Beware the Dark Side

The main-stream media continue to descend in a whirlpool of self-delusion seeking little more than to flog mis-information about the former administration and deflect observation of the current crop of clowns.

The characterization of Dick Cheney as some sort of villainous Svengali of the White House continues even after George W. Bush has left office. Here we have chief propagandist of the New York Times elite expounding on the "executive assassination squads."

Tin Foil Hat Ring

Hersh speaks with "great confidence" about what he hasn't written yet. Then adds that it may be a "year or two" before he has what he needs to actually commit some of his blather to paper. How do you have such great confidence then? And, why do I think that a "covert" organization at that level would be decidedly hard to get anything on record. I'm flashing back to Mr. Phelps and his Mission Impossible bunch here. Everybody disavows everything if it blows up, but before then nobody knows nothing.

My stumble was when Hersh's paranoid vision named the organization as the Joint Special Operations Command. If you speak fluent militarese, as I do you, know that "special operations" means unconventional warfare--stuff like behind-the-lines activities, intel gathering, penetration of enemy assets, insertion/extraction of such forces, etc. It dates back a long way, but the most modern iteration is usually traced back to the World War II OSS. And "joint" means an organization with components from more than one service. "Command" of course means they all work for one guy, just as in all military organizations. Doesn't sound too malevolent to me.

The acronym, JSOC, returns this as the number one hit on Google:

Not Too Secret for Wikipedia

Maybe Mr. Hersh should do his research on Wikipedia. He might see there that the genesis of JSOC wasn't Bush/Cheney. It was the much more leftist incompetence of Jimmy Carter after the Iranian hostage rescue debacle that established the organization.

Notice, if you read all the way down, that the entry is current enough to even disparage Mr. Hersh's rantings.