You’ve probably seen the story by now:
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.”
So two things if your initial reaction is doubt:
1) This is Seymour Hersh. The guy that broke My Lai and Abu Ghraib, among many other stories. A man described as “the most feared investigative journalist in America”.
2) He’s talking about the Bush Administration. At this point can you really believe they wouldn’t do this? I’m sure John Yoo wrote up a justification for why it was legal. If you’ll start a war under false pretenses, engage in wholesale warrantless spying on your own citizens, tacitly allow the wholesale looting of a country, support torture and extraordinary rendition as government policy, etc, is it so hard to believe you might have a “hit squad”?
Me, I can’t wait for the book Hersh promises later in the article.
