John Hannah: Unitary Executives Can Assassinate Enemy Leaders
In his appearance tonight on Wolf Blitzer, Sy Hersh said the same thing I said about his "revelation" that JSOC had assassination squads that bypassed normal reporting channels–Hersh pointed out that he had reported all that previously, last July. The biggest news in that part of his appearance is that Hersh revealed the number of countries–twelve–in which JSOC could work its assassination teams.
After Hersh appeared, Wolf had John Hannah, Cheney’s replacement Scooter and by far the biggest hack witness at the Libby trial, to try to rebut Hersh’s reporting.
Though Hannah didn’t really do that.
Instead, he dismissed Hersh’s concerns about the legality of the operations by insisting that the Chairs of the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, and Congressional leadership, could learn about these operations. Aside from the fact that Hannah admitted he didn’t actually know that to be true, he’s working on the assumption that they’ll come and ask about something that Hannah admits is a very close hold.
Wolf: And when he says this JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command has this authority that they don’t even tell Congress about?
Hannah: It is extremely hard for me to believe, I, I, don’t know exactly what the consultations are with the Congress but it’s hard for me to believe that those committee chairmen and the leadership on the Hill involved in intelligence and armed services, if they want to know about these operations, cannot get this information from the Defense Department.
Wolf: And so this would be, from your perspective–and you worked for the Bush Administration for many years–it would be totally constitutional, totally legal to go out, find these guys, and to whack them.
Hannah: There’s no question, in a theater of war, when we are at war–and 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 out after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.
Ultimately, though, Hannah resorts to the Cheneyesque justification for all abuses of power, the AUMF, arguing that troops "in the theater of war" can capture and kill the enemy.
Of course, we’ve already seen that, until last November at least, the Bush Administration considered the US to be in the theater of war. And Hannah pretends these assassinations are only going on in Iraq (if you’re Nuri al-Maliki or more pointedly, Moqtada al-Sadr, how does this make you feel?), Afghanistan (I hear we’re turning on Hamid Karzai), and those border regions of Pakistan (golly, I seem to recall that Benazhir Bhutto was assassinated). But, as I mentioned, Hersh said these teams operated in twelve countries.
But don’t worry–if they assassinate someone in one of those twelve countries and Carl Levin happens to learn about it after the fact, according to John Hannah he can ask DOD for details.
Yeah, no kidding. Hannah doesn’t really have any knowledge of those kind of consultations with Congress because he and his boss never engaged in them and spent their careers devising ways not to do so.
Digby – What bmaz said.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com…..k-end.html
Not that DoD is obligated to or would deign to actually answer, let alone answer truthfully.
And the US was one of the countries in which the squads operated.
“Impeachment is off the table — and swept under the rug”
This statement kills me (Huh? I’m on the list too?).
In what alternate universe does Hannah live that he can believe the Bush/Cheney Administration he himself conspired with would ever voluntarily supply such information to those hated interfering busybodies in Congress?
And just how would those Congresscritters ever know to ask if they were never informed in the first place? Those same Congresscritters that Cheney treated like mushrooms?
Yah, sure John Hannah!
And totally OT EW but I thought ya’ll would get a kick out of it, from the WSJ:
It appears that Cerberus will still make out like the banditos they are wrt their stranglehold on Chrysler Financial, so no tears need be shed. /s
So let’s list those 12 countries (purported though I think more) where Bush/Cheney let loose the dogs of war:
For certain:
Afghanistan (been there, done that)
Iraq (been there, done that)
Pakistan (been there, done that)
Syria (been there, done that)
Yemen (been there, done that)
Strong possibles:
Iran
Lebanon
Kenya
Possibles:
Jordan
Tanzania
Philippines
The tri-border area of Paraguay, Boliva and Brazil (supposed hotbed of Al Qaeda in South America)
Mexico (there were reports of a Navy Seal covert killing op against Al Qaeda)
This doesn’t include likely places adjacent to Afghanistan such as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Nor Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tajikistan, and Ethiopia.
My list seems to likely show far more than 12.
Somalia is almost certainly a “for certain.”
Dagnabbit! For some reason I forgot that one, but you’re exactly right!
My guess at 12 (and we know Iran is one bc that was the focus of the article and SSCI’s concern):
Afghanistan
Iraq
Pakistan
Syria
Yemen
Iran
Qatar
Lebanon
Somalia
Philippines
Indonesia
One of the ‘Stans
I’d buy your list too except for Qatar. Not that I disagree, but refresh my memory if you will on that one.
