Reply #1: Outstanding interview! [View All]

[pberq]

Short excerpt:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/28/150251

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what you have found. Start off with John Negroponte.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I did not talk to him. He did not deny the story. He simply refused to comment when The New Yorker sent a series of questions to his office at the State Department. Essentially, it was simply that there were a couple of reasons that he wanted out of the job, the job that McConnell -- you just heard in your opening -- took after him. One was that he didn't get along with Cheney very well, because he was considered to be too much of a stickler, or “legalistic” was another term people used, in terms of agreeing with some of the covert and clandestine operations by the Pentagon. As many now know, the Pentagon has been running operations without any congressional oversight for years -- this has been written about -- on the basis that they are all part of the war, preparing the battlefield, having to do with military affairs, not intelligence, and therefore, since they were not intelligence, there was no reason to abide by legislation reporting covert intelligence operations. They were simply military activities that the President could authorize without Congress. And he disagreed with that. He disagreed. I guess you could say Negroponte found some of these operations to be risky and also perhaps illegal. But the one that really upset him the most was the covert operations that we’re doing in various places in the Middle East, targeted against the Iranians and also the Shia with funds used in some part by Bandar.

(More . . .)