Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is best known for breaking the shocking My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war, in which hundreds of unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese village were slaughtered by U.S. soldiers in March 1968. His courageous reporting on this sad chapter in history won him a Pulitzer Prize. In recent years, his incisive coverage of the Abu Ghraib abuses and torture has also been widely followed and respected.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.” [Hersh said] “after 9/11 … 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. Today, there was a story in the New York Times that … mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC. 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 [Cheney]. Congress has no oversight of it.”

“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on. 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. That’s been going on in the name of all of us.”

He added that both the press and the public let down their guard in the aftermath of 9/11. “The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team.” Top editors passed the message to investigative reporters not to ‘pick holes’ in what Bush was doing.

MSNBC was one of the few to give good coverage to the revelations of Seymour Hersh. You can watch that coverage right here.

While we can be thankful for the exceptions like MSNBC in this case, all too often the major media are failing at their responsibility to educate the public and expose gross and illegal manipulations on the part of government and industry.
So it is increasingly up to us to spread the news. Using the powerful capabilities of the Internet, we can insist that corruption be rooted out and illegal assassinations and associated assassination squads be stopped.

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