Are we sure that the ops were only used for anti-al Qaeda* purposes?
I’ve always thought the death of “Turkmenbashi” was fishy, particularly if one widens the scope to Iran and energy.
*Ugh, I should rephrase that — anti-al Qaeda efforts, on the face of it, so as to appear legitimate with respect to the AUMF.
Another Hannah quote from that same interview:
Tell me more about this well-vetted inter-agency process, John Hannah. I believe it was Dick Cheney
who said about Richard Clarke, the guy whose hair was on fire pre 9/11 begging for attention:
Basically because there was no interagency process. It was Cheney, Addington and Rumsfeld.
A friend of mine who worked on the NSC staff said that on more than one occasion, Rumsfeld would actually turn off the lights of the room if Condi was remaining in that room (sometimes her office, sometimes the Situation Room) to purposefully leave her in the dark.
Yup! I believe the correct term for that is circle jerk.
What is interesting to me is that so many government employees – top to bottom- seemed quite comfortable in the dark
It was, and still is, so mystifying why elected officials, although not directly informed or adequately breifed about these activities, did not have the imagination to ask. While we on the outside had the imagination to “read” the character of Cheney’s snarl and hear the information from many investigative sources.
Why 12? That would be some bizarre statute.
Here’s an NYT article that adds more detail – Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda
Based on that article, 12 countries is on the low side:
And note we need to include Saudi Arabia on the list as “for certain”.
And btw, note the article makes zero, nada, zilch mention of Congressional notification or even of Congressional reporting.
But working with Syria on a US Special Operations Command cross-border raid into Syria evidently rates higher than working with Congress:
I held off with them and Jordan only bc we like to pretend our client states have soveignty. Or at least I used to think that.
Like Europe? From the same LA Times article in my # 21 above:
I noticed that on MSNBC, Clifford May was accusing Hersh of being a conspiracy theorist who used dubious sources. That would be Clifford “everyone knew Valerie Wilson was CIA” May.
Well, and so?
Clifford May’s sources aren’t mysterious. We have a pretty good idea where he got that tale.
And I guess we should move Paraguary to the “for certain” list too:
(My bold)
That was in 2004. Since then, Paraguay has had a change in government:
For an assessment, see the LA Times, Paraguay moves left with President-elect Fernando Lugo.
Bob in HI
That’s going to make them really want to be our allies, isn’t it? /s
Rumsfeld’s Foreign Intel Teams…
Of course, Cheney couldn’t help himself and had to go on record… off record to try and salvage Rumsfeld, with the old “history will read differently” saw:
John Hannah should be kicked out of the football Hall of Fame for this.
Let us not forget the curious obsession the Cheney Gang had with Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela and the open support for Columbian special forces along the Venezuelan border in this lot.
If you read reports on the Stanford Group and the 30% of the CD funds that were collected were from Venezuela. Reports are now surfacing that the understanding was that a portion of the profits from the CD’s would be used to fight back against the socialist programs of Chavez.
I’m afraid that Cheney has left Obama with more than economic bombs for his administration to deal with. Every time I hear the quote repeated on the news that Cheney indicated that Obama would never become a major league player, I always want to reply…”Yes, but he will never approach the low levels of the “Bush leaguers”.
I’m a little late to the party here, but the story of the U.S. paramilitary death squads (and that’s what they are) is equal parts bureacratic turf war, unitary executive, and old-fashioned evil. Rumsfeld was upset that the CIA got credit for the quick success in overthrowing the Taleban in Afghanistan, even though the military had provided critical support with special ops forces. He quickly saw that power and influence within the Bush-Cheney regime was going to the parts of the government that operated outside of public and congressional view. Cheney has a long-standing (starting in the Nixon administration) beef with the CIA. Together, they had some powerful incentives to build up a competing paramilitary structure.
The leverage they used on Bush to undercut Tenet and the CIA was the fact that the military didn’t have nearly the same restrictions the CIA did when it came to notifying Congress (or the State Dept. for that matter). They were able to cut the CIA out of the loop on a lot of these missions by arguing that if it was military only, they wouldn’t have to notify Congress, the local embassy, or the government of the country which are all things that the CIA is supposed to do. The CIA’s Abu Omar fiasco just cemented that notion.
I’m not where I can run the clip right now, but I saw a clip on Olberman last night too that might be the same one. What struck me there was how Hannah at one point said battlefield (as in, troops can kill on the battlefield) and then very conspicuously went back and corrected that reference to one of the “theatre” reference (battle theatre or theatre of war).
