Murder By Any Other Name

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney exposing some of the rage that supported and fueled America’s international death squads..

The United States government has committed every kind of atrocity to further its goals. This statement is not something that most Americans would find controversial, especially the descendants of chattel slavery. Some of us remember the atrocities committed during the first televised war in history, the Viet-Nam conflict. We remember the striking photographs of men being shot in the head and partially burned children running in the streets. These are things that most of us have forgotten. These are things that some of us think we were able to stop by massive protests or by voting people out of office. The history of the most recent administration of the United States government has shown that the idea of changing the behavior of our government is often nothing but a fantasy forged by the American media propaganda machines.

We are often told by the spiritual masters of the eastern traditions that the world we see is just an illusion. It is reasonable to recognize that there are aspects of the existence that we cannot see, but it is not often that we apply this concept fully. We do not have to delve into some kind of esoteric or mystical realm to know that there are things going on in this world that we are not aware of, things that affect us in ways that we may not understand. What we must be most cognizant of, however, is the fact that many of the things we do not see are the actions of a government that will use anysituation to justify any kind of behavior.

There is mounting evidence that during the Bush-Cheney administration, the United States of America operated an international death squad. The first information about these death squads has come from one of the most renowned reporters of the past 60 years, Seymour Hersh. Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, author, and a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine. He first came to prominence for his investigation of the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

At a “Great Conversation” event at the University of Minnesota that was held on March 10th in which Mr. Hersh wasinvolved in a moderated discussion with former presidential candidate Walter Mondale about the current abuses of presidential power, he was asked about the kind of abuses that used to occur. In response to the question “And do they continue to happen to this day?” he replied,

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that, if you read it carefully, mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command-- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring, essentially and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“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.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

The interesting point about this information is that there is a subtle indication that there is a right way to go about this. As if talking to an ambassador or CIA station chief would make it OK, as if congressional oversight would allow such things as cold-blooded murder to be legal. Isn’t any of the killing that the US government does murder?

I used to feel a sense of insulation from the responsibility for the government’s behavior. After all, I didn’t vote for Bush/Cheney. It is not my fault because they stole the election, twice. I don’t think that any of us can honestly see ourselves as somehow special enough to be excluded from the consequences of this kind of behavior by the government. We all claim to be citizens and benefit from that status. We all support this government with our taxes and our consumption. We are not alone in this world. There are billions of people who suffer as a result of our action or inaction.

If this government is honest and true, if it really stands for all of the concepts that it claims in its rhetoric, then Dick Cheney, and certain senior officers of the Joint Services Operations Command should be arrested and transferred to the International Criminal Court and charged with crimes against humanity. If this is not done, then everyone in the world will know that there is a double standard for criminal behavior, and that the world is at the mercy of the despotic behavior of any man or woman who happens to reach the pinnacles of power within the US Government.

But then, this is not new, didn’t the world know this already?