Twitter
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Delicious
Digg
Newsvine
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiThe Democrats' Selective Amnesia on Assassination: Clinton Did It and Obama Does It Too
While the focus is on Dick Cheney’s role, the U.S. has long had a bi-partisan assassination program.
Members of Congress have expressed outrage over the "secret" CIA assassination program that former vice president Dick Cheney allegedly ordered concealed from Congress. But this program-and the media descriptions of it-sounds a lot like the assassination policy implemented by President Bill Clinton, particularly during his second term in office.
Partisan politics often require selective amnesia. Over the past decade, we have seen this amnesia take hold when it comes to many of President Bush's most vile policies. And we are now seeing a pretty severe case overtake several leading Democrats. It makes for good speechifying to act as though all criminality began with Bush and-particularly these days-Cheney, but that is extreme intellectual dishonesty. The fact is that many of Bush's worst policies (now being highlighted by leading Democrats) were based in some form or another in a Clinton-initiated policy or were supported by the Democrats in Congress with their votes. To name a few: the USA PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the attack against Afghanistan, the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, the widespread use of mercenaries and other private contractors in US war zones and warrant-less wire-tapping.
Regarding the Bush-era assassination program, there is great reason to be skeptical that the program CIA Director Leon Panetta alleges was concealed from Congress is actually the program the public is currently being led to believe it is. Why would the CIA need to conceal a program that never was implemented and, if it never was implemented, why did Panetta need to shut it down? Moreover, who was running this inactive program from the minute Obama was sworn in until June 24 when Panetta supposedly announced its cancellation? This program-as it is currently being described- should hardly be a major scandal to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as some are now treating it. As they well know, President Obama has continued the Bush targeted assassination program using weaponized drones and special forces teams hunting "high value targets." As former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and others have pointed out, "The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time." Cannistraro told Talking Points Memo that there is no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.
Now, if it turns out that the actual plan Cheney allegedly concealed is something other than what has been publicly described, that will be a different matter. For instance, if the CIA had a secret post-9/11 program planning assassinations on US soil or of US citizens and it was ordered concealed by Cheney. Or, if it was a plan to target in other ways "enemies of the state" within the U.S. as Seymour Hersh has suggested: "The Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state," Hersh said in March. "Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet. That does happen."
Let's look at the program the Democrats claim was kept secret. The Bush administration reportedly authorized the CIA to use small paramilitary teams to hunt down and assassinate "al Qaeda" leaders around the world. It is currently being reported that this plan was never implemented and was born after 9/11. Both of these assertions are very, very doubtful.
The plan, as currently described in the press and by Democrats, is one that continues to exist under the Obama administration right now. In fact, this program has been part of official U.S. policy-under Democratic and Republican administrations-for decades.
By way of background, there is technically a U.S. ban on assassination that dates back to President Ford in 1976. "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," states Executive Order 11905. That was then updated by President Carter who dropped the term "political" simply prohibiting "assassination." The current Executive Order, 12333, was signed by president Reagan in 1981 and has remained on the books through every administration since. What is brutally ironic about Reagan signing this ban was that he authorized repeated assassinations, notably the 1986 attempt on Col. Moammar Gadhafi, which failed to kill Gadhafi but instead killed his infant daughter. But in that brutal apparent contradiction is the truth: the U.S. does not have a ban on assassinations as long as government lawyers can figure out some legal acrobats for the president to use in sidelining the ban. Every president from Reagan to Obama has reserved the right to assassinate kill "terrorists" by claiming it as a military operation or a preemptive strike.
It is pretty clear that when the Bush administration took over, it picked up the Clinton administration's policy on assassination and ran with it-albeit with more of a missionary zeal for killing and a removal of some of the layers of lawyering. In short, the Bush team expanded and streamlined the longstanding U.S. government assassination program.
Throughout the 1990s, the question of covert assassinations was a source of major discussion within the Clinton White House and it is clear assassinations were attempted with presidential approval. Newsweek magazine reported on how, in 1995, U.S. Special Forces facilitated the assassination of a Libyan "terrorist" in Bosnia, saying, "American authorities justified the assassination under a little-known 1993 ‘lethal finding' signed by President Bill Clinton that gave permission to target terrorists." A former senior Clinton official speaking shortly after 9/11 called on the Bush administration not to escalate the U.S. assassination program, saying "We have a war on drugs, too, but we don't kill drug lords." But then, with no apparent sense of contradiction, the official added, "we have proxies who do."
