Cheney ordered assassination of Benazir Bhutto: Hersh

Here is the video.

Mr Hersh, a Washington-based journalist who writes for the New Yorker magazine and other prominent media outlets, also claims that former US Vice President Dick Cheney was running an ‘executive assassination ring’ throughout the Bush years. The cell reported directly to Mr Cheney.

In an interview to an Arab television channel, Mr Hersh indicated that the same unit killed Ms Bhutto because in an interview with al Jazeera TV on Nov. 2, 2007, she had said she believed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was already dead.

Ms Bhutto said she believed Omar Saeed Sheikh, an al Qaeda activist imprisoned in Pakistan for killing US journalist Daniel Pearl, murdered bin Laden.

But the interviewer, veteran British journalist David Frost, deleted her claim from the interview, Mr Hersh said.

The controversial US journalist told Gulf News on May 12 he believed Ms Bhutto was assassinated because the US leadership did not want bin Laden to be declared dead.

The Bush administration wanted to keep bin Laden alive to justify the presence of US army in Afghanistan to combat the Taliban, Mr Hersh said.

The Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist claimed that the unit also killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country.

Mr Hariri and the Lebanese army chief were murdered for not safeguarding US interests and refusing to allow US to set up military bases in Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, the then prime minister of Israel, was also a key man in the plot, Mr Hersh said.

Mr Hersh recently gave a speech to the American Civil Liberties Union making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it.

via DAWN.COM | World | Cheney ordered assassination of Benazir Bhutto: Hersh.

Erick Black has this to say:

Three weeks ago, your humble ink-stained wretch stumbled into a matter of global, legal, historic, covert and overt interest while covering legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh speaking at "Great Conversations" forum at the U of M. It wasn't my scoop, and I received undeserved credit for it. I was merely in the audience and had a tape running when Hersh pretty much accused Vice President Dick Cheney of supervising a team of assassins.

Yesterday, on CNN, Hersh repeated what he had said at the U (while calling himself "dumb-dumb" for having said it when, where and how he said it).

Two high-ranking former aides to Cheney denied there was anything to it, then proceeded to confirm almost all of Hersh's key claims. Yes, the Cheney-ites said, the U.S. does compile and maintain a list of names of people, presumably connected to terrorist activities, whom the U.S. is trying to kill, starting with Osama bin Laden. Yes, there are military units who are authorized to kill them. Really, the only issues on which they differ is whether such targeted killings should be called "assassinations," whether Congress should have oversight over such activites, and whether there is anything wrong with it.

Here is a transcript of the CNN exchange (you have to skip more than halfway down on the transcript, or search for the word "controversial" and you'll go right to it).

... via MINPOST.com

We don't get to see the whack list, so there is no way to know if Cheney had Bhutto killed. We just have to trust that some unnamed people are making good decisions regarding who to bump off? If these people have granted themselves the power to kill and to torture for the greater good of the USA, then could they not also decide that some Americans must die, including civilians? Which brings us to the outrageous claim that Cheney planned the attacks of 9/11.

Where is the evidence of a moral line which he would not cross?

... said Mr. McClellan. "Cheney's always been a straight shooter who's not afraid of absorbing a little collateral damage if it will help him hit whatever goals he's targeting."