Imaginary Death Squads

By Greyhawk

...can result in real death.

Accusation's that U.S. military members assassinated Benazir Bhutto aren't the first such allegations built on the foundation of Seymour Hersh's fable of "Dick Cheney's Death Squads" - and Hersh isn't the only "credible" source providing fodder for world-wide conspiracy theorists. They should be the last. They won't be.

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News from Pakistan:

Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country.

The squad was headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of US army in Afghanistan. It was disclosed by reputed US journalist Seymour Hersh while talking to an Arab TV in an interview.

More news from Pakistan:

US journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday contradicted news reports being published in South Asia that quote him as saying a “special death squad” made by former US vice president Dick Cheney had killed Benazir Bhutto. The award-winning journalist described as “complete madness” the reports that the squad headed by General Stanley McChrystal – the new commander of US army in Afghanistan – had also killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafique Al Hariri and a Lebanese army chief. “Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Mrs Bhutto,” Hersh said.

Hersh offers this warning about quoting him: “This is another example of blogs going bonkers with misleading and fabricated stories and professional journalists repeating such rumours without doing their job – and that is to verify such rumours.” That's true - for a previous example of professional journalists using Hersh stories without fact checking them see "Abu Ghraib": When Hersh was caught lying on video regarding that story he was quick to walk it back, too: “I actually didn’t quite say what I wanted to say correctly,” Hersh now says. “It wasn’t that inaccurate, but it was misstated. The next thing I know, it was all over the blogs.”

Translation: "I'm a liar, and if you repeat what I say without fact-checking me I'll call you a liar too."

Funny, in a way. But far away from the comforting embrace of home, Seymour's fevered mouth actually will get Americans - and those he inspires to fight them - killed.

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Much of the "Dick Cheney's executive assassination ring" story can be traced back to a Hersh speaking event in March:

"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."

Keith Olbermann was on the story in no time flat:

Hersh‘s bombshell allegations about the assassination ring, the result of reporting for a book he says might be still a year or two away from being published. Hersh is telling MinnPost.com in an email after the event, that the disclosures are, quote, “not something he wanted to dwell about in public.”

The toothpaste, however, is already out of the proverbial tube here.

For added "authority" he called in Newsweek magazine's Howard Fineman to participate in the hyperventilation:

First, we‘ll call in our own Howard Fineman, senior Washington correspondent for “Newsweek” magazine, who‘s book, “The Thirteen American Arguments” has just been released in paperback.

Howard, good evening.

HOWARD FINEMAN, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Good evening, Keith.

OLBERMANN: If Sy Hersh alleges here, the vice president, the former vice president and a covert assassination ring operated without talking to the CIA, how exactly would the CIA be in the position to call Mr. Hersh‘s reporting “utter nonsense”?

FINEMAN: Well, moreover, Keith, if there a—if there in fact is such a thing as Seymour Hersh‘s reporting seems to indicate and the CIA was kept in the dark about it, the last thing they would want to do right now is admit it. So, either way, they don‘t have an interest in confirming no matter what they know at this point.

In checking around in the intelligence community today, I can say this, you know, Seymour Hersh is somebody they respect.
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OLBERMANN: . just because we might not be surprised by what Mr. Hersh is alleging, I mean, people who look at Dick Cheney would say, well, yes, that sounds plausible if it isn‘t actually true—should that make this revelation any less shocking or if true any less egregious and essentially terrifying to the nature of the democracy?

FINEMAN: Well, depressing is another word I would use and infuriating. If it pans out, if when Sy‘s book comes out, it‘s all there - because it would be of a piece with the picture that‘s emerging. “We became what we beheld,” to use a phrase from a great movie called “The Untouchables.” And I think it‘s clear in the days right after 9/11 that, especially Vice President Cheney and he managed to convince George W. Bush, and maybe he didn‘t need a whole lot of convincing, that secrecy and really, lawlessness was the way to go in the early days.

And rather than focus on catching Osama bin Laden, to use another phrase, they didn‘t let a good crisis go to waste. And they used the atmosphere of crisis after 9/11 for all kinds of aggregation of power—accumulating power in the executive and really within the vice president‘s office in a way that we haven‘t seen outside of declared wartime and even there, with more strictures than were the case here.

