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.

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Keith talks to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh about the Dick Cheney "stay behinds" he discussed in his recent interview with NPR. Some of that transcript from Think Progress:

GROSS: Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward and revealing things to you about what happened in the Bush administration?

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence. And again, because of the problems this administration’s having filling jobs, a lot of people who served in the Bush Cheney government, particularly even in the White House people on most sophisticated staffs are still there. You simply can’t get rid of everybody, you may not even want to. Some are professional people. But Cheney is, I would never call it admiration, but, you know, formidable, yeah, this guy. This guy is the real McCoy.

They also discuss Hersh's recent article in the New Yorker, Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s chance to engage in a Middle East peace.

Chris Matthews brings on Cliff May and Joe Conason to discuss Sy Hersh's recent allegations that Dick Cheney told the Israelis that President Obama was "pro-Palestinian" and described him as someone who would "never make it in the major leagues" while the incoming administration was trying to broker a cease fire.

The best May can muster to defend Cheney? Well maybe Sy Hersh's reporting is wrong. Cliff May has been an apologist for everything done by any of his fellow neo-cons at every turn. Let's see how long it takes him to do a one eighty on this one if he's proven wrong and take to defending Cheney's actions instead.

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Keith's report on Seymour Hersh's claim that Dick Cheney was running a covert assassination ring out of the Vice President's office with no Congressional oversight called the Joint Special Operations Command. The CIA denies the allegations. Keith's opening and Howard Fineman's slant are in the clip above and Howard Fineman states that even with the denials the CIA was not willing to dismiss Hersh's claim out of hand. He also thinks this may give some more creedance to Pat Leahy's call for a truth commission and find him some more support for it.

John Dean weighed in on the legal implications for the Bush administration as well as the CIA.

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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.

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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:

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I posted the video of Sy Hersch talking to Blitzer about his new article on Major Gen. Taguba's investigation of Abu Ghraib yesterday. Here's an important point of the article:

From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. "These M.P. troops were not that creative," he said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box."

I'd say Rummy, torture Yoo, Alberto and the whole crew were involved with this and to limit Taguba's investigation proves the point. Nobody with half-o'-brain believed this was only an incident perpetrated by a few rogue solders acting on their own....Damn them to hell...

 Sy Hersh joined Wolf on CNN this morning to talk about his new piece in The New Yorker: "How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties." It's another important story that Sy has brought to our attention. The lies that were told about the Abu Ghraid scandal are staggering as this WH implemented torture into its playbook and the soul of America.

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HERSH:  Very simply that the notion, as they told Congress, that our leader, Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense and his aides, they all went and testified in May after the stories about Abu Ghraib became public that "Oh, my god, we just didn't know about it until -- we didn't realize how serious it was" is simply not true.

The fact is that, within a few days of the incident first getting reported internally, which was in January of '04, the back channel was flying.  There were messages going.  And the back channel showed very clearly the documents – the actual cables show that Rumsfeld and his aides and Wolfowitz and his aides and the director of the Joint staff, all these senior people at the Pentagon were getting very detailed -- they didn't see the photographs; they were getting verbal accounts of the photographs that made it very clear.

It doesn't pay to do a thorough investigation for this White House as Major Gen. Taguba found out, but what about Bush's role in all of this?

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career. 

(full transcript via CNN below the fold)

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  Sy Hersh was on Real Time last night, and, like always, offered some serious insight into the rarely seen world of Washington politics.

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Common Dreams has the Frank Rich article and Hersh's latest New Yorker piece on Iran can be found here. It's rather lengthy but certainly worth the read. In it, he documents how our current Middle East policy ends up empowering Sunni extremists (al Qaeda) through covert and Congressionally unsanctioned methods. I have to say that after reading it I'm infinitely more informed, but equally as confused. Nevertheless, there is simply no more revered, respected and credible investigative journalist in America than Seymour Hersh; he's right on nearly everything and we should take his warnings about the Bush administration's true intentions towards Iran very seriously.

 Sy jumps into the Situation Room after appearing with Wolf on Sunday to discuss his New Yorker article and the Pentagon's response to him. Isn't it interesting that they always put out statements trying to debunk Hersh's articles....I'm just saying....

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Hersh..inside the military, they are planning very seriously at the President's request to attack Iran

They aren't very happy about this getting out:

We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…

 Sy Hersh tells us that the echos of Iran Contra weighed heavily in Negroponte's decision to resign his post and is claiming that Bush is funneling money without authorization or oversight that has ended up in the hands of Sunni jihadist groups.

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The President is taking his notion of executive privilege to the extreme----running covert operations, using money that's not authorized by Congress...Negroponte is too ethical for Cheney...

Hersh: There has been some violence.  So America, my country, without telling Congress, using funds not appropriated, I don't know where, by my sources believe much of the money obviously came from Iraq where there is all kinds of piles of loose money, pools of cash that could be used for covert operations. 

All of this should be investigated by Congress, by the way, and I trust it will be.  In my talking to membership -- members there, they are very upset that they know nothing about this.  And they have great many suspicions. 

We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…

He -- that is one of the reasons, I was told.  Negroponte also was not in tune with Cheney.  There was a lot of complaints about him because he was seen as much of a stickler, too ethical for some of the operations the Pentagon wants to run.  (full transcript below the fold)

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Military leadership is having difficulty completing a request from President Bush for plans to bomb Iran.

 In his latest article, Seymour Hersh writes, "The generals and admirals have told the administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran's nuclear program. A crucial issue in the military's dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities. The war planners are not sure what to hit."

 Video -WMP Video -QT

"Seymour Hersh has a lengthy new article about the Bush administration's plans for Iran. As always with Hersh, you should read the entire piece. Here are some highlightsLet me bewith what I think is the single most important paragraph. Hersh discusses in detail the various conflicts between the military and the Bush administration about different strategies and the possible outcomes, including profoundly dangerous negative consequences of any action against Iran. But if you thought for one moment that the administration has given up serious planning for an attack of some kind, think again ..read on"