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COVERT ACTS! "VP Dick Cheney Oversaw Secret US Forces Carrying Out Illegal Assassinations In A Dozen Countries Including Latin America", Seymour Hersh + Israeli Gov't Lies To Them As US Lies To Us
COVERT ACTS!
“VP Dick Cheney
Oversaw Secret US
Forces Carrying Out
Illegal
Assassinations In A
Dozen Countries
Including
Latin America”,
Seymour Hersh +
Israeli Gov’t Lies
To Israelis As
US Lies To Us - RI10
Tabacco: Yes, today is April 1, but this is NOT A JOKE!
Journalist Seymour Hersh sat down with CNN's Wolf Blitzer in The Situation Room Monday.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/30/reporter-alleges-secret-assassination-wing/
March 30, 2009
Reporter alleges secret 'assassination wing'
Posted: 04:39 PM ET
From CNN's Alexander Mooney, Martina Stewart and Rebecca Sinderbrand
(CNN) — The Bush administration established a secret special operations unit unmonitored by Congress with authority to assassinate high-value targets in as many as a dozen countries, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh told CNN Monday.
A former Cheney aide denied the claim.
Tabacco: Why would CNN even state the obvious!
Watch both interviews today on The Situation Room at 6 pm ET.
In an interview on CNN's The Situation Room, Hersh said the group — called the Joint Special Operations Command — reported to Vice President Dick Cheney and was delegated authority to assassinate individuals based on their own intelligence.
"The idea that we have a unit that goes around and without reporting to Congress — Congress knows very little about this group, can't get hearings, can't get even classified hearings on it…goes around and has authority from the president to go into a country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack someone, I am sorry Wolf, yes I have a problem with that", Hersh said in the interview with Wolf Blitzer.
Cheney aide John Hannah denied the claim. (Yawn! Aides should only be quoted when they confirm negatives, not when they deny. Where’s his proof? He has none because you cannot prove a negative “Cheney did NOT do what he is accused of”. So Hannah should not even be in this story. I was sorely tempted to remove him, but I did not or my detractors would have a field day.) "It's not true", he told Blitzer Monday. "And I think you heard in that interview that there was a little walking back from the original claim that was made in the speech that Mr. Hersh made" in which the reporter characterized the group as an "assassination wing". (Very little!)
Hersh said Monday he regretted using that language. Note how the particulars are not explained. Fear not, there is another interview at Democracy Now! to follow this one. That “regret” will be explained@. Always beware of unexplained assertions and partial quotes!
Democracy Now! is wrong in their point of view re Illegal Aliens. Their collective pro-Amnesty stance is self-serving and predictable. However, DN! reports the news completely, asks the right questions and investigates in a style that can best be described as “old school” – from the Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Edward R. Murrow school of journalism: Let the chips fall where they may; we tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth!
"I wish I had said something different, more careful. It's a loaded phrase, [but] it comes down to the same thing", Hersh said. "[The Bush administration] delegated authority to troops in the field on the basis of whatever intelligence they think is good, and I can tell you it's always not good and sometimes things get very bloody."
Hannah also told CNN that in a "theater of war" like Iraq, Afghanistan and the Pakistani border, "our troops have the authority to go out after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy".
But he also admitted he did not know for sure what the procedure had been. "I don't know exactly what the consultations are with the Congress, but it's hard for me to believe that those committee chairman and the leadership on the Hill involved in intelligence and armed services, if they want to know about these operations, cannot get that information through the Defense Department."
A Special Operations Command spokesman rejected Hersh's report, saying their forces operate under established rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict. He adds that the vice president has no command-and-control authorities over the U.S. military. Two former Cheney aides also reject the claim, as does the former Bush homeland security adviser, now a national security analyst. Hersh did not disclose any sources in the speech or in the CNN interview, nor was he asked about sources.
Tabacco trusts Seymour Hersh, a reputable unbiased newsman, a lot more than Bush-Cheney-government shills, who have vested interest in keeping this secret under wraps! But after all, we’ve had 8 years of denials and ad Hominem attacks by Bush Regime members on anybody, including other Republicans, who exposed GOP wrongs, lies and duplicities. The Whistleblowers were always lying, and the Bushites were always telling the Truth? Give me a break!
