Flashback: When Lefties Thought US Special Operations Troops Were Outlaw Assassins

I was pretty bi-partisan last night and I stand by it. I would have never thought in a million years President Obama would have the brass balls to send a team of Navy SEALs deep into Pakistan to get bin Laden in such an up close and personal way. But in the cool afterglow of bin Laden's death, I'd like to remind folks that not everyone was always so excited about killing America's enemies

Behold a breathless Keith Olbermann in March of 2009 pimping the rantings of admitted liar Sy Hersh.

Our fifth story on the Countdown tonight: As we reported on this newshour last night, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, claiming to have uncovered a covert executive assassination ring that reported directly to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. A reminder -- if one is needed – that in 1976, Mr. Cheney was the chief of staff to President Ford. Meaning, by the time Cheney was back in the West Wing, it appears he had either forgotten about his own boss’ executive order or worse, he had decided to ignore it.

Mr. Hersh is making the revelations at a forum in Minnesota two nights ago. The topic: America’s constitutional crisis. Hersh saying of Mr. Cheney and his inner circle, quote, "They ran a government within the government." Adding, "Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country."

Hersh’s bombshell allegations about the assassination ring, the result of reporting for a book he says might be still a year or two away from being published. Hersh is telling MinnPost.com in an email after the event, that the disclosures are, quote, "not something he wanted to dwell about in public."

The toothpaste, however, is already out of the proverbial tube here. When the discussion touched upon the abuses of executive power, Mr. Hersh asked how these things tend to happen and whether they continue to happen to this day. In his reply, the reporter describing a secret commando unit officially called the "Joint Special Operations Command."

HERSH (audio clip): "It’s a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody except in the Clinton, I mean, in the Bush/Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They do not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. Gates, the secretary of defense. They report directly to him.

They are not -- they have absolutely no -- Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.

And just today in The Times, there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going into, in -- 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, well, in the name of all of us."

The Joint Special Operations Command...Hersh and Olbermann's band of rogue assassins was the lead command in the death of bin Laden.

Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.

This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound. Trial runs were held in early April.

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story -- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That’s the code.

Olbermann (link to his site) is over the moon excited about Obama getting bin Laden. I guess he was against JSOC killing terrorists before he was for it.

Michelle Malkin has more on the left's hypocrisy on "secret prisons".

Almost all Americans are rightfully excited about bin Laden's death but let's not pretend all of us were always in favor of it. Hacks like Olbermann only celebrate American victories when it fits his political narrative., It's disgusting and it shouldn't be ignored.

posted by DrewM. at 11:43 AM

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