Clinton-era officials' attempt to hide behind "proxies" is a stunning trampling of the assassination ban as it currently exists. Not only does it ban U.S. government personnel from engaging in or conspiring to engage in "assassination," it also bans "Indirect Participation," stating: "No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order."
The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn't just proxies authorized to do the assassinations.
The Clinton White House worked for years with the CIA to craft an assassination policy-specifically relating to "al Qaeda" in general and Osama bin-Laden and his top deputies specifically. CIA operatives like Billy Waugh complained in the early and middle years of the Clinton presidencies that they were lawyered to death by Clinton's attorneys in their attempts to get the green light to kill bin Laden in Sudan. "[I]n the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders," recalled Waugh. Among Waugh's rejected ideas was an alleged plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan and dump his body at the Iranian Eembassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran. Eventually, however, Clinton did authorize what amounted to assassination squads to hunt down and kill bin Laden and other "al Qaeda leaders." That happened officially in 1998 with Clinton's signing of a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to carry out covert assassinations. George W Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Of course, current CIA Director Leon Panetta was Clinton's chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue when Clinton was president.
Under Clinton, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued secret rulings stating that the Ford/Reagan ban on assassinations did not apply to "military targets or "to attacks carried out in preemptive self-defense," according to Steve Coll, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Ghost Wars.
Shortly after 9/11, Clinton stated this position publicly, supporting the Bush administration's "war on terror" targeted assassination policy, saying on NBC News, "The ban that was put in effect under President Ford only applies to heads of state. It doesn't apply to terrorists." That is a stunning statement that is a true legal stretch given the explicit language of the ban. Moreover, Clinton did, in fact, try to kill a head of state on April 22, 1999, when he ordered a NATO airstrike on the home of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Clinton and Gen. Wesley Clark also authorized an assassination attempt on Serbian Information Minister, Aleksander Vucic, bombing Radio Television Serbia when Vucic was scheduled to appear via satellite on CNN's "Larry King Live." Vucic was not killed, but 16 media workers were.
Clinton also publicly acknowledged his own administration's attempt to assassinate bin Laden. "I worked hard to try to kill him," Clinton said. "I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since." Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said after Clinton issued his 1998 "lethal finding," U.S. operatives worked with Afghan rebels for two years in an attempt to kill Bin Laden. "There were a few points when the pulse quickened, when we thought we were close," Berger later recalled. Among the alleged attempts on bin Laden's life taken by Clinton was the 1998 bombing of Afghanistan (which was coupled with a massive strike on the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan).
As Coll observed of the Clinton policy: "Clinton had demonstrated his willingness to kill bin Laden, without any pretense of seeking his arrest."
After 9/11, the CIA, which had been frustrated by some of the hurdles to assassination posed by the Clinton administration's legal team, now had the conditions and the commander-in-chief it needed to take its assassination program to the next level. The main operations were run out of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) headed by J. Cofer Black, who had served as Clinton's CIA station chief in Sudan when bin Laden was there in the 1990s. After 9/11, Black's division at the CIA was authorized by President Bush -with the consent of Congress-to hunt down bin Laden and others alleged to be responsible for 9/11. As I describe in my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army:
Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed [to Afghanistan] on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. "Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement," Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. "I don't want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead... . They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden's head to the President. I promised him I would do that." Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. Black asked if he had made himself clear. "Perfectly clear, Cofer," Schroen told him. "I don't know where we'll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field." Black later explained why this would be necessary. "You'd need some DNA," Black said. "There's a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you'll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!"
The actions of the teams run by Cofer Black were certainly known to Congress. In fact, Black himself testified in front of Congress in 2002 about what he called the new "operational flexibility" being employed in the "war on terror." "This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11," Black said. "After 9/11 the gloves come off." By 2004, Black claimed that "over 70 percent" of Al Qaeda's leadership had been arrested, detained, or killed, and "more than 3,400 of their operatives and supporters have also been detained and put out of an action." The existence of this program is not secret. It has been documented in books by former CIA operatives, is discussed in public speeches by former officials and is a reflected extensively in the Congressional record.
Obviously, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees should investigate the assassination policy under the Bush administration. Cheney's role is central to that. Prosecutors should also be authorized to do the same. If there is a nefarious program that the public is unaware of and was unlawfully concealed, it should be brought out into the light. But, the truth is that a real investigation-one that actually seeks to get to the broader truths of these matters- would require investigating the current assassination program under Obama and the roots of the program that preceded the day when George W Bush took power. That means looking at the Clinton White House and further back. It means looking at both Democratic and Republican assassination teams. The sad fact is that nobody on Capitol Hill has demonstrated in any way that they have the political courage to do that.
