At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. 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.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:

http://www.minnpost.com/ericbl…..ation_ring

i have begun wondering, how is it that all the caring political action, all the progressive legislation, all the oversight,

is being initiated in the house.

the united states senate? the worlds most important deliberative body?

is beginning to smell like a dead body.

the senate democrats, and the senate in toto, leave the impression they could give a rat’s ass about national needs, bill of rights abuses, national health care.

it really is time to “clean house” of democrats in the senate. if republican win those seats so be it.

there are way too many old, bought, tired, unconcerned-with-the-nation’s-wellbeing democrats.

in terms of just running the government, check the last june “federal times” for a chart showing the number of appropriations bills reported out of committee and voted on by the house.

then look at the u.s, senate’s record of (in)action.

the senate ain’t bein’ run well.

if a democratic president won’t fight, or fight back, he/she won’t gain ground.

nor will you gain respect.

nor will you attract adherents.

and nothing is so obvious as the fact that national democratic politicians simply will not fight – they won’t fight back, won’t fight for principle, they won’t fight at all.

i’m not sure why this is the case, but i am sure this astonishing democratic behavior underlies the national “sense” of the democratic leaders as weak flakes.

on a related topic, when was the last time you heard a national democrat espouse a “populist”, i.e., anti-establishment, viewpoint?

rush limbaugh and the republican commercial provocateurs own “populism”.

why should they?

they should not.

but then, look at the number of “bought” democratic senators.

a “bought” senator is not going to be a populist.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…..d-Politics

This is one of the more convoluted stories of the week. Intelligence Appropriations is up this week, and in Republicans want to use the opportunity to further their “Pelosi lied” storyline (they only think illegal torture’s a problem if a Democrat who wasn’t responsible for ordering it might have known about it).

This has the hallmarks of becoming a rather major scandal for the CIA. It’s a bad time for the administration to be arguing for more secrecy in intelligence matters.

House overwhelmingly rejects signing statement
“We do this not just on behalf of this institution, but on behalf of this democracy,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). “There’s kind of a unilateralism, an undemocratic, unreachable way about these signing statements.”

http://thehill.com/leading-the…..07-09.html

“…The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: “Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, ‘That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.’”

-Richard Clark

Extra-legal snatches were formally institutionalized in a 1995 executive order, with the CIA making clear it had the resources to track, capture, and transport terrorist suspects globally — including access to a small fleet of aircraft. You think it was a failure to pursue Iran-Contra that led to the Bush detainee program? It seems to me Clinton had the ball all teed up, Bush just had to whack it. He simply cut out the middle man.

Leon Panetta orders internal probe of secret spy program after some members of Congress say CIA misled them

http://www.newsweek.com/id/205958

CIA director Leon Panetta has ordered an internal inquiry into the agency’s handling of a contentious and still highly-classified intelligence program that has caused a heated dispute between the CIA and Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. The move by Panetta appears to be an implicit acknowledgement by the agency that it should have disclosed information about the post-9/11 secret program to Congress much earlier than it did.

CIA and congressional officials have refused to describe the nature of the covert program, but insisted it is not connected to the CIA’s use of controversial “enhanced” interrogation techniques.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..28864.html

The revelation from seven Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee that they were misled about a critical CIA program has sparked a debate that touches on the most sensitive areas of national security policy. What program, exactly, was being kept secret?

No one is answering the question, citing the sensitivities that come when discussing classified intelligence matters. But in various conversations with sources on and off the Hill, two general theories have emerged. The first is that the CIA was keeping quiet about the use of waterboarding on terrorist suspects. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she was misled by the intelligence agency on that very subject. It’s also the story told to the Huffington Post by a source with knowledge of the letter the seven House Democrats penned to CIA chief Leon Panetta, in which they complained about being misled.

But the dates don’t line up. In their letter, the lawmakers note that members of Congress were “misled” for “a number of years, from 2001 to this week.” Pelosi, however, contended that the CIA lied to her about the use of harsh interrogation techniques during the fall of 2002.

And in a conversation with the Huffington Post, Rep. Anna Eshoo, (D-Calif.), one of the letter’s signatories, said that Panetta “stopped the program the day after he was informed.” Waterboarding was ended as a practice during the Bush years.

So what are the “significant actions” that these seven lawmakers insist were kept from Congress? Another theory being bandied about concerns an “executive assassination ring” that was allegedly set up and answered to former Vice President Dick Cheney. The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, building off earlier reporting from the New York Times, dropped news of the possibility that such a ring existed in a March 2009 discussion sponsored by the University of Minnesota.

“It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” Hersh said. “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,” he added. “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.”

Asked if this was the basis of her letter to Panetta, Eshoo said she could not discuss what was a “highly classified program.” She did, however, note that when Panetta told House Intelligence Committee members what it was that had been kept secret, “the whole committee was stunned, even Republicans.”