Being in the position that it is landed in, Pakistan must be the most visited destination of this executive assassination wing, but then neither Ambassador Patterson nor the CIA station chief would know anything about it, would they, which explains her umbrage that led her to write a rather acerbic self-righteous letter to The Nation. What Mr. Hersh has said is damning indeed, as damning as saying that a US death squad killed Benazir Bhutto. So tell me: “Who killed Benazir Bhutto?” Do you still blame Pakistanis, a people who have been victims of many conspiracies, for believing in ‘conspiracy theories’, one of which is that the US killed Benazir? The seeds of many a ‘conspiracy theory’ are often sowed by the US and its western allies and their media’s “Nescafe journalism.”

There’s more, enough to write a book. Soon after Hersh’s Minnesota speech, the CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney’s former National Security Adviser John Hannah about Hersh’s claim. “Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?” And this is what Hannah said: “There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process…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, whom authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.”

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.”

Hersh told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! “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…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…our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need…there’s no legal basis for it.”

Hersh on Guantanamo: “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…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…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.”

About the JSOC, Hersh told Amy Goodman: “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 – 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’ – 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.
”

So who did kill Benazir Bhutto? The question is still suspended in the air, where it will remain forevermore if they can help it.

This column appeared in The Nation.

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