40 Comments so far
Show Allis assassination covered by geniva convention like torture is?
mafia's assasinations, it is said, are economic, the government's ones are political - they say, but aren't political assasinations at the same time economic?
edweg
Jeremy Scahill wrote:
"... As I describe in my book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army:
Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed [to Afghanistan] on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. ..."
Anyone who believes Black was serious has to be a fool. Given the wholly maccabre nature of what he said, supposedly ordered, it's all a black comedy to me. I would not believe that crap and wonder why Jeremy Scahill thinks it's of real value. After all, Usama Bin Ladin is member of the bin Ladin family of Saudi Arabia, and there is [no] U.S. President who's going to act maccabrely against that filthy rich and ruling family of Saudi Arabia, which, in petrol., oil, terms is precious to U.S. ruling "elites", and it's for them that the CIA and military really work for, so they're not going to go against their "money masters".
It seems as if Jeremy Scahill believes everything he learns of what U.S. government officials is true, truthful, as if meant to be anything more than just more bait for the public to believe bs.
Maybe I'm the one who's mistaken, but this'll have to be seriously proven before I'm convinced. If Black had ordered the assassination, but didn't go off into some kind of horror flick sort of sick fantasy, then I might believe that he may have possibly wanted to really assassinate UBL; but not with the extremely exaggerated manner that Black did take and state.
So what was Cheney's secret program?? Hints and rumors suggest it was an assassination program, or that it was a program to spy on Americans. THIS DOESN'T ADD UP!
The US already HAS programs for assassination and for spying on Americans. Why the uproar in Congress and the continued secrecy?
One guess: THE PROGRAM INCLUDED ASSASSINATIONS OF AMERICANS! People that made the Cheney/corporate/fascist gang uncomfortable died under mysterious circumstances: Liberal congressmen, people with inside information on how the neocons staged the 9/11 attacks, and people with inside information on the Republican vote-rigging scheme.
We no longer have a democracy; it's all just a show. And you liberals are making it worse by voting for that other corporate-funded party. Wake up, people!
Alan8 July 16th, 2009 1:26 pm.........The truth of 9/11 is on it's way and cannot be stopped. April Gallop, the woman inside the Pentagon who was there at the initial explosion PRIOR to the SUPPOSED flight 77 hitting, has filed a suit against Rummy, Cheney and Myers. It may be found here...just copy and paste..
The affidavits.........
http://www.centerfor911justice.org/
news/index.html
The actual complaint....
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/
forum//index....showtopic=15787
It also may be interesting to know that to not report an act of treason to the President, a state or local judge, the governor et al, one may be guilty of "misprision of treason" and subject to a fine or seven years imprisonment.
United States Code
TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE
PART I - CRIMES
CHAPTER 115 - TREASON, SEDITION, AND SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES
U.S. Code as of: 01/19/04
Section 2382. Misprision of treason
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having
knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals
and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same
to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the
governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is
guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title
or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.
Incidentally, you may find the complete report on the thermite found in the dust around "ground zero" ..here...(this is also included in the suit as a link)
http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM
I didn't know this, good information.
let's promote peace!
http://www.bayaw.com/
http://www.articlesroom.com/
esus, Jeremy Scahill is the king of pussies. Comparing drone attacks to assassination squads is hamfistedly clumsy - someone get Scahill a journalism degree an a diaper. What a waste of ink.
Backlinks
The whole idea of assissination is disgusting. Let's face it though, it's been authorized and conducted under every president at least since Eisenhower. the only difference is the progrma continues to grow as the US government sinks lower into moral turpitude - who are the terrorist?
Both drone attacks and hit squads have one thing in common - their ineptness. The extra kill power of drone missile attacks only means that more people die - mostly the unintended targets (time and time again, the intended targets survive), Drone attack have the added affect of lifting anti-American feelings and being great recruiting tools for more so-called "terrorists." So they're not even effective.
The idea that these strikes are somehow preemptive is a specious argument - government lawyers could argue that we should wipe out every living soul in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preempt a possible attack on the US.
How about entertaining a foreign policy that actually respects and considers the views and feelings of people in other countires and stops trying to take advantage of them simply for American gain? Obama, you've got a choice. Follow the lead of your predecessors or wise up.
