[Media-watch] ...the Press is nowhere... Seymour Hersh about Iraq

[Sigi D]

Hi,
this is  talk by Seymour Hersh given to  Stephen Wise
Free Synagoge, NY, the journalist who wrote about Abu
Ghraib in the New Yorker. Published in Counterpunch 27
Jan 2005
This is really heavy, and moving,  stuff.

http://www.counterpunch.com/hersh01272005.html
http://www.counterpunch.com/hersh01272005.html

The Military is Nowhere; the Press is Nowhere; the
Congress is Nowhere...

We've Been Taken Over By a Cult

By SEYMOUR HERSH

Editors' Note: This is a transcript of remarks by
Seymour Hersh at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in
New York.

About what's going on in terms of the President is
that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New
Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of
what's been going on in the last three years, George
Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is
absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks
he's doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or
whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just
don't know, but George Bush thinks this is the right
thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been
doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he
can. I think that the number of body bags that come
back will make no difference to him. The body bags are
rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he
will see it as a price he has to pay to put America
where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a
very strange way to people like me, to the
politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway
to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us
have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes,
many of people who voted for him weren't voting for
continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going
to have.

It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of
silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him?
How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move
him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he
sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have
to -- I can't begin to exaggerate how frightening the
position is -- we're in right now, because most of you
don't understand, because the press has not done a
very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the
new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11
committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance,
I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really
does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the
Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the
right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting
to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing
them before they kill us, as Peter said. "They did it
to us. We've got to do it to them." That is the
attitude that -- at the very top of our government
exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things
that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not
much more to go on with.

I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you
one thing. Let's all forget this word "insurgency".
It's one of the most misleading words of all.
Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won
the war and a group of disgruntled people began to
operate against us and we then had to do
counter-action against them. That would be an
insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the
war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus
nationalists. We are fighting the very people that
started -- they only choose to fight in different time
spans than we want them to, in different places. We
took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took
Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it
and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned
that they're very actively fighting. The frightening
thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's
-- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence
about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're
up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the
cells operating against us were two and three people,
that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't
know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups.
They have terrific communications. Somebody told me,
it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by
the way, the good part of it is, more and more people
are available to somebody like me.

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our
professional military and our intelligence people.
Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights as much as anybody here, and individual
freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of
fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways --
one of the things that you could say is, the amazing
thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult,
eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed
the government. Just how and why and how they did it
so efficiently, will have to wait for much later
historians and better documentation than we have now,
but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the
Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It
does say something about how fragile our Democracy is.
You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it
comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men
in the White House having their way. What they have
done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were
people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has
done was not attack the operational people, but the
intelligence people. There were people -- serious
senior analysts who disagree with the White House,
with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White
House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody
said, the goal in the last month has been to separate
the apostates from the true believers. That's what's
happening. The real target has been "diminish the
agency." I'm writing about all of this soon, so I
don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous
sea change in the government. A concentration of
power.

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts.
We can't win this war. We can do what he's doing. We
can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other
horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't
really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet
government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the
Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he
became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before
we installed him, since we have installed him on June
28, July, August, September, October, November, every
month, one thing happened: the number of sorties,
bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage
dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are
systematically bombing that country. There are no
embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I
think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists
at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the
aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the
operational fights. There's no air defense, It's
simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they
want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told.
We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if
they're going to carry out an election and if they're
going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it,
which means that what happened in Fallujah,
essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam --
Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone" right in
front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a
friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful
task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban
bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as
possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three
weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home.
I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work.
I call them at home, and he has one of those caller
I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said,
"Welcome to Stalingrad." We know what we're doing.
This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not
telling us. They're not talking about it.

We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State
that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist
asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about
lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the
President then gets up and says, "Yes, they should all
have good equipment and we're going to do it," as if
somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean
nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just
utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again
and again, "well, we don't do torture." We know what
happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see
anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way
because so much has come out in the last few weeks,
the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not
an isolated incident what's happened with the seven
kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England.
That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys.
Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send
kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we
send our children to war is the officers become in
loco parentis. That means their job in the military is
to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets
and being blown up, but also there is nothing as
stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a
war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle
of these people doing those antics night after night,
for three and a half months only stopped when one of
their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you
need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give
you a timeline that will tell you all you need to
know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this
year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful
lot about what was going on there. At that point,
between January and May, our government did nothing.
Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was
briefed by the middle of January on it and told the
President. In those three-and-a-half months before it
became public, was there any systematic effort to do
anything other than to prosecute seven "bad seeds",
enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the
unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The
answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who
were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in
charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't
excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is
another framework. We're not seeing it. They've gotten
away with it.

So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there
is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny
way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington
Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine,
