[Peace-discuss] A new murder by Cheney/Obama's assassin?

[LAURIE SOLOMON]

These days it appears that one can no longer tell if fact imitates fiction
or fiction imitates fact.  I was struck by the fact that when I first heard
Hersh's remarks I said to myself that this sounds very similar to what was
being portrayed on TV in the TV show. "The Unit."

-----Original Message-----
From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net
[mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C. G.
Estabrook
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2009 3:25 AM
To: Peace-discuss
Subject: [Peace-discuss] A new murder by Cheney/Obama's assassin?

[1. Famous investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said the following two
months ago.]

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. That does happen.

"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. It is a special wing of our special operations community
that 
is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the 
Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not 
report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert]
Gates, 
the secretary of defense. 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. Just today in the Times
there 
was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.]
McRaven, 
ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"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.


[2. Obama has appointed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the head of JSOC --
described 
by Hersh above -- as his commander for what he calls "the central front of
the 
war on terrorism," Afpak.  Could the following be an example of his work?]

...The torture Dick Cheney insisted on applying to every detainee about whom
he 
had any knowledge -- and that seems to be most of them, given the files 
(photographs? videos?) he kept close at hand -- was perpetrated with one 
objective. Here it is. Again: The authorized harsh interrogation in April
and 
May of 2002 -- well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal
opinion 
-- had as its principal priority an attempt to force the confession of a
link 
between Iraq and al-Qa'ida. It was not an attempt to obtain intelligence
that 
would uncover the plans for some sort of terror attack against the U.S. The
Bush 
Crime Family used torture and the fear of imminent death to elicit what it 
wanted to hear. Confess, and we stop. Withhold what you know we want to hear
and 
we will kill you, slowly and painfully. Any public statement to the contrary
by 
Dick Cheney is a goddam lie.

Yesterday, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff
said...

     "So furious was this effort [torture] that on one particular detainee,
even 
when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney's office that their
detainee 
"was compliant" (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP's
office 
ordered them to continue the enhanced methods [torture]. The detainee had
not 
revealed any al-Qa'ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn 
al-Sheikh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, "revealed" such contacts.
Of 
course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the

torture to stop. There in fact were no such contacts."

And now, the announcement declares, al-Libi "committed suicide" earlier this

week in a Libyan prison cell. And as expected, media in the US -- with a few

notable exceptions -- completely ignored the story. Astonishing? This US
media 
blackout on the "suicide" of the man whose "confession" allowed Cheney and
Bush 
to launch a war that has killed thousands of American soldiers and tens of 
thousands of Iraqis? Get serious. Mainstream media dare not report such
facts. 
They are too heavily invested in the eight years of Bush Crime Family lies
that 
sucked out everything moral and ethical from this country and spat it into
the 
nearest gutter.

It was nearly a month ago that Jonathan Landay first reported this hideous
story 
for McClatchy Newspapers (McClatchy being one of the few "notable
exceptions" 
mentioned above.) Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, another of the

"notable exceptions" -- blogging at the New York Times -- put it this way:

     "Let's say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a

pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it 
tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link. There's a word
for 
this: it's evil."

One of Jonathan Landy's lead sources was former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj.

Charles Burney, whom Landy said...

     "...told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the
Guantanamo 
Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of
ties 
between al Qaida and Iraq. "While we were there a large part of the time we
were 
focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were
not 
successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told
staff 
of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being
able 
to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to 
measures that might produce more immediate results."

Cheney could not get the "confession" he wanted. Nor could his Special 
Operations torturers produce the results he demanded. Remember all those
months 
when the torture -- we now realize -- was at its apex and Vice President
Dick 
Cheney was AWOL from his duties?  Remember the light-hearted and half-witted

speculation from mainstream media as to this monster's whereabouts? Is there
now 
any doubt where he was? What he was overseeing? What he was directing?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/There-s-a-Word-For-This--by-Mike-Malloy-090
514-267.html
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