This is where someone needs to start nailing these guys – Yoo did the same thing in his op ed piece where he claimed we didn’t respect the Bill of Rights during the Civil War bc it was a theatre of war.
The “right” follow up is to say, The Supreme Court has ruled that a theatre of battle is a place where, due to active hostilities, courts are no longer open and operating – so are you saying that we ONLY had soldiers going in for assassinations in places where there were such active, ongoing hostilities that courts were not open and operating? Or were they going into sovereign nations with whom we are not engaged in active hostilities and which do have their courts open and operating and operating covertly murdering in a place that does not meet the Sup Cts definiation of a theatre of battle? Is the US a theatre of battle under your definition?
The other thing I noticed was Hannah talking about how thoroughly “vetted” the murder victims were – but he wasn’t asked if they were vetted in the same way as Maher Arar and Khalid el-Masri or Kurnaz or Errachidi or … or to what degree the vetting included Presidential input. And even with his references to vetting he then went on to say that they were people who HAD been involved in killing Americans or participating in the planning to kill Americans and then, kind of slid in there, he included “suspected of planning” So that was the standard for the “thorough”vetting, if you ended up suspicious, you could murder. Then there were the questions of whether or not they could also murder family members or local authorities who may have responded, etc.
Kadyrov of late seems to have had his Chechen murderers and Bush had his Cheneyian murderers.
31 – they were afraid to know. We have lobbyist picks running gov now, not statesmen and especially not leaders. If Reid and Pelosi are the leadership cream, it’s pretty thin milk there.
12 – thanks, that’s what I remembered from the KO clip, the start with, hey, these guys COMMITTED ACTS OF WAR AGAINST THE US, continuing to or, ya know, like some guy might have suspected some of them of planning stuff
18 – thanks for that report, which also goes to the follow up questions that didn’t get asked to Hannah – “so are the assassins authorized to murder children too or blow up civilians in marketplaces where their target is shopping or … ” 21 – is that the same incident (Paraguay shootout) as in Risen’s book? And re: 22 – you have to wonder if it was a place where we have a SOFA as well (and I’d have to guess it was someplace where courts are open and operating)
26 – just as certainly as the Terrorist Surveillance Program being limited to calls from Al-Qaeda.
Can anyone explain to me why John Hannah was able to maneuver his way out of his part in the Plame outing? Why are these guys (Rove, Hannah etc) still walking the streets filling our air waves?
Is the following all true about Hannah?
Cheney aide cooperating with CIA outing probe, sources say
Larisa Alexandrovna and Jason Leopold
A senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney is cooperating with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, sources close to the investigation say.
Individuals familiar with Fitzgerald’s case tell RAW STORY that John Hannah, a senior national security aide on loan to Vice President Dick Cheney from the offices of then-Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John Bolton, was named as a target of Fitzgerald’s probe. They say he was told in recent weeks that he could face imminent indictment for his role in leaking Plame-Wilson’s name to reporters unless he cooperated with the investigation.
Others close to the probe say that if Hannah is cooperating with the special prosecutor then he was likely going to be charged as a co-conspirator and may have cut a deal.
Hannah did not return two calls and several emails to his White House address seeking comment.
Fitzgerald is investigating whether officials in the Bush Administration illegally outed a CIA agent to get back at her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was a critic of the Administration’s faulty intelligence and lead-up to war.
In a July 2003 editorial, Wilson wrote that the Bush administration “twisted” pre-Iraq war intelligence in order to win public support for the Iraq conflict.
Specifically, Wilson called into question the veracity of President Bush’s claim in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq tried to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Africa. Wilson had been sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger a year before and reported that those allegations were unfounded. Bush administration officials said Wilson’s trip was a boondoggle, and was set up by his wife who worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction.
Those close to the investigation said in June 2003, Hannah was given orders by higher-ups in Cheney’s office to leak Plame’s covert status and identity in an attempt to muzzle Wilson, who had been a thorn in the side of the administration since May 2003, when he started questioning the administration’s claims that Iraq was an imminent threat to the U.S. and its neighbors in the Middle East. The specifics of who issued those orders and what directives were given were not provided.
Hannah had been fingered by Wilson
To many following the case, Hannah’s involvement will not come as a surprise. Wilson pointed to Hannah as a possible leaker in his book, The Politics of Truth.
“In fact, senior advisers close to the president may well have been clever enough to have used others to do the actual leaking, in order to keep their fingerprints off the crime,” Wilson writes.
