You want to climb to the top of this seething pit,
You got to walk and talk real nice.
But the secret price of power here is
Human sacrifice.

Yesterday we wrote about the sudden-onset amnesia of our media-political class concerning the officially confirmed operations of American death squads. As we noted, official Washington is in a minor flutter at the moment over reports that Dick Cheney ordered and then concealed the existence of a planned program of targeted assassinations -- a program which was supposedly never implemented and was then supposedly cancelled by Obama CIA chief Leon Panetta. We merely pointed out the well-known fact -- supported by copious reportage in mainstream journals in the past eight years, not to mention proud public admissions by top government officials, including the president -- that the CIA (and other agents of the United States government) had indeed been murdering people in "extrajudicial assassinations" throughout the Bush Administration.

I concentrated on state murder during the Bush years because that is the ostensible focus of the current, manufactured controversy over the alleged existence of one allegedly non-operational program. However, as Jeremy Scahill points out, the Bush-Cheney murder racket was not created ex nihilo, but was a continuation and refinement of murder programs initiated by Bill Clinton. Scahill also makes the pertinent observation that "extrajudicial assassination" -- known quaintly in the old days as murder most foul -- is continuing unabated under Barack Obama.

The deep-dyed complicity of Democratic leaders, executive and congressional, in official murder sprees is the main reason we will never see a genuine investigation of America's death squads, as Scahill points out. Imperial crime is thoroughly bipartisan; neither faction dares push too far in such matters, because both are smeared and caked with blood.

Scahill's piece should be read in its entirety, but here are a few choice bits:

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...

As [the Democrats now pretending to be scandalized by the recent Cheney allegations] 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.

...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." 

...The truth is, under Clinton, it wasn’t just proxies authorized to do the assassinations. ... 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."

Scahill has much more on the macabre history -- and the reeking hypocrisy -- behind the current "controversy.

Comments (6)

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scott douglas said:

	... I am going to buy a tricycle... because it is very difficult to backpedal this bicycle slowly enough... to keep up with the past/facts receding rapidly... forward... into the looming time/space anomaly... that was... the American Imperial Propaganda Machine...
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July 16, 2009 | url
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Sean O'Neil said:

... overheard at a gathering of The Donkle -- "we'd better go hack and shut down Chris Floyd again." "yeah, he's telling more lies about Obama and Clinton." "yeah, I mean -- everyone knows that Democrats do nothing wrong, and that it's always the Rethugs who are destroying America and trampling the Constitution. Obama's just trying to hold the nation together after it was ripped apart by The Smirking Chimp and the Wyoming Ranchhand." "EXACTLY." "well, the question is why Chris Floyd is attacking Democrats. isn't he a progressive?" "yeah, what's up with that? progressives are supposed to be on board with Obama, I mean Obama's a progressive!" "he's probably just a Rethug." "no he's probably a lunatic leftist like a socialist or something like that. he probably thinks Hillary Clinton is a right-winger." "yeah I bet you're right. Hillary gets such a bad rap because she's a tough woman -- it's all that misogyny coming out of the closet in her critics! what bigots!" "next thing you know, Floyd will criticize Israel." "don't worry, Abe Foxman will have him shut down if that happens."

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July 17, 2009
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yankee 30 said:

... 'Report: CIA Assassin Program Could Operate Anywhere -- Even Inside U.S.' (headline from TPM Muckraker, July 16th) Isn't it rich? From JFK to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King,Jr. to... From Ngo Binh Diem to Zia-ul-Haq to Muammar Gaddafi's adopted 15-month-old daughter(oops) to... Yes indeed, as classic Orwellian 'newspeak'(ers) and 'doublethink'(ers), assassination is whatever they say it is. "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth." George Orwell, 1949 Totalitarianism by any other name is still totalitarianism. _______________ Read LIBRA by Don DeLillo. Very compelling.

