‘Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney,’ Raw Story reports.

Hersh replied, “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.”

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”

“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authorPoliGazette › Create New Post — WordPressity, 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 rather obviously a bombshell. If true, the story deserves to be explored. Who did they kill? Who approved of it? Were there truly no further checks and balances?

But also, perhaps checks and balances aren’t always necessary – not when it comes to intelligence and secret operations. It’s sad, but enemies have to be taken out by violence sometimes. Talking, diplomacy doesn’t always work. If the special squad knows where a certain terrorist is at a certain time, it may not have time to ask anyone for permission to kill (or capture) him. They have to act immediately. The war on terrorism is just that: a war.

Of course the question is whether it’s true or not. Hersh hasn’t written about this himself yet, he even admits he doesn’t have enough evidence to ‘convince the sceptic’ the story is true. If a journalist is confident about a story, he’ll write about it. And he’ll only write about it when he has a lot of proof. If he doesn’t have enough evidence he can’t be confident about it which means he doesn’t write about… nor should he, then, talk about it.