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A Tiny Revolution: Seymour Hersh describes "battlefield executions" by U.S. in Afghanistan

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So many of the saner people were driven out of the military during the Bush administration, it doesn't surprise me that the people left include a lot of the right-wing, racist fringe elements. Still, it's shocking to hear this:

DURHAM — The U.S. military is not just fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most renowned investigative journalist says.

The army is also “in a war against the White House — and they feel they have Obama boxed in,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh told several hundred people in Duke University’s Page Auditorium on Tuesday night. “They think he’s weak and the wrong color. Yes, there’s racism in the Pentagon. We may not like to think that, but it’s true and we all know it.”

In a speech on Obama’s foreign policy, Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and torture at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraqi war, said many military leaders want Obama to fail.

“A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him get into trouble,” he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.

“If he gives them the extra troops they’re asking for, he loses politically,” Hersh said. “And if he doesn’t give them the troops, he also loses politically.”

The journalist criticized the president for “letting the military do that,” and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.

“He’s either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon,” Hersh said. If he doesn’t, “this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency.”

Hersh called the “Af-Pak” situation — the spreading conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Obama’s main challenge.

The only way for the U.S. to extricate itself from the conflict, Hersh said, is to negotiate with the Taliban.

“It’s the only way out,” he said. “I know that there’s a lot of discussion in the White House about this now.

After Downing Street: We demand national single-payer or at least the right for states to do it.

David E's Fablog: Distant gay traces.

Harp and Sword: Who to believe, Seymour Hersh or Dick Cheney? Hmm...

Brilliant at Breakfast: Yeah, Olbermann and O'Reilly are exactly the same, except...

driftglass: When Harry Met Crazy.

Stinque: The grotesque story behind Lou Dobbs' own birth. (Hey, by Lou's standards, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.)

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily send tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com. Thanks.

Like many reporters, Seymour Hersh has a lot of trouble keeping a hot scoop to himself, and dropped a major bomb at the University of Minnesota the other night. This is the second time he's spilled the beans on an upcoming story at a public forum:

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.”

Good on Faiz of Think Progress for getting this exclusive:

Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh - a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker - revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President's office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.

In Hersh's most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The "meeting took place in the Vice-President's office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,'" according to one of Hersh's sources.

During the journalism conference event, I asked Hersh specifically about this meeting and if he could elaborate on what occurred. Hersh explained that, during the meeting in Cheney's office, an idea was considered to dress up Navy Seals as Iranians, put them on fake Iranian speedboats, and shoot at them. This idea, intended to provoke an Iran war, was ultimately rejected:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don't we build - we in our shipyard - build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can't have Americans killing Americans. That's the kind of - that's the level of stuff we're talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

This is not a new technique. Remember one of the revelations from the Downing Street Memo was that Bush had suggested to Blair that they paint one of our air force planes to UN colors to try to entrap Saddam's army into shooting it down? It's like our foreign policy is being decided on by a protege of Wile E. Coyote.

Download | play Download | play (h/t David)

Seymour Hersh has been writing about the Bush administration's aggressive stance against Iran for years now. His latest article for The New Yorker, "Preparing the Battlefield", Hersh claims that the Bush administration has been carrying out clandestine operations in Iran for some time now, with the funding and cooperation of the Democratic leadership in Congress.

HERSH: I think this is another example of putting an awful lot of pressure on the Iranian government. There's been a dramatic increase in kinetic events and chaos inside of Iran. Almost every other day, there's another story in the Iranian press -- I write about this in the article, too -- about things blowing up, et cetera, et cetera. It looks like things are falling apart, a little bit. And the central government certainly has more trouble.

And I think the goal of this operation, this incredible operation, with all this money -- and, by the way, it's the Democrats in Congress who basically looked the other way and said, take the money and run. They did not stop this money, the leadership that I'm talking about, the Democratic leadership.

So, basically, my guess is that -- I don't think we can safely say that any military action is off the table, no matter what happens. And that's -- as I say, I wish I'm going to be wrong about all that, but this is really, sort of, an amazing development.

