The (Pakistani) Nation does it. Sy Hersh leads the way:
Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country.
The squad was headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of US army in Afghanistan. It was disclosed by reputed US journalist Seymour Hersh while talking to an Arab TV in an interview.
Hersh said former US vice-president Cheney was the chief of the Joint Special Operation Command and he clear the way for the US by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA. General Stanley was the in-charge of the unit.
General Stanley. It is to laugh.
A survey of Israel’s Arab citizens published today finds more than 40 percent of those polled saying the Holocaust never happened…
Golly.
Update: Sy jumps back.
US journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday contradicted news reports being published in South Asia that quote him as saying a “special death squad” made by former US vice president Dick Cheney had killed Benazir Bhutto. The award-winning journalist described as “complete madness” the reports that the squad headed by General Stanley McChrystal – the new commander of US army in Afghanistan – had also killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafique Al Hariri and a Lebanese army chief. “Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad.”
Glad we got that sorted out.
Apparently, he has been peddling this for a while.
http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/03/12/7344/the_cia_responds_to_seymour_hersh_via_minnpost
Left wingers lap this stuff up.
Truthers!!!1!
http://www.minnpost.com/ericblackblog/2009/03/11/7310/investigative_reporter_seymour_hersh_describes_executive_assassination_ring
GreyGoat – Accurate? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely!
Are you familiar with the TS Phoenix Program that systematically performed organized assassinations of Vietnamese civilians for years?
(Some say 20 to 30 thousand individual assassinations of non-combatants. Google it. There were many.)
I have an acquaintance that was deeply involved and at a high level in the Phoenix Program.
Today, he is a tortured soul of deep regret and nightmares decades later. And this guy was and remains about as hard-nose a fighter and patriot you would ever want to meet.
Without saying pro or con about the Phoenix Program, can anyone then wonder that we can, and indeed do sometimes, assassinate others?
I may be a liberal, but I can and do support assassination in some selected instances. Whether we did in Bhutto’s case, and especially whether or not it was justified, I cannot comment.
But to trash Hersh is to beg the question.
Oh, the leaks, the leaks! All our secretz is belong to you!
That PM Benazir Bhutto was assassinated is a fact. By whom still remains in question.
While I don’t necessarily buy Sy Hersh’s allegation, his does seem about as good as any. BB was a complex person. She gave great lip service to Democracy, and was immensely popular in Pakistan. But she also was extremely corrupt. In earlier years she even supported the Taliban.
At one time the US said (and may indeed have, but I doubt it) they “would support her” if she went back to Pakistan from her exile in London. But they later abandoned her and left her twisting even before she returned to Pakistan.
Given her checkered background, large populist Pakistani support, and many views contrary to our US positions, her former Taliban support, and her and her father’s major conflicts with Pervez Musharraf (whom for better or worse, the US has long supported), and the nuclear stakes involved, her election was very troublesome to US foreign policy.
While I don’t think the US had a hand in her assassination, I am sure they privately welcomed it. And they probably knew, or now know who did it.
Sy Hersh however is not alone in his opinion. Others so speculate. Here is a sympathetic link in Pakistan with more speculation. Link
Noted author Ron Suskind in his bestseller, The Way of the World gives some very interesting background on the woman, her strange relationship with US foreign policy, her return to Pakistan and her assassination. (IIRC, he does not link her assassination to the US, but he does lay the foundation for motive.)
BT
While Bhutto’s assassins are still in question, the Holocaust certainly cannot be, it is so well documented.
Currently reading Richard Evans’s last in his trilogy, The Third Reich At War.
It is in many places extremely difficult to read. Page after page of beating or shooting Jews on site, starving Polish cities and towns, filth, lice, disease, starvation, dogs eating corpses in the streets, taking groups small and large outside of town and shooting them, then putting them in mass unmarked graves – daily!
And it wasn’t only the Jews, it was the Poles, the Catholics and the priests, the Gypsies, the “resisters” the physically or mentally challenged children (even if they were ‘pure’ Aryan) were systematically killed. The documentation of progressive experiments for mass killings by gas is absolutely incredible and beyond evil. Although the Jews suffered the most, the killing net was wide and incredibly sadistic.
I have long been aware of the Holocaust and Nazi wanton killing. But reading this book raises my awareness of atrocities to levels almost beyond comprehension.
Fliter, if one reads of the eugenics movement back in the early part of the 20th century you’ll find these sorts of atrocities make sense once you also add in a cup of socialism and a dash of fascism. Quite simply, all religions challenge the supreme authority of the State, and if the State is to be the master then it must be revered and totally controlling.
