[Peace-discuss] Cheney's & Obama's assassin

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Published on Saturday, May 16, 2009 by Press TV
	McChrystal was Cheney's Chief Assassin

Seymour Hersh says that Dick Cheney headed a secret assassination wing and the 
head of the wing has just been named as the new commander in Afghanistan.

In an interview with GulfNews, (the Persian Gulf's largest daily English 
language newspaper published from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates) on May 12, 
2009 Pulitzer prize-winning American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, 
said that there is a special unit called the Joint Special Operations Command 
(JSOC) that does high-value targeting of men that are known to be involved in 
anti-American activities, or are believed to be planning such activities.

According to Hersh, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was headed by 
former US vice president Dick Cheney and the former head of JSOC, Lieutenant 
General Stanley McChrystal who has just been named the new commander in charge 
of the war in Afghanistan.

McChrystal, a West Pointer who became a Green Beret not long after graduation, 
following a stint as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division, is 
currently director of Staff at the Pentagon, the executive to Joint staff to the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Most of what General McChrystal has done over a 33-year career remains 
classified, including service between 2003 and 2008 as commander of the Joint 
Special Operations Command, an elite unit so clandestine that the Pentagon for 
years refused to acknowledge its existence.

On July 22, 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled "No blood, no foul" 
about American torture practices at three facilities in Iraq. One of them was 
Camp Nama, which was operated by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 
under the direction of then Major General Stanley McChrystal.

McChrystal was officially based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but he was a 
frequent visitor to Camp Nama and other Special Forces bases in Iraq and 
Afghanistan where forces under his command were based.

An interrogator at Camp Nama known as Jeff described locking prisoners in 
shipping containers for 24 hours at a time in extreme heat; exposing them to 
extreme cold with periodic soaking in cold water; bombardment with bright lights 
and loud music; sleep deprivation; and severe beatings.

When he and other interrogators went to the colonel in charge and expressed 
concern that this kind of treatment was not legal, and that they might be 
investigated by the military's Criminal Investigation Division or the 
International Committee of the Red Cross, the colonel told them he had "this 
directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there's no way that the 
Red Cross could get in."

In the July 2, 2006 report, When Human Rights Watch asked whether the 
interrogator knew whether the colonel was receiving orders or pressures to use 
the abusive tactics, Jeff said that his understanding was that there was some 
form of pressure to use aggressive techniques coming from higher up the chain of 
command; however neither he nor other interrogators were briefed on the 
particular source.

"We really didn't know too much about it. We knew that we were only like a few 
steps away in the chain of command from the Pentagon, but it was a little 
unclear, especially to the interrogators who weren't really part of that task 
force."

The interrogator said that he did see Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of US 
Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, visiting the Nama facility on several 
occasions. "I saw him a couple of times. I know what he looks like."

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the international body 
charged under international law with monitoring compliance with the Geneva 
Conventions, and it, therefore, has the right to inspect all facilities where 
people are detained in a country that is at war or under military occupation.

To hide prisoners or facilities from the ICRC or to deny access to them is a 
serious war crime. But many US prisons in Iraq have held "ghost" prisoners whose 
imprisonment has not been reported to the ICRC, and these "ghosts" have usually 
been precisely the ones subjected to the worst torture. Camp Nama, run by 
McChrystal's JSOC, was an entire "ghost" facility.

The decision by Obama's administration to appoint General McChrystal as the new 
commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan and retaining the military 
commission for the US war-on-terror detainees held in the Guantanamo Bay prison 
are the latest examples of the new US administration walking in Bush's foot 
steps with regards to torture and denial of habeas corpus.

© 2009 Press TV