I just went over to Harper’s, (which, by the way, is one of the best magazines, and websites for that matter, in the US), to see what Scott Horton had to say about the news that the Alabama Attorney General, Troy King, is under Federal investigation, presumably for trumping up charges and ‘ensuring’ (through criminal acts) a conviction of a number of people including the former governor, Don Siegelman. I was interested to see Horton’s take because the Montgomery Advertiser states that:
The Birmingham News reported that U.S. Attorney Alice Martin of Birmingham attended all three grand jury sessions in Montgomery last week, along with members of her staff, indicating the U.S. attorney’s office in Montgomery is not overseeing it. Martin declined to comment when contacted Tuesday by The Associated Press.
Which implies that Martin’s office is overseeing the grand jury. This would be a very strange thing to write if you know the background of the story, because in fact Alice Martin was very much involved in the criminality surrounding Siegelman’s conviction, and likely the convictions of other political opponents. So one would hope she is not handling the investigation of King; if she is, then we have a serious problem on our hands. However, given that Alice serves at the pleasure of the President, I would expect that the Birmingham News, which apparently has a very close relationship with Ms. Martin, is simply loath to comment on her increasingly tenuous personal freedom.
Horton hasn’t gotten to that, yet, but he is not on holiday. He just wrote a post that is a bombshell, Did Cheney Run a Murder-on-demand Program? The quote from Sy Hersh is somewhat unclear, but what he says is still chilling:
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. That does happen. Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, 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 him. …Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.
Hersh goes on to imply that his use of the term ‘domestic’ might have been imprecise; that these assassinations have been carried out in foreign countries. But that does not make the story any more attractive, or at least much more palatable. Click through any of the links provided and prepare to be disgusted.
We must bring these criminals to justice. I have been working on a post on just that topic. We must create a sense of urgency about the matter, build public support, and then begin the investigations, and then, the trials. The evidence of criminality is no longer arguable.