I didn’t say they made sense to us, but they make sense as a logical progression of power.
Thus Jews were murdered because they weren’t perfect Aryans, just as the retardates were. But the Catholics presented just as great an obstacle to a united National Socialist movement and were murdered not simply for genetics but because they’d never worship the State.
There are some interesting parallels with present-day movement, but that’s about all they are — interesting.
I do find it amazing how much what our “science” teaches us, how much the stated goals of our leaders, turn out to be completely at odds with what we know 50 years later.
It’s almost as if they were taking advantage of any new straw in the wind to garner power, and when that straw is swept away by new evidence another straw is grasped and clutched.
Global Warming. Cap and Trade. Universal Health Care.
Hobgoblins, but power over our checkbook, power over our lives, promises that government knows best and is saving us from ourselves, just as Mom did when she slapped our hands reaching for that hot pot on the stove and told us she did it because she loves us too much to let us get hurt.
And we eat it up and vote for more of it.
It’s not merely evil, it is the worst sort of evil. It is one championed and empowered by ourselves, and then willfully ignored, as if we had no responsibility for what it does.
German citizens nearby were ordered to march to Dachau and help with the cleanup of the facilities. Many were shocked at the conditions and what they found. Yet they lived 10 miles away. They saw the trainloads of prisoners roll in, they smelled the smoke of burnt flesh, and read the statements describing it as the first camp for political prisoners.
(I cribbed that from Wikipedia, BTW, in case you’d like to follow it up, but it’s not the case I’m making here)
Will I some day look a an 80% tax rate, will I some day look at my own elected government telling my employer how much the CEO can make or what items we can build for sale? Will I some day have a government worker telling myself and my doctor what is best for my health, from the point of view of the state?
And will I find that I’ve helped these things to come because I saw them happening before my eyes, lowered my gaze, and went back to work because telling somebody in authority was useless, as I’d elected that authority and aided it through my votes, my taxes, and my silence?
It would be the easiest path to take, you know.
Now look at Pakistan, and the Arab nations, again. Hobgoblin presented, citizens outraged, enemies defined with words like infidels and the great satan.
Don’t tell me it can’t happen again. It will. All the parts are in place. All it needs is a catalyst.
Oh, and they’ve got nukes.
Sleep well tonight.
– Max
flit
Seymour Hersh is probably one that still thinks that TWA 800 was downed by an SM-2 from an offshore Aegis cruiser, and that the World Trade Towers fell because the CIA had planted dynamite when they were built, and that AIDS was caused by a CIA plot against ghetto blacks, and that Sheik Khalid Mohammed was just giving Daniel pearl a friendly shave when the razor slipped, etc, etc.
Vietnam had enough atrocities on both sides, and while your friend my have regrets there are missions that were conducted under that banner which brought great results. But I wonder if the VC that amputated the kids’ arms after receiving shots from US medics lay awake at night? I wonder if the VC that captured 2 of my father’s troopers and then cut off their heads and stuck the heads on poles lay awake at night with regret?
Me thinks the libs are always looking for any angle that gives them the air of righteous indignation that they covet – no matter how ludicrous the war cry. If we worked this way, we would surely have Mr Hersh at the top of some hit list. but we don’t, and we won’t. I’m sure you are somewhat disappointed.
Hersh had to come up with some new material, after asserting for several years in a row that we were going to bomb Iran…”This year it will really, really happen, sources tell me!” “Er, THIS YEAR!!” He has as much credibility as a stopped clock.
But Liz, “even a stopped clock is right …..”. You are far too generous with your gift of credibility.
I don’t know. Eventually, we might actually bomb Iran. Make enough fantastic or wacky assertions and one of them is bound to be true someday…He probably gets it right 1/2777th of the time.
[...] Lex invokes the dread Shark Jump. Indeed. At a level seen only at the end of this trailer, [...]
Thank goodness for the update. The original shark jumping was so woefully poor that I was suprised to see anyone gave it serious consideration here.
” Reputed Journalist ” , yes, that sounds about right, he is ‘reputed’ to be a journalist.
Sy in the last link, “He said Gen McChrystal had run a special forces unit that engaged in “high value target activity”, but “while I have been critical of some of that unit’s activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Mr Cheney, as the published stories state.”
Excuse me, is he going senile? Granted, I didn’t hear him mention specifically who was assassinated, but I just watched a linked interview and those were basically the exact words that came out of his mouth. “Political assassination” “Death squads” and, yes, “on behalf of Cheney”. Maybe the time has come for him to spend some time in a padded room.
[...] Lex invokes the dread Shark Jump. Indeed. At a level seen only at the end of this trailer, [...]