Mr. Hersh has been busy, ever since, expressing his regrets over having said those words (even parsing that he had actually said assassination “wing” not “ring”) and so obviously nervous in every interview with the whole subject. This investigative journalist, who was awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for  exposing the My Lai massacre and cover-up, originally attributed his awkwardness over his revelations as too early in consideration of a book planned but not written. In the days after Minnesota, however, Hersh has not run away from what he said, but he appears to be frantically running away from something.

Wolf Blitzer interviewed Seymour Hersh on CNN March 30, 2009, to give Hersh a chance to “revise or amend or explain” the assassination ring comments. This offer of redemption to Hersh  was made after Blizer had tape played of himself narrating:

 “A Special Operations Command spokesman rejects the report. Says their forces operate under established rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict. He adds that the vice president has no command and control authorities over the U.S. military. Two former Cheney aides also reject the claim, as does the former Bush homeland security adviser, now a national security analyst.”

Then the video goes to a CNN employee, the network’s national security advisor Francis Townsend who says:

“There is no such squad wandering the earth. They don’t do this. There is no such thing.”

Blitzer’s voice-over combined with the authorative pronouncement of another CNN employee apparently wasn’t enough to compel Hersh to recant, only mourn as “loaded” his descriptive phrase “assassination wing”. In fact, Hersh told Blitzer:

“Everything I wrote about, everything I said in that article was written, has been written over the years in "The New Yorker." The basic premise that I was saying is there is a unit known as the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, it's a separately independent unit that does not report to Congress, at least in the years I know about…I wrote…that congresspeople are very upset at the senior leadership. It has been given executive authority by the president in as many as 12 countries to go in and kill. We're talking about high value targets. That's absolutely correct.”

“Is there anything wrong with that?” Blitzer asked.

“Oh, sure,” Hersh responded. “Because what's the intelligence basis? What's the legal basis for that?…The idea that we have a unit set up who goes after high-value targets who up to a certain point I know for sure until very recently were clearing lists. That doesn't mean Cheney has an assassination unit that he says I want to go get somebody. That's how it sort of played out in the press.The idea that we have a unit that goes around and without reporting to Congress, Congress knows very little about this group, can't get clearings, can't get hearings, can't get even a classified hearings on it. Congresspeople have told me this…For the president to go into a country without telling the CIA station chief or the ambassador and whack somebody and I'm sorry, Wolf, I have a lot of problems with that.”

“What if it's done by the CIA?” Blitzer asked.

“The CIA has learned a lesson,” Hersh replied. “The reason that I could write a story last summer in "The New Yorker" about it, there was a joint operation inside Iran involving JSOC and the CIA and the CIA wanted to go to Congress and they wanted to get authority. They wanted to get something known as a presidential finding. That is how Congress got a smell of how much is going on.”.

       Blitzer pressed,”When you said executive assassination ring...

“No, I said ‘wing’ actually,” Hersh said.

“Well, is it ‘ring’ or ‘wing’?” Blitzer asked.

“Wing,” Hersh clarified. “I said ‘wing’.”

“’Wing’, all right,” Blitzer accepted.

“But that’s all right. It’s the same point,” Hersh maintained

“Yes,” Blitzer said.

“But that’s all right,” Hersh assured. “It’s the same point.”

“Yes,” Blitzer agreed.

Then Hersh elaborated: “It was -- I wish I had… said something different, something more careful, because it's a loaded phrase. It comes down to the same thing…you've delegated authority to troops in the field to hit people on the basis of whatever intelligence they think is good, and I can tell you it's always not good, and sometimes things get very bloody. Yes JSOC is not a new phenomenon. It's been written about. In fact, in his latest book Bob Woodward has a page about it, basically more praiseful than I would be, in terms of how effective they were against al Qaeda in Iraq.

       “The bottom line is, it's -- if it were the way your little presentation set up, that everything was checked and cleared, in fact, it was an awful lot of delegation to this group, which does not brief the Congress. And this does raise profound questions of constitutional authority.

        “It's the same questions that have come up repeatedly in the Bush administration. That is a unitarian president, the notion that a president can do things without telling Congress and unilaterally. This is an extension of that issue.

Blitzer sought to balance Hersh with Cheney National Security Advisor John Hanna.

“It’s not true,” Hanna said. “And I think you heard in that interview that there was a little walking back from the original claim that was made in the speech that Mr. Hersh made….”

    Yet Hanna didn’t deny all of Hersh’s revelations:

    “There is -- there's clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process -- interagency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or is suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given, to our troops in the field in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.”

    “And so this would be -- from your perspective, and you worked in the Bush administration for many years, it would be totally constitutional, totally legal to go out and find these guys and to whack them?” Blizer asked.

    “There is no question,” Hanna said. “And in a theater of war, when we are at war, and there's no doubt, we are still at war against al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go out after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.”

    Transcript Video

In another interview, broadcast March 31, 2009 on PBS’s Democracy Now, Hersh was frustrated that interviewer Amy Goodman began with questions about the Minnesota comments instead of the expected discussion of his latest New Yorker article: "Syria Calling: The Obama Administration's Chance To Engage In A Middle East Peace" Hersh disputed Hanna’s statement to CNN’s Blitzer that the assassination squads were limited to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Pakistani border:

    “…and it’s far more than just in combat areas. There’s more—at least a dozen countries and perhaps more. The President has authorized these kinds of actions in the Middle East and also in Latin America, I will tell you, Central America, some countries. They’ve been—our boys have been told they can go and take the kind of executive action they need, and that’s simply—there’s no legal basis for it.” 

    Later in the interview, Hersh told Amy Goodman:    “An internal report that I wrote about in a book I did years ago, an internal report made by the summer of 2002, estimated that at least half and possibly more of those people had nothing to do with actions against America. The intelligence we have is often very fragmentary, not very good. And the idea that the American president would think he has the constitutional power or the legal right to tell soldiers not engaged in immediate combat to go out and find people based on lists and execute them is just amazing to me. It’s amazing to me.”