But that would require that America acknowledge its "national interest" is not the most important thing in the world. We cant have that, we're AMERICA!
Yes, great article....
Any person with a conscience would not be registered with the Democratic Party after this.
Obama is the latest incarnation of American Imperialism, albeit with a smile and likeable qualities. Where Bush was outright loud and offensive, if not vulgar, Obama is charming, deferential, if not deceptive, but both men carry/carried out the imperatives of the U.S. Empire which includes breaking laws of this land and others, as in foreign territory.
Loathsome, immoral and criminal. Ralph Nader told you so.
They wouldn't and will not listen. Not until they're on the receiving end of Cheney's 'enhanced interrogation'.
I voted for BO, and see he's a liar and corporate whore. Awful.
But God In Heaven, Bush & Cheney?
The 1st post in this thread posits this with sarcasm, "a little evil is BETTER than a lot?" As though this postulation is absurd! look up little and lot. you want a little good or a lot, it IS the inverse. Asked by life every day.
Realizing the Democrats suck horribly does not preclude seeing that the GOP takes it to the next level.
Bush would have privatized Social Security, handed it to Goldman Sacks (thanks SR) if not for Democrats, in office and across the land. That's another thing, on CD, always they are the same....this on one level is not true-the voters themselves, I've ultra rarely met a Republican working at a charity or homeless shelter (I ask), usually Christians and MOSTLY Democrats. Giving, working for the poor for free, not Republicans. Local Republicans organized where I live to OPPOSE the homeless shelter where many Dems now work free! A difference. NOT the same!
That is a fact. Like Obama sucks is a fact.
Peacefullness
When Senator Wellstone was about to be the only US Senator to vote against attacking Iraq VP Cheney angrily told him that there would be serious consequences to him and his family. Not long afterward the Senator, wife, daughter and campaign director crashed in a twin engine plane. That model plane has the safest record of twin engine prop planes in aviation and the pilot and co-pilot were considered exceptional pilots. The plane was coming in for a landing at a regional air port and with no communication of problem veered off and crashed in the woods. The FAA investigators could find nothing wrong with the plane and listed unknown as the cause. Conspiracy investigators mention that the government has scaled down hand-held pulsed beam weapons that could shut down the computer/electrical system of a low flying plane. It appears that Cheney's death squad was doing assassinations in the USA. Maybe Cheney really is a Reptilian ET-human hybrid as some say. Reptile brain mentality at least.
You Got IT !!!!!
Senator Wellstone's plane....Mike Connell's Plane (Ready to testify on how he stole the Ohio votes)....and The Interior Minister of Mexico´s Plane (Investigating two mysterious crash landings of two planes linked to the CIA and drug running.) all went down the same way: below 3,000 feet and ready to land----then a radical change in course and crash------no signs of problems!!!!!! Raytheon invented the pilotless plane in the mid 80's, and can control planes from the ground!!!!Just watch the one video from the Pentagon Attack of 9/11 and Raytheon comes to mind!!!!
But wait, what about the Washington Madam Scandal !!!!! Didn't all Lobby Groups use that "Escort Service" to influence Congressmen, including Halliburton? Two major witnesses were hung to be found by either their daughter and grandaugher or mother and it was claimed they committed suicide without writing a suicide letter. NOT!
No, too many 9/11 eyewitnesses have died mysteriously! No, too many eyewitnesses to the movement of Nuclear Weapons from Minot AFB to Biloxi, Mississippi died mysteriously. No, too many microbiologists who worked with Anthrax at Fort Detrick mysteriously died.........
Sandy Berger went into the National Archives to steal specific documents immediately after 9/11.(Philip Shenon, "The Uncensored Histroy of 9/11 Commission.)......He pleaded loss of memory and was slapped on the wrist!!!!! He knew what he was after!!!
Cofer Black moved from CIA to Vice Chairman of Blackwater........the best "Off Book" move for a "LOYAL Assassin"..........
Read a little about Sydney Gottlieb and you will understand what the CIA has always been about........."God have mercy on us all"
"Maybe Cheney really is a Reptilian ET-human hybrid as some say."
So you think he's at least part human? Any supporting evidence for this?
It's offensive and degrading to reptiles, to any kind of animals in fact, to be associated or compared to humans. Especially a rotten one like Cheney. But to all humans really.
