"No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination."--President Gerald R. Ford's Executive Order 11905: United States Foreign Intelligence Activities, SEC. 5, (g).
Passed in 1976 by then President Gerald Ford, Executive Order 11905 clearly prohibits political assassination by agents of the US, as part of an attempt to reign in an out-of-control CIA. While the order had ambiguous success, as the 1980s saw the US directly involved in numerous death squads and assassination groups throughout the Americas, it did restrain Presidents and members of the executive office from directly endorsing and directing such activities. Or at least, until the Bush administration.
More after the fold...
In an interview for an upcoming book, investigative journalist Sy Hersh this week revealed what he described as an "executive assassination ring" that operated directly out of the Bush White House:"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called....They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office....They reported directly to him. Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on...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.
If they stand up to the scrutiny they will certainly be put under, Hersh's stunning revelations reveal (once again) just how "dark" the days of the Bush administration had become. And they leave open a great deal of questions. Who was killed in these assassinations? How was this death squad created? How directly tied into this were the legal advisers to the administration? And, most alarmingly, who has control over it now? The accusations being put forth here are far beyond the purvey of Sen. Leah's proposed Truth Commission, meant to examine extrajudicial acts during the Bush administration. Murder and political assassination under the auspices of the US government being carried out directly from the executive office call for indictments and prosecutions. The Obama administration, so reluctant about dealing with the excesses of their predecessors, might find themselves forced to confront crimes too serious to ignore.
Read more below.
Seymour Hersh: "Executive Assassination Ring" Answered to Cheney, Had No Congressional Oversight
By Eric Black, MinnPost.com.
Investigative journalist Sy Hersh dropped a bombshell revelation on Monday about international killings ordered under Bush.
Read full article here.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Our Death Squads
Friday, December 7, 2007
Look Ma', No Nukes- The NIE Report on Iran
So in the midst of saber-rattling about the threat posed by Iran's "alleged" nuclear weapons program (President Bush has warned Iranian nukes could ignite World War III), the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was released this week. And what do 16 different U.S. intelligence agencies conclude? That Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program back in 2003, and has not restarted it since. The news has sent the neocon war hawks, the White House and their allies into a frenzy. President Bush, in a series of bizarre speeches, has claimed the report doesn't change anything and that Iran is still dangerous. Neocons and warhawks have spent a great deal of print and air time attempting to spin the report to their liking, or questioning its validity. We've seen this story before, during the lead up to the Iraq war. Only that time, it was behind the scenes, and the intelligence community was pressured to cherry-pick information to come out with bogus claims. After getting blamed for that fiasco in the end (as the hawks and the White House sought to cover their role in pushing for war), the intelligence community has decided they aren't getting burned twice. An awkward looking National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, released the NIE this past Monday in full spin mode--probably only because he knew leaks were inevitable if they tried to bury it. In fact, looks as if President Bush knew the direction the NIE was going since at least August, but STILL continued its saber-rattling. And this guy still isn't impeachable?
So here we are, at an interesting place, where the main drumbeating for war has been interrupted by intelligence reports that come (ironically enough) from the very country that has been doing the most saber-rattling. What do with this pause? The hawks and neo-cons have been busily shoring up support from the Europeans and others. Iran has declared the NIE a victory. World bodies like the UN are moving cautiously. And the White House is still into spin, spin, spin. Three articles below that attempt to shed some light on the meaning of the NIE and where things can, and should, go from here, from three of my favorite writers: an earlier Nov piece by author Trita Parsi, Robert Scheer at the Nation and Juan Cole at Salon.com.
The Iranian Challenge
by Trita Parsi
Iran will be the top foreign policy challenge for the United States in the coming years. The Bush Administration's policy (insistence on zero enrichment of uranium, regime change and isolation of Iran) and the policy of the radicals around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (unlimited civilian nuclear capability, selective inspections and replacing the United States as the region's dominant power) have set the two countries on a collision course. Yet the mere retirement of George W. Bush's neocons or Ahmadinejad's radicals may not be sufficient to avoid the disaster of war.
The ill-informed foreign policy debate on Iran contributes to a paradigm of enmity between the United States and Iran, which limits the foreign policy options of future US administrations to various forms of confrontation while excluding more constructive approaches. These policies of collision are in no small part born of the erroneous assumptions we adopted about Iran back in the days when we could afford to ignore that country. But as America sinks deeper into the Iraqi quicksand, remaining in the dark about the realities of Iran and the actual policies of its decision-makers is no longer an option.
full article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/parsi
Bush on Iran: Fool Me Twice
by Robert Scheer
Bush is such a liar. Or is he just out to lunch on the most important issue that he faces? In October, he charged that Iran's nuclear weapons program was bringing the world to the precipice of World War III, even though the White House had been informed at least a month earlier that Iran had no such program and had stopped efforts to develop one back in 2003
full article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071217/truthdig
The GOP's Iran Option is Off the Table
Rudy Giuliani was counting on Iran as a weapon of mass distraction in the '08 race. But the flailing Republican right has just been disarmed.
By Juan Cole
Dec. 11, 2007 | The conclusions of the latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran's lack of a nuclear weapons program will have a profound impact on the 2008 presidential campaign. The report may well prove a key element in throwing the election to the Democrats. Republicans have used the alleged nuclear threat posed by Iran to scare the American public and to turn attention away from Iraq, economic troubles and Republican scandals. But the NIE findings have pulled the rug out from under the Grand Old Party.
full article: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/12/11/iran_08/
