Cheney Directed Assassination Ring
BY MATT SULLIVAN / RCFP
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed during a talk at the University of Minnesota, March 10, that Dick Cheney orchestrated assassination squads directly out of the office of the vice president.
Here is what Hersh said: “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 [Cheney].
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s anexecutive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leader, 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.” Interestingly, Hersh gives us two pieces of information here. First he tells us that the CIA has been “deeply involved” in domestic operations; something that is forbidden by law. And second, he reveals that the office of vice president has been directing assassination squads abroad, also clearly illegal underdomestic and international law.
It is not much of a leap of logic to put these two bits of information together and ask the question: ‘Did the CIA engage in domestic assassination as well?’ Clearly the fact that this would be illegal is no barrier; according to neocon doctrine, the unitary executive is above and beyond any law.
Let’s see if there have been any likely assassinations that may be the handiwork of the Cheney hit teams. For example:
September 9, 2001; Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, is assassinated in Afghanistan just two days before the 9/11 attack. His death cleared the way for the Afghan invasion.
Shortly before his October 2002 death in a mysterious airplane crash, Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone met with the Vice President. Cheney was rounding up Senate support for the vote giving the administration the go ahead to invade Iraq in spite of United Nations objections. At a campaign stop in Willmar, Minn., days before his death, Wellstone told attendees that Cheney told him, “If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota.” Senator Wellstone’s death cleared the way for the Iraq Invasion.
On February 5, 2005, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari was killed in an explosion. His death was immediately blamed on Syria, but without any evidence. Within weeks Syrian peacekeeping forces which had been in Lebanon for a decade, were forced to leave. Syria’s departure cleared the way for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.
The DC Madam, Deborah Palfrey, found dead on May Day, 2008, was very likely murdered. She had a very embarrassing little black book of clients for her prostitution service which included Washington lobbyists, defense contractors, intelligence operatives and even, reportedly, Dick Cheney himself. Before she was ‘suicided’ she made several public statements, including in radio interviews, that she had no intention of committing suicide and that if she was to be found dead, that it would be murder.
Mike Connell was a republican IT specialist: He helped the GOP orchestrate the electronic theft of the 2004 Ohio election (among others). He was scheduled to testify in a federal probe about not only the election thefts, but also about the “missing” White House e-mails. Before his death, Connell’s lawyers were on-record requesting protection for their client based on threats from Karl Rove.
Connell’s death appears to be part of a ‘clean-up’ operation.
This is but a brief list of possible, even likely, executive assassinations. Now that it has been revealed that a sophisticated covert program of assassination has been ongoing under the direction of VP Cheney, a thorough review of unsolved, politically convenient murders would seem to be in order.
Let’s start with the 3000 killed in lower Manhattan.