Let me see if l understand this; if some honcho gets offed it's "assassination', when one of us peons gets it, it's "collateral damage"
Kudos, as always, to Scahill, but let's take things one step further. Scahill writes:
"Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. 'I don't want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead...'"
I think there is more than simple bloodlust and desire for revenge in this directive from Bush 43, and I believe it is of a piece with Clinton's unabashed and admitted desire to "kill" Bin Laden. The people in power wanted the shadowy sheik dead so that he wouldn't talk. There is no other explanation for it. If he was truly responsible for the events of 9/11--all or even any of them--what better, propaganda-wise, than to capture the supposed incarnation of even and put on a great show trial for the world to see?
With Bin Laden out of the way, instead, they would be free to trot out johnny-come-lately boogeymen like Khalid Sheik Mohammed and brutalize them within one inch of their sanity so they would say whatever they were told to say. The much more savvy Osama would not have been so malleable.
And remember the CIA assassination of the US citizen in Yemen in 2002 ---
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/nov2002/yem-n12.shtml
We may have serious issues with the US government being judge-jury-executioner, but Joe Sap who lives on Main Street would probably agree with the policy of assassinating bad guys and has no problem allowing the US government to determine who the bad guys are.
I can just hear the blind fools I work with saying, "So what! They are bad guys and deserve to die. Just look at what they did on 9-11! Anyway if Bill O'Busha does it it must be legal!"
Jeremy,
Thanks so much for this article. I too am very skeptical of the program now being alleged to have been considered by Cheney - that is, assassination of Al Queda suspects.
And I think your speculation is dead on:
"Now, if it turns out that the actual plan Cheney allegedly concealed is something other than what has been publicly described, that will be a different matter. For instance, if the CIA had a secret post-9/11 program planning assassinations on US soil or of US citizens and it was ordered concealed by Cheney...."
I believe this is what was considered and may have actually been implemented. The fact that a "cover" story has been pushed into the media by the government should give everyone pause.
I still have my doubts about the Wellstone and Carnahan crashes, and I know the targeting and intimidation of American citizens by the security appartus of the United States is going on even as we speak.
It is not that far of a reach to believe that Cheney was putting in place a plan to murder Americans, especially considering the anthrax mailings (U.S. military scientist mails anthrax to two U.S. senators - both Democrats). Also, the program might have involved blackmailing of Congress. These would place the program beyond the Clinton era assassinations you've discussed.
Thanks for your great reporting. Keep up the good work.
Most of the outrage I have heard is over the fact that the program was kept secret from Congress, not over the issue of assassination. This makes Jeremy's article somewhat of a straw man.
I don't see the strawman here.
There may be some Dems who have not pretended to their now largely antiwar constituency to be against this kind of thing, but many have. If one assumes (as I do) that the Dem's criticism of the Rep's evasion of Congress is in part a way to show opposition to war without reducing military force, Scahill is once again on target.
The business of working around Congress is a major issue too, and deserves attention. But since Congress has sailed along and funded pretty much everything the military has asked for, I have to think much of Congressional concern with centralizing war decisions is for show.
Besides, at base Scahill isn't arguing against the Dem's explicit arguments; he's informing us that the Dem establishment is and has been guilty of these practices and that the halo's borrowed.
The Dems are the better of the two major/sellout parties by-as-little-as-they-can-possibly-get-away-with. They get away with too much.
"As President Obama insisted in his Cairo speech, anyone depicting the United States as a “self-interested empire” is way off base." Andrew Bacevich
Obimbo is so full of blatant crap!
The USA is the only empire ever to dominate the entire world. Rome had the Persians to the North who were competitive in military might. Egypt was no pushover either.
What the combined military force of the rest of the world could not do to us we did to ourselves with our real national motto: "Greed is good".
I still hear discussions on TV about when 'it' will be over. It's already over, and I'm not referring to the depression. They call it a recession but we have allowed the bankers, health care, and the military to cut all our throats.
Of course the Dems have selective amnesia. Both of USA Incorporated's political facades do. It's the single way in which they are actually representative of the US electorate.
Deepa
US is the ONLY country that has LEGALISED TORTURE, OUTSOURCED TORTURE, AND LEGALISED ASSASSINATION of leaders of sovereign countries that opposed its hegemony.
Ironically, US is the veto wielding UN Security Council member, and claimed to be the BEACON of hope and light for the world????
Plenty of governments torture. The US is globally invested, and so globalizes it. Americans concern themselves with legality, and so legalize it - or try to.