OLBERMANN: Could this report or report of a report—since he doesn‘t have anything on this yet other than his allegation—could it possibly put some muscle, some steam behind the truth commission that Senator Leahy is calling for, but a truth commission that would allow for the necessity of prosecutions? Because if this is true, you have to prosecute this, there‘s no way around this.

FINEMAN: Yes.

CNN ran with the story, too - and "progressive" blogs followed soon after.

Today, CNN interviewed Hersh and former Cheney national security aide John Hannah. Although he expressed regret for revealing the story (calling it a “dumb-dumb”), Hersh stood by his initial statements. “I’m sorry, Wolf, I have a lot of problems with it,” he said about the assassination scheme:

HERSH: I know for sure…the idea that we have a unit that goes around, without reporting to Congress… and has authority from the President to go into the country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack somebody. … You’ve delegated authority to troops in the field to hit people on the basis of whatever intelligence they think is good.

Note that here Hersh took his story one step further - claiming the authority to "whack" someone was delegated to troops in the field.

That was two months ago - time enough for Hersh's remarks to be almost forgotten in America but also to have spread around the world. It should surprise no one then that this week's "news" isn't the first time the conspiracy theory-hungry Middle Eastern media have run with the ball. Here's a translation of an al Manar (Lebanon) television report citing a Russian TV interview with another "investigative journalist" on the topic:

Dick Cheney, the name that always pops up whenever there is talk about a serious crime someplace in the world. Well, Cheney had his own death squad CIA unit which he ran from the white house. By Cheney's orders, the assassinations unit killed former Lebanese minister and Lebanese Forces chief Elie Hobeika on the 24th of January 2002 and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on the 14th of March 2005, prominent investigative journalist Wayne Madsen said. Madsen who is known for his close ties with active circles in the CIA, was speaking to the Russia Today television when he revealed that the same squad that had assassinated Hobeika in coordination with former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon's office, had also assassinated Hariri.

Nice for Hersh that blogs reported the major media coverage of his comments - so that now he can blame them all for not "investigating" what he said. The rest of us can only hope al Manar viewers have more well-developed personal truth filters (aka "bullshit detectors") than Keith Olbermann's; that readers of news in Pakistan can process information with a bit more discretion than Newsweek subscribers. Because while Olbermann fans might be satisfied with the thrill of merely demanding "Truth Commissions" to validate their fantasies, overseas victims of this fraud have other targets closer to home. Here's more of Hersh's original comment:

"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.

And as he made clear on CNN, authorized to "whack" on their own.

He's used to tossing that sort of stuff out without being questioned. Here's Hersh quoted in 2006 on American troops in Iraq:

If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.

“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”

Of course, if he wanted to Hersh could point to other "authoritative" sources. Those sources aren't limited to fraudulent "Iraq Veterans Against War" members, either. Here's Iraq vet (and "veterans group" founder) Jon Soltz writing in the Huffington Post on U.S. Army Rangers in Afghanistan:

You don't mistake someone from 10 yards away. But, was it murder or negligence? Was this a deliberate homicide?
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It is inevitable, then, that unless the president comes clean, rumors about Tillman's death will take hold. By stonewalling, there is no way to stop people from wondering, "Was the man the White House used to promote the war ordered to be killed because he was becoming increasingly critical of the war in Iraq?"

Soltz assures us he doesn't believe what he's saying - much the same way Hersh assures us he doesn't say what he's saying. Funny how that doesn't stop people from hearing them anyway.

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It's become far too easy to make accusations like these, far too easy to casually slander members of the armed forces and far too easy for those doing so to back-pedal, or claim they're blaming the leaders of these troops - that these murderous thugs are as much victims of those leaders as are the corpses they've left in their wake.

It's far too easy to merely shake your head in disgust at the entire state of affairs, shrug and wander away. It's harder to fight back - it always is. The miscalculation made by those who'd continue their attacks time after time after time was to assume veterans wouldn't notice they were being branded, or that they would welcome that "victim" status, or simply choose that easy shrug and walk away.

They guessed wrong.

Posted by Greyhawk / May 19, 2009 9:37 AM | Permalink