Let’s Hear It For “Cheney’s Assassination Squad”

Mark Hemingway reminds us that back in the bad old days of the Bush administration, when the Joint Special Operations Command carried out extra-judicial, theoretically “illegal,” and highly effective raids, liberals referred to them as “Dick Cheney’s Assassination Squad:”

Under Bush, JSOC was routinely smeared by the left and placed at the center of many Bush/Cheney conspiracy theories. Specifically, New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh alleged it was Dick Cheney’s personal assassination squad:

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “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.”

The horror! Now that JSOS has become Barack Obama’s “assassination ring,” it will be interesting to see whether Hersh and his fellow liberals are able to mount the same indignation.

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