Deepa
In fact, CIA epitomizes USA and American Democracy and Freedom.
Money and Death are the two overwhelming obsessions of the American government.
Of course, American politicians do not assassinate American presidents, but they have proxies who do. American politicians do not assassinate American civil rights leaders, but they have proxies who do. American politicians do not assassinate American presidential candidates, but they have proxies who do.
All of this grew out of the well-documented programs of the American government to assassinate foreign leaders by means of proxies. That separation between foreign and domestic turns out to be as illusory as that between church and state; it is simply a fig leaf for the capitalist elite domination of the world through our government, and by appeals to the populace that are in turn legalistic and police enforced then moralistic and mob enforced.
Since our government has 'legalized' assassination by
precidential decree why is Sirhan Sirhan still in prison?
That is an AWESOME question and a very legitimate one. Aside from the many unanswered questions surrounding RFK's death (I'm convinced Sirhan was nothing more than a patsy), the fact that he's still locked up after 41 years when most others would be now discharged makes it painfully clear (particularly for him) that it wasn't what he did, but rather whom he is alleged to have killed.
You can also take your question some steps further and ask if it would also be o.k. for Drug Lords and dealers to assassinate at will - so long as their targets are 'high-value'.
There's NO POLITICIAN in D.C. who will crawl down the deep dark rabbit hole Jeremy lays out.
Scahill's last sentence aptly puts this in perspective. Nobody on Capitol Hill has the political courage to begin these investigations. Maybe Conyers or Kucinich can hold panel hearings that get zero coverage in MSM and yield zero follow-ups. Maybe a "paper" will emerge from some obscure corner of an ignored agency. Covert assassinations will go on, the CIA will continue its routine lying to Congress, which Congress will approve of, and Obama won't change a goddamn thing.
From the article:
"Clinton did authorize...covert assassinations. George W Bush was not the president and Dick Cheney was not the vice president. Of course, current CIA Director Leon Panetta was Clinton's chief of staff from 1994 to 1997 and would have been party to years worth of discussion on this issue when Clinton was president."
I just had a WTF moment---doesn't this amount to Panetta's stepping on his own genitalia by blowing the whistle on this program?
On second thought, maybe he knows he has nothing to fear, and this is a good-faith gesture of "transparency."
Sioux Rose
More evidence that "Mars rules" when a president believes he owns the right to order the assassination of other(s). A nation of laws? Bah, humbug! The Yoo/Gonzales legal Vauderville Act should put an end to the romantic notion that laws currently mean anything other than what "the leader" says they do.
Now as to Coffer Black, or Black Coffin, much like Blackwater, in their quest to put "heads on pikes," does this not smack of the same mentality of the actual Crusades? So those of you who do not believe in reincarnation, it would seem these people remain (frozen in consciousness) in something like 1320 A.D.
Gandhi's words echo: "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it WOULD be a good idea." As in, when does the civilization part actually get started?
Wow, the truth does not fit in with the discourse of the Duopoly. This discourse (as well as policy) has creeped ever rightward, from D to R administrations.
Scahill underlines more evidence of a completely corrupt, winner takes all, big money, corporate media dictated, two-party duopoly, false dichotomy, one dimensional, "democratic" process in the USA.
We need more like him to point this out to folks who cannot or will not face the overwhelming and disturbing truth.
From your lips to deaf ears.....I am with you 100% Jeremy on the failure of either Democrat (Blue-Dog or otherwise) voters or people who voted for either Obama or Clinton....they refuse to look at the actions of their "chosen candidate". It just can't be!!! Or it isn't as BAD as Bush....heavens NO. A little bit of evil is BETTER than a whole-lot of evil...or maybe it is that Democrat evil is better than Republican evil. HMMM!
Whenever I ask someone about citing votes that Clinton made to actually prove why he was a good president they can't do it. All they say is "Well, he balance the budget." That sounds like a mantra from Madison Avenue....just throw out some phrase like that or "well, he got more people working" (even at the expense of kicking mom's off welfare and putting high school teens to work to suppliment the lack of income their parents were bringing home under Clinton)..
No....voters are deaf and blind to the truth. They are afraid to admit their vote was wasted or that they were lied to. Such a shame....it would be better to admit it and then work to repair the damage than to stand firm in one's ego at the expense of the decline of our society. Oh well!!! It was certainly a wild ride!!!
Thanks for your continued hard work at reporting the truth!!!
I am taking it in and working when and where I can to promote justice and peace in my community!!!
peace