The assassination of political leaders has been banned since 1976 — but suspected terrorists are a different story. (Tabacco is still waiting for the “smoking gun” on the Paul Wellstone “Assassination” – yes, I said ASSASSINATION! And it had to be a GOP-inspired act!) When it comes to top al Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden, American policy remains unambiguous, with President Obama saying, “We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants”. Abu Musab al Zarqawi is the highest profile commander killed by American forces so far.
Former national security adviser Frances Townsend, a CNN national security contributor, says the list of authorized terror targets — people who can be killed without a trial -– numbers fewer than 100 who helped plan attacks or are "plotting the death and destruction of Americans or American interests around the world”. The U.S. military and the intelligence services, she says, are given authority to capture or kill them wherever they're found.
Townsend said the list of targets for the president to sign off on was the product of interagency collaboration that included the military, intelligence, law enforcement, and the Justice Department.
Both interviews air today on The Situation Room.
Do you really believe that George W. Bush signed off on names that Dick Cheney did not sign off on or that GWB did not sign off on names that Cheney did sign off on! When it came to assassinations and other Covert actions, Dick Cheney, not George W. Bush, was in fact the president of the United States!
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/31/seymour_hersh_secret_us_forces_carried
March 31, 2009
Seymour Hersh: Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Counties, Including in Latin America
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir earlier this month when he said the Bush administration ran an “executive assassination ring” that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving”, Hersh said. Seymour Hersh joins us to explain. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled “Syria Calling”.
Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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* "Syria Calling" (The New Yorker)
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh created a stir last month when he said the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney. Hersh made the comment during a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10th.
Today is April 1, 2009. If this is the first you have heard of it, you might want to ask yourselves, “Why not?” I did not hold this publication up. I only heard about it a day and a half ago myself, and you know how voraciously I pursue the relevant news.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.
AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.
Tabacco: Even DN! Is reporting this biased “source”. Are biased sources the only sources the Media could find to act as character references for the Bush Regime? Lots of Republicans have been Whistleblowers against the Bush shenanigans, but no Democrats have acted as character references. If you inject “Joe Lieberman” as a Democrat, I rebuke you in advance for that INSULT!
WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?
JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.
We have his word and assertion that it was “very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process”. Since we have only their word, how do we know that those suspects were what they say they were? Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were filled with innocent “detainees”, later released without conviction and/or trial. If they were often WRONG about Detainees, does it not stand to reason they were probably WRONG about their ASSASSINATION LISTEES also!
WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em!
JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy. (And misidentified “collateral damages” – let’s not forget them!)
AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser. Seymour Hersh joins me now here in Washington, D.C., staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest article appears in the current issue, called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace”.
OK, welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy Hersh. It was good to see you last night at Georgetown. Talk about, first, these comments you made at the University of Minnesota.
SEYMOUR HERSH: @Well, it was sort of stupid of me to start talking about stuff I haven’t written. I always kick myself when I do it. But I was with Walter Mondale, the former vice president, who was being amazingly open and sort of, for him—he had come a long way in—since I knew him as a senator who was reluctant to oppose the Vietnam War. And so, I was asked about future things, and I just—I am looking into stuff. I’ve done—there’s really nothing I said at Minnesota I haven’t written in the New York Times. Last summer, I wrote a long article about the Joint Special Operations Command.
And just to go back to what John Hannah, who is—was—I think ended up being the senior national security adviser, almost—if not the chief of staff, deputy chief of staff for Dick Cheney in the last three or four years, what he said is simply that, yes, we go after people suspected—that was the word he used—of crimes against America. And I have to tell you that there’s an executive order, signed by Jerry Ford, President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive.
The evidence—the problem with having military go kill people when they’re not directly in combat, these are asking American troops to go out and find people and, as you said earlier, in one of the statements I made that you played, they go into countries without telling any of the authorities, the American ambassador, the CIA chief, certainly nobody in the government that we’re going into, and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.
And not only that, if you look at Guantánamo, the American government knew by—well, let’s see, Guantánamo opened in early 2002. “Gitmo”, they call it, the base down in Cuba for alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002,estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me!
And not only that, Amy, the thing about George Bush is, everything’s sort of done in plain sight. In his State of the Union address, I think January the 28th, 2003, about a month and a half before we went into Iraq, Bush was describing the progress in the war, and he said—I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close—he said that we’ve captured more than 3,000 members of al-Qaeda and suspected members, people suspected of operations against us. And then he added with that little smile he has, “And let me tell you, some of those people will not be able to ever operate again. I can assure you that. They will not be in a position”. He’s clearly talking about killing people, and to applause.
So, there we are! @I don’t back off what I said. I wish I hadn’t said it ad hoc, because, like I hope we’re going to talk about in a minute, I spend a lot of time writing stories for The New Yorker, and they’re very carefully vetted, and sometimes when you speak off the top, you’re not as precise.
Tabacco: See what happens when Right-wing LIARS-SOPHISTS take quotes out of context and don’t include important details!
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what the Joint Special Operations Command is and what oversight Congress has of it.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it’s a special unit. We have something called the Special Operations Command that operates out of Florida, and it involves a lot of wings. And one of the units that work under the umbrella of the Special Operations Command is known as Joint Special Op—JSOC. It’s a special unit. What makes it so special, it’s a group of elite people that include Navy Seals, some Navy Seals, Delta Force, our—what we call our black units, the commando units. “Commando” is a word they don’t like, but that’s what we, most of us, refer to them as. And they promote from within. It’s a unit that has its own promotion structure. And one of the elements, I must tell you, about getting ahead in promotion is the number of kills you have. Of course! Because it’s basically devised—it’s been transmogrified, if you will, into this unit that goes after high-value targets.
And where Cheney comes in and the idea of an assassination ring—I actually said “wing,” but of an assassination wing—that reports to Cheney was simply that they clear lists through the Vice President’s office. He’s not sitting around picking targets. They clear the lists. And he’s certainly deeply involved, less and less as time went on, of course, but in the beginning very closely involved. And this is the elite unit. I think they do three-month tours. And last summer, I wrote a long article in The New Yorker, last July, about how the JSOC operation is simply not available, and there’s no information provided by the executive to Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: What countries, Sy Hersh—what countries are they operating in?
SEYMOUR HERSH: A lot of countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Name some.
SEYMOUR HERSH: @No, because I haven’t written about it, Amy. And I will tell you, as I say, in Central America, it’s far more than just the areas that Mr. Hannah talked about—Afghanistan, Iraq. You can understand an operation like this in the heat of battle in Iraq, killing—I mean, taking out enemy. That’s war. But when you go into other countries—let’s say Yemen, let’s say Peru, let’s say Colombia, let’s say Eritrea, let’s say Madagascar, let’s say Kenya, countries like that—and kill people who are believed on a list to be al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-linked or anti-American, you’re violating most of the tenets.
We’re a country that believes very much in due process. That’s what it’s all about. We don’t give the President of United States the right to tell military people, even in a war—and it’s a war against an idea, war against terrorism. It’s not as if we’re at war against a committed uniformed enemy. It’s a very complicated war we’re in. And with each of those actions, of course, there’s always collateral deaths, and there’s always more people ending up becoming our enemies. That’s the tragedy of Guantánamo. By the time people, whether they were with us or against us when they got there, by the time they’ve been there three or four months, they’re dangerous to us, because of the way they’ve been treated. But I’d love to move on to what I wrote about in The New Yorker.
AMY GOODMAN: One question: Is the assassination wing continuing under President Obama?
SEYMOUR HERSH: How do I know? I hope not.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Sy Hersh. We’re going to go to break, and then we’ll be back with him, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His piece in The New Yorker is called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace”. Stay with us!
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/31/seymour_hersh_on_syria_calling_the
March 31, 2009
Seymour Hersh on “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace”
In the latest issue of The New Yorker, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh looks at Syria’s emerging role in the politics of Middle East peace. He also reveals new details on the behind-the-scenes dealings of the Bush administration and the then-incoming Obama camp during the Israeli attack on Gaza. The article is called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.” [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled “Syria Calling”.
Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...
Related Links
* "Syria Calling" (The New Yorker)
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. His piece in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine is called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace”.
Sy, you begin, “When the Israelis’ controversial twenty-two-day military campaign in Gaza ended, on January 18th, it also seemed to end the promising [peace] talks between Israel and Syria.” What were those talks?
SEYMOUR HERSH: There was a series of more or less secret talks. They initially were secret, but they became known. The Turkish government intervened. And Turkey and Syria have not always been good friends, but there’s a great relationship between the leadership of Turkey and President Bashar Assad of Syria now. And they began talks about—the Turks have also great relationships, very close relationships —or did, until Gaza—with the Israelis. So it was a natural sort of mix.
The Turks mediated or brokered a series of—I think there were four long meetings about getting the Golan Heights, which was an area, a large area, seized by the Israelis after the ’67 war and, contrary to international law, not returned to the Syrians. The Syrians have always wanted it back, as any country would. You know, it’s native soil. And so, the talks were very—what I was writing about, I started doing this last fall, because I was told how far along the talks were. They had resolved a lot of questions. There were always going to be complicated questions of water, because the Golan Heights is a mountainous region, and there’s a great deal of water that pours into the Jordan Valley and into Israel. But once the riparian rights—even those rights were discussed and worked out. And they were on a track to begin almost direct negotiations, when Gaza broke out. So the story I had worked on for months at The New Yorker was sort of scrapped, obviously, because of Gaza.
And then, to my surprise, a few weeks after the war, after both the Turkish president, Erdogan, and Bashar Assad both were incredibly harshly critical of Israel for the overzealous bombing, etc., etc., we all know about at Gaza and the collateral deaths—they were so critical. I had sent an email message to Assad, President Assad, who I’ve seen three or four times in the past six or so years. And to my surprise, he responded with an email, saying essentially, “Look, I want to go ahead with talks.” And he is still talking that way. And his goal is—it’s not just some sort of quixotic thing. The Israelis want to go ahead with talks, despite Gaza.
And the Syrian goal is simply, I think—as I write, the Syrian goal was to get President Obama, who is the great hope of everybody in the Middle East and, I think, everybody in the world—we’re all worried about Afghanistan, for sure, but nonetheless, the Syrians want Obama and the Americans to broker talks, and the idea being, if you can get this administration, our White House, into a possible settlement of the Golan Heights dispute, land for peace, we can get a regional peace process going.
And then the United States would have to—in Bashar Assad’s view, it would be not—very logical for the Americans to also accept the idea that Iran should participate. And we just heard in your news broadcast today Richard Holbrooke talking about the inevitability of using—having Iran involved, because for the United States, you have to look at the idea of having Syria, Turkey and Iran all together, all border countries playing an enormous role in making sure that the Iraqi—as we walk out of Iraq, and making sure that that happens safely—they have a lot to say about what’s going to happen inside Iraq. They can be moderating influences. And so, you see the potential for an enormous sort of a change in the paradigm.
AMY GOODMAN: Sy Hersh, can you talk about Vice President Cheney’s comments about Obama to Israeli officials after he was elected but before he was inaugurated?
SEYMOUR HERSH: What I wrote about, in doing my reporting, I did discover that Cheney, of course, to no one’s surprise, if you certainly read what I wrote about Cheney and the White House’s involvement in the Israeli attack on Lebanon three years ago—Cheney was deeply involved with the Israelis in the planning for Gaza, resupplying them with weapons and also providing intelligence through our—the offices we have in Egypt, our intelligence offices there. So we were deeply involved in helping the Israelis do the attack on Gaza, with intelligence, etc., and weaponry.
And he was, not surprisingly, very hostile to the election of Obama. And he called him a lot of pejorative names, but one of them that we published that dealt with—I think he said, “He will never make it in the major leagues,” and that kind of language.
And more specifically, what I wrote about that actually is, I think, far more interesting is that Obama—and when he was in transition, his transition team let the Israelis know that—if you remember, the bombing of Gaza began in late December of ’08 and ended around the 18th of January, 18th. That wasn’t an accident. Obama told the Israelis, “I do not want bombing in Gaza or Israeli troops in Gaza at the time of my inauguration.” And that was—it’s not clear whether the Israelis were going to stay there. But the hunch is, they planned to go another week. They stopped short.
And as I write, they complained bitterly to Cheney, who communicated that distress to General Jones, who is the new head of the National Security—former Marine General Jim Jones, who’s head of now the National—as I said, national security adviser. And Jones was the national security adviser in waiting, and he worked out a deal, which was that the Israelis would stop short, as Obama wanted; in return, the Obama administration, once in office, would not interfere with a prearranged flow of arms that was going to Israel. In other words, we were going to keep the supply of smart bombs and other weaponry going past the inauguration. And so, the message to Israel, perhaps, was, “Well, we’re still your friends, but not a blank check.” And so, that was a very interesting—it’s just a couple of graphs in my piece, but a very interesting couple of graphs.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah. I wanted to play for you, Sy Hersh, the comments of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. He was in Doha Monday attending a summit of the Arab League. Arab leaders are reportedly set to warn Israel time is running out to accept a longstanding peace offer. Syrian President Assad endorsed future peace talks with Israel but said the incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not a serious partner.
PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASSAD: [translated] Since we released the Arab Peace Initiative, we do not have a real partner in the peace process. Israel has killed the Arab initiative and not the Doha summit, as some people are trying to suggest.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Sy Hersh?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, that’s not inconsistent. His argument all along has been that the only way you can really get a systematic peace process going now is bringing in America to broker it. And the American role would be important. It’s a tremendous challenge for the Obama administration diplomatically, which is to nurse an agreement over the Golan Heights, which everybody seems to want, and use that to start talking about regional peace.
And that would mean bringing in Iran, countries like Iran, into the process, at the same time trying to hold off the Israelis, who—I think the main reason Israel would be interested in the Golan Heights settlement is they see a settlement with Syria over the Golan Heights as an issue that would isolate the Iranians from the Syrians and, therefore, give the Israelis more leverage to go after Iran, if they choose to do so, if, this year or next year, the Israelis view Iran as a strategic threat. They don’t view—this is, I would say, certainly Ehud Barak, the defense minister, he does—who’s into the government now. He does not view the Palestinian issue, whether Hamas or Fattah, as strategic. That’s a tactical issue.
The main goal for this government in Israel now is going to be to try and do something to take care of the Iranians. And if they have to deal with Israel—I mean, with Syria and seal that part of the border off and protect themselves and get a settlement there to put more pressure on Iran, that’s the way they view it. The problem is that the Syrians have a different motive for dealing with Israel. They’re not interested in walking away from the Iranian agreement.
So Bush—or, the Obama administration has to somehow walk its way through all of these issues and keep the Israelis happy and also go forward, because, as I said, it’s almost impossible to consider you could—you’re going to be able to extract ourselves from Iraq as peacefully as we want to. We’ve got a lot of boys to get out of there and a lot of damage to repair there. And the idea of having all three of the countries—as I said, Turkey, Syria and Iran—supporting us in that operation is overwhelmingly attractive.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me play a clip for you of President Carter. I wanted to ask you about the emerging positions of the Hamas leadership on accepting a long-term agreement with Israel. Carter has met with Hamas officials and relayed their willingness to accept a peace deal with Israel. This is President Carter speaking last April.
JIMMY CARTER: They said that they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, if approved by Palestinians, and that they would accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor next door in peace, provided the agreements negotiated by Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas were submitted to the Palestinians for their overall approval.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what President Carter is saying and also President Carter’s relationship with President Obama, Sy?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, sure. That’s one of the most amazing things. You know, Jimmy Carter has been a pariah for the American Jewish community and for Israel ever—in recent years because of just the kind of conversations you’ve heard. He’s gone and made visits to the Hamas leadership, and he’s gone to see Bashar Assad of Syria.
It turns out he has a pretty profound relationship with Obama. He met with him privately about ten, twelve days before the inauguration. I wrote about that meeting. It was just the—Carter and his wife and the President, Obama, and his aide David Axelrod. And since then, I think there’s even been more—perhaps even more private meetings. And so, I do understand that it seems inevitable, of course, they would discuss Hamas.
And the fact of the matter is that what Mr. Carter said, Khaled Meshaal, the head who runs the Hamas office in Damascus—I actually interviewed in this piece in The New Yorker—he says literally the same thing. In a sense, he said he would be—Hamas leadership would be willing to leave Syria, as Bush always wanted, if there was an agreement on the Golan Heights. He said he would not stand in the way of Bashar Assad. And he also said, Khaled Meshaal, who said that Iran would be against this kind of an agreement, they would be isolated, as the Israelis think. It was pretty straightforward stuff. What we may—and Meshaal has said to me, in that visit and previous visits, “The Israelis keep on wanting me to talk about Israel publicly and say I recognize Israel. For a man of the resistance, that would be suicidal. But what I do say is—and I’ve said this, too, publicly”—and he said it to Carter—“I understand there’s a state called Israel.” And he’s not—he just won’t say what the Israelis want him to say.
