WASHINGTON - March 11, 2009 - 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 that reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when the moderator of a public discussion of “America’s Constitutional Crisis” asked Hersh whether abuses of executive power, like those that occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

Hersh replied, "After (the events of September 11, 2001) - 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 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 Cheney’s 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 authority, they’ve been going into countries, (without even speaking) to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, finding people on a list and then executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."