CROWLEY: Absolutely. I want to read a graph out of your book because it goes to the oversight of the Democrats you just mentioned. [snip] "'The oversight process has not kept pace -- it's been co-opted by the administration,' the person familiar with the contents of the findings said. 'The process is broken and this is dangerous stuff we're authorizing.'"

Tell me, first, what your sources say is so dangerous about this?

HERSH: The president has to give a finding on covert action, any action that's covert. In other words, when CIA goes in some place, if they get caught, there could be spies.

So he has to tell the Congress about it. And the military simply is -- the president, since 9/11, has decided anything we do militarily, we don't have to tell anybody in Congress about.

Guest host Candy Crowley brings on Iraq Ambassador Ryan Crocker to officially deny that any cross border operations have taken place, but Hersh points out that Crocker may not be in the loop--plausible deniability being the operative word.

That is simply a reality, that when you run secret operations, if you're not telling the commander, the military commander of the Central Command, who is supposedly running the country -- you may not tell the ambassador everything. Sometimes it's better not to have the ambassador know.

Full transcripts below the fold:

Continue reading »

SteveAudio here again with some fresh Tuesday sounds:

When I think about you I touch myself. . . Stephen Colbert is running for President, and plans to debate. . . himself.

I heard the news today, oh boy. . . Judy "Kneepads" Miller = Seymour Hersh. Hot Military Stud Jeff Gannon whines. Studs Terkel swings his pulitzer like a bat and hits it out of the park. And it's fun to make fun of Fox News because they're so funny.

Man he's too cool for school. . . Intelligent Design is so . . .intelligent. Free-market economists are so economical with their brains. The two Naomis write great books.

Everybody wants to rule the world. . . Giuliani had fantasies of adequacy. And he thinks Democrats will learn to love Iraq like he does. And he makes stuff up about health care.

It's time to be a big girl now, and big girls don't cry. . . Condi Rice thinks the State Department has done a bang-up job in Iraq. Andrew Sullivan doesn't like Hillary.

That music you hear means we're playing our break song. More music tomorrow, hopefully we'll play something you like. Send any tips or song requests to steveaudio at earthlink dot net, with Blog Round Up as the title.

So long, we're here all week, and there's a great view from the patio, just watch the gnats.

From 1968 -- Cream, Sunshine Of Your Love

The Sunday Talking Head line-up is ready for reading. Newt Gingrich will be on This Week, no doubt explaining why he's on the off-again cycle of his flirtation with a presidential run -- fickle little odious bastard, isn't he? Bill Clinton is making the rounds following the Clinton Global Initiative Summit in NYC. Otherwise, it's a roundup of the usual suspects -- with the exception of a Seymour Hersh interview set for CNN which ought to be intriguing and scary at the same time.

What's catching your eye in the news or on the blogs this morning?

Color of Change:  Pushing the Jena 6 letter-writing campaign over the top...  (h/t My Little Tribe)

Mother Jones/Mark Fiore:  Cheney-in-Chief, Fireside Chat #2.

Bush in 30 Seconds Blog:  Suddenly surrounded by idiots?

Workaday Liberal:  Will the US even accept a political solution in Iraq?

And don't miss Adbusters's conversation with Seymour Hersh. But don't get me started about Condi and the Pope.

Guest blogged by Blue Gal, who wishes her colleague Sandy Underpants a belated happy birthday as wonderful as his own self.

FireDogLake:

[The above clip is an excerpted bit from the Frontline examination of "The Torture Question." There are graphic images from photos taken at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as well as some disturbing information presented in this documentary...]

For the Bush Administration, first and foremost, it has been consistently about maintaining a public level of plausible deniability for each and every scandal that has arisen during their tenure in office. Over and over, the phrase we have heard is that an official could not look into particular charges because of "an ongoing criminal investigation."

What that has meant, for close to seven years now, is that when a substantial problem arises in any executive agency, that problem is left to fester - for days, months, even years - while members of the Bush Administration sit back and bide their time, and allow the problem to continue unabated under the cloak of plausible deniability - unless and until someone outside the Administration begins to ask the tough questions that need to be asked.

Seymour Hersh has a blistering example of that directly from former Gen. Antonio Taguba that everyone should read in full. But I want to warn you up front, it is infuriating and utterly disgusting. Read full article here...