“John Hannah and David Wurmser, mid-level political appointees in the vice-president’s office, have both been suggested as sources of the leak …Mid-level officials, however, do not leak information without the authority from a higher level,” Wilson notes.
The revelation that Hannah has become a prosecution witness strongly suggests that Fitzgerald is now looking into the motive for outing Plame and how Wilson’s complaints threatened to destroy public support for the war, which the Bush administration worked diligently to win.
Fitzgerald may be looking at a broader conspiracy case of pre-war machinations by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) and by the Pentagon’s ultra-secret Office of Net Assessment, the former operating out of Dick Cheney’s office and tasked with “selling” the war in Iraq, and the latter operating out of Defense Under Secretary for Policy, Douglas Feith’s office and tasked with creating a war to “sell,” as some describe.
To spread its message that Saddam Hussein was a nuclear threat, the White House Iraq Group relied heavily on New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who, after meeting with several of the organization’s members in August 2002, wrote an explosive story that many critics of the war believe laid the groundwork for military action against Iraq.
On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, for example, Miller wrote a story for the Times quoting anonymous officials who said aluminum tubes found in Iraq were to be used as centrifuges. Her report turned out to be wrong.
Hannah under investigation for role with Chalabi group
Hannah is currently under investigation by U.S. authorities for his alleged activities in an intelligence program run by the controversial Iraqi National Congress (INC) and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi.
According to a Newsweek article, a memo written for the Iraq National Congress (INC) raised questions regarding Cheney’s role in the build up to the war in Iraq. During the lead up to the war, Newsweek asserts, the INC was providing intelligence on the now discredited Iraqi WMD program through Hannah and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff.
“A June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two ‘U.S. governmental recipients’ for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, ‘defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed’; the info was then reported to, among others, ‘appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.’ The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number.”
“…Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, were the two Cheney employees,’ We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,’ one federal law-enforcement officer told the magazine.
According to the Washington Post, Libby discussed Wilson’s wife with at least two reporters before her identity became public.
35 – some of Leopold’s reporting during Plame ended up being “less than” reliable. But let’s face it – most people walked away as a result of the Plame investigation. Congress blew smoke, but basically was either too incompetent or cared too little to really dig in and follow up on how things were handled and additional evidence and investigations.
Meanwhile, I’ve found a book I have to buy, just because this made me laugh and I haven’t been laughing much lately.
Scott Horton has a 6 Questions up, interviewing Barry Eisler (whose books I haven’t read). Eisler is described as a former “covert operations agent for the CIA, [who] transformed himself into a Silicon Valley intellectual property lawyer and entrepreneur” and he has a book out, Fault Line, that oddly enough is about a JSOC murder squad, operating overseas and domestically. Horton asks him about the timing – coinciding with Hersh reviving the Cheney death squad allegations, “Surely you don’t mean to imply that you think there’s any basis in fact for all this left-wing hysteria?” and Eisler gives this answer:
For that smile, I’ll spring for the book. That, plus the quote in the sidebar from the book.
Plus it is an interesting interview with some real observations – the human need to strike back to counteract the feeling of helplessness, etc.
Mary,
I bought the Kindle (for the iPod Touch) version of Fault Line yesterday and read the whole thing. It’s pretty standard spy thriller fare which I enjoy, with the added bonus that the author names several characters after leading bloggers, including Scott Horton. Also, the there’s a pretty good representation of the liberal side of the torture, assassination, etc. debate. There’s obviously quite a bit of violence and, maybe not so obviously, a bit of explicit sex. Most of both is narratively necessary.
oh yeah all that hysteria in response to the pictures from Abu Gharib. (am unable to link from this computer). I think Americans should look at those photos once a week just to remember what we have done.
Hysteria…yeah right. They pull the “hysteria, conspiracy card” out of their asses when they feel the heat.
WO – thanks for the info. I generally do wind down with escapist stuff like spy thrillers (for real depression, I do straight non-fiction) at night or when driving. Ludlum kind of stuff. The problem is its a pretty broad field and ez to pick up stuff that’s a snooze or just so badly written its hard to plow through or that tries so hard to make the bad guys bad guys that they try for inventive and graphic stuff re: animals and kids. That I don’t do as well with and I don’t need a Libby-esque chapter on bear rape of a 10 yo girl to carry around with me, but the rest doesn’t bother much and I just skip the parts that do *g*.
Sounds like the blogger undercurrent will make it fun – some time when you have time, drop a reference to how you like your Kindle. I’m kind of worried I’d spill coffee or wine all over it and lose my Kindle AND my books on it.