counterterrorism agencies, adds new names or deletes those who are captured or killed, or when intelligence indicates the emergence of a new leader.

The precise criteria for adding someone to the list are unclear, although the evidence against each person must be clear and convincing, the officials said. The list contains the names of some of the same people who are on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's list of most wanted terror suspects, although the lists are prepared independently.

Officials said the C.I.A., working with the F.B.I., the military and foreign governments, will seek to capture terrorists when possible and bring them into custody.

Counterterrorism officials prefer to capture senior Qaeda leaders for interrogation, if possible. They regard killing as a last resort in cases in which the location of a Qaeda operative is known but capture would be too dangerous or logistically impossible, the officials said.

Under current intelligence law, the president must sign a finding to provide the legal basis for covert actions to be carried out by the C.I.A. In response to past abuses, the decision-making process has grown into a highly formalized review in which the White House, Justice Department, State Department, Pentagon and C.I.A. take part.

The administration must notify Congressional leaders of any covert action finding signed by the president. In the case of the presidential finding authorizing the use of lethal force against members of Al Qaeda, Congressional leaders have been notified as required, the officials said.

The new emphasis on covert action is an outgrowth of more aggressive attitudes regarding the use of lethal force in the campaign against terrorism. Moreover, such operations have become easier to conduct because of technological advances like the development of the Predator, which has evolved from a camera-carrying surveillance drone into an armed robot warplane controlled by operators safely stationed thousands of miles from any attack.

The development of the armed Predator drone has made it much easier for the C.I.A. to pursue and kill terrorists in ways that would almost certainly not have been tried in the past for fear of the potential for American casualties. In the strike in Yemen, for example, Mr. Harethi was living in a remote, lawless region where the Yemeni government had little control. Not long before the Predator strike, Yemeni forces attacked Qaeda operatives in that same area and were beaten back with many casualties.

The more aggressive approach to counterterrorism is showing results.

George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said in a speech last week that more than one-third of the top leadership of Al Qaeda identified before the war in Afghanistan had been killed or captured.

One recent success, he said, came with the capture of Al Qaeda's operations chief for the Persian Gulf region who had been involved in the planning of the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa as well as the bombing of the Cole in 2000. Since September 2001, Mr. Tenet added, more than 3,000 suspected Qaeda operatives or their associates have been detained in more than 100 countries.

But the decision by the Bush administration to authorize, under certain circumstances, the killing of terrorist leaders threatens to thrust it into a murky area of national security and international law that is almost never debated in public because the covert operations are known only to a small circle of executive branch and Congressional officials.

In the past, the Bush administration has criticized the targeting of Palestinian leaders by Israeli forces. But one former senior official said such criticism had diminished as the administration sought to move aggressively against Al Qaeda.

Still, some national security lawyers said the practice of drawing up lists of people who are subject to lethal force might blur the lines drawn by government's ban on assassinations. That prohibition was first ordered by President Gerald Ford, and in the view of some lawyers, it applies not only to foreign leaders but to civilians. (American officials have said in the past that Saddam Hussein would be a legitimate target in a war, as he is a military commander as well as Iraq's president.)

"The inevitable complication of a politically declared but legally undeclared war is the blurring of the distinction between enemy combatants and other nonstate actors," said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale University and a former State Department official in President Bill Clinton's administration. "The question is, what factual showing will demonstrate that they had warlike intentions against us and who sees that evidence before any action is taken?"

in addition to whatever program Panetta actually canned, don't forget the revelations by 5 inspectors general that electronic surveillance is beyond the bounds of anything hinted at in public:
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?p=274561#274561

so what was ended? something related to Main Core? or the countless data thefts feeding the new TIA offspring? considering that the most scintillating programs will be coveted by every sitting administration, it's a sure bet that whatever was de-authorized will be pretty vanilla by comparison.