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July 17, 2009
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DeanTaylor said:

Burnt Norton's Weeny Sandwich--or...How Empire got us into this mess Chomsky advises that to confront global terrorism--theirs, not ours--we ought to consider their grievances and address them. To that end, retired CIA officer turned political activist Ray McGovern homes in on the crux of the issue in citing a report compiled by the US Defense Science Board http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Science_Board "...an unclassified study published, not by some 'liberal' think-tank, but by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board just two months after the 9/11 Commission Report. That report directly contradicted what Cheney and President Bush had been saying about 'why they hate us,' letting the elephant out of the bag and into the room, so to speak: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.” McGovern continues: "You didn’t know about that report? Well, maybe this is because of the timing. The Defense Science Board final report was given to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 23, 2004, just weeks before the presidential election. "That is a time when presidential candidates and the U.S. Establishment in general are hyper-allergic to discussing how U.S. support for Israeli policies toward the Palestinians encourages the recruitment of anti-American terrorists. "Bending over backwards to oblige, the FCM [Fawning Corporate Media] suppressed the Defense Science Board findings until after the election. On Nov. 24, 2004, the New York Times, erstwhile 'newspaper of record,' did publish a story on the board’s report — but performed some highly interesting surgery. "Thom Shanker of the Times quoted the paragraph beginning with 'Muslims do not 'hate our freedom' (see above), but he or his editors deliberately cut out the following sentence about what Muslims do object to; i.e., U.S. 'one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights' and support for tyrannical regimes. The Times did include the sentence that immediately followed the omitted one. In other words, it was not simply a matter of shortening the paragraph. Rather, the offending middle sentence was surgically removed. "Similarly creative editing showed through the Times' reporting in late October 2004 on a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden. Almost six paragraphs of the story made it onto page one, but the Times saw to it that the key point bin Laden made at the beginning of his presentation was relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the very bottom of page nine. "Buried there was bin Laden's assertion that the idea for 9/11 first germinated after 'we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.' "Wading through the drivel in the FCM’s Times and Washington Post on Friday morning, I am hardly surprised that they missed Cheney’s slip about U.S. policy toward Israel being one of the terrorists’ 'true sources of resentment.' The "slip" McGovern refers to is here: "There are a number of reasons why al-Qaeda and other terrorist movements wish to attack us, but this question never gets a complete – or honest – answer, certainly not from the FCM or from the mouths of politicians like Cheney and Obama. "Cheney’s explanation of a motive mostly reprised George W. Bush’s old 'the terrorists hate our freedoms' canard. Cheney said the terrorists hate 'all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences,' an odd set of qualities for Cheney to cite given his roles in violating constitutional rights, torturing captives and spreading falsehoods to justify invading Iraq. "But that’s also where Cheney slipped up. You didn’t notice? Well, Cheney couldn’t resist expanding on the complaints of the terrorists: [Cheney]: “They have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion…our belief in equal rights for women…our support for Israel… — these are the true sources of resentment…” McGovern continues: "'Our support for Israel.' Cheney got that part right." full article: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/42882

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July 17, 2009
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Joseph Mark Potter said:

	... Have you ever known of the American Elite investigating, charging, trying, convicting and then punishing one of their own? From president down to animal control, we see lawless behavior on the part of governmental officials that seemingly never gets the proper punishment. Will it ever happen?
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July 17, 2009
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Sean O'Neil said:

to Dean Taylor Dean, I have been reading Christopher Lasch lately. His book The True and Only Heaven deals with the notion of "progress" as a cornerstone to "liberal" and "progressive" perspectives, and the fallacy of believing in "progress" as a life's wellspring of sorts. One of the things Lasch takes to task is what I would call the science-ization of government, the idea that sprung up around Robt McNamara's approach to Vietnam -- the idea that we just need think-tanks to "analyze problems" for us. I think Lasch was dead correct on this. The report you reference did not need to be compiled, and by making a big deal of it, Ray McGovern shows his pro-Donkey partisanship once again. It's god-damned OBVIOUS that Islamic nations do not "hate our freedoms" and instead despise our colonialist, imperialist, dictatorial stride about the globe. It's completely obvious. It is an inescapable result of a ridiculous 230 year history of arrogance. It could turn out no other way. To have some need to reduce it to a think-tank report that Ray McGovern seems to think was essential, but hidden? Damn it, McGovern's playing politics there. The truth did not need the report or those who compiled it. The truth existed and was obvious, and it was NOT a Republican thing, it was a bi-partisan, fully federal and national thing. I'm tired of Ray McGovern and his Donkey service. He writes pieces only to attack Republicans. He's another in a long like of pathetic pro-Donkey apologists like Dave Lindorff, David Michael Green, Joshuah Micah Marshall, and a good number of popular bloggers like Daily Kos and Eschaton and Digby's Hullaballoo where the only perspective is one that says good government is 100% Democrat and 0% Republican. I wish Ray McGovern would just shut his mouth and turn off his keyboard.

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