The whole question of how Bush presented things and how Obama presents things, I really—it’s quite amazing. Obama talks about mutual respect. And again, in this article, I mention that instead of going to the Syrians and demanding that they kick Hamas out of Syria—the Hamas has had an office there for years in Syria, much to our anger, the Bush administration’s anger—Hillary Clinton, to her everlasting credit, sent two of her aides to see the Syrians a few weeks ago, and their message was so different. They said, “Look, we know you won’t kick out Hamas. That’s an act you won’t do. We won’t shame you and ask you to shame yourself. What we want you to do, instead of kicking them out, is to try and help us be—help us to get Hamas to be more moderate.” Similarly, about Hezbollah, instead of demanding that Syria, as part of any agreement, disavow Hezbollah, disavow Hamas or disavow Iran, what the Obama people, the message they passed in Syria was, “Look, we think that perhaps the Bush administration was wrong or overzealous in thinking how much control Syria has over Hezbollah. We’re reevaluating that. There may not be as much direct control.”
So you have a new government in place that, I must tell you, for all of the caviling and for all of the concerns I have about Afghanistan and other actions of Mr. Obama, what he’s doing in this part with Syria and Hamas is pretty interesting. He seems to be more willing to accept the reality than the Bush administration was. They saw a world that I don’t think existed.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for being with us. I do want to ask, you never got to talk to David Axelrod about this article? We have ten seconds.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I talked to him about Carter. He was very open. But once I started talking about what Obama wanted to do with the—in terms of getting the Israelis to stop the war short of the inauguration, the war on Gaza, I was treated exactly as Bush would treat me, you know, which is, “Are you kidding?” No response, no response, make appointments, don’t do it. But that’s normal for White Houses. They like the press only—every White House wants the press exactly the way they want it, which is, they want to feed you and take care of you. If you raise questions, they don’t like you. Big deal.
AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, joining us today. His latest article in The New Yorker magazine is called “Syria Calling: The Obama Administration’s Chance to Engage in a Middle East Peace.”
Tabacco: I am going to make an assumption for which I have no proof, only a hunch or educated guess. That assumption is that the average Israeli is more educated, more politically involved and more knowledgeable than the average American.
If I’m correct, then another assumption, which follows from the first, is that Israeli people are lied to by the Israeli government just as American people are lied to by the US government. Intellect, experience and knowledge are NO VACINATION against Lies & Propaganda! We know that because of all the wealthy, erudite intellects, who were deceived, exploited and lied to by Bernard Madoff. Lack of knowledge and misinformation generally guarantee Public acquiescence and submission, regardless of intellect.
Any people would prefer peace to dodging bullets and avoiding suicide bombers. When average Israelis declare they want peace, Tabacco is inclined to believe them. So why and how would the Israeli government ignore Muslim peace overtures and pretend no olive branch was ever offered or accepted? Because, just as in Capitalist America, the Israeli government is operated and controlled by Imperialists, to whom genocide is merely a strategy and collateral damages are merely a fact of life. Their avarice and indifference supersede any concern for their own people, let alone innocent bystander Muslims.
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler exploited fear of the Jew to promote his own Disaster Capitalism.
In 2003, George W. Bush exploited Americans’ fear of 9/11/01 and Muslims to promote his own Disaster Capitalism.
Since the 1940s, Jewish leaders, in concert with American leaders, have exploited fear of those same Muslims to promote their own Disaster Capitalism. Declaring Muslims to be anti-Semites does not explain their relationship or lack thereof. After all, Israelis and Christians do not exchange “militaristic greetings”!
Nobody cares whether Jews worship God or Christ or Mohammad! Christians don’t worship as Muslims do, and our main conflict with them has come during the 3 Bush administrations. If you provoke, threaten and attack a large bear or steal his food, and that bear attempts to kill you, are you surprised!
No, the old Excuses do not fly; the old Canards are lacking in logic. Something is being withheld from the Public(s). Something is rotten in Denmark! When GWB told us Muslims attacked America on 9/11/01 because they hated our freedom and loathed our heathen civilization, you should have known he was lying. Those “Excuses”, in and of themselves, do not make sense. When the Reason or Excuse lacks credibility, then the proposed retaliatory act our leaders propose is undoubtedly irrational also.
Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.
Tabacco is not a blogger, who thinks; I am a Thinker, who blogs.
In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization) – Think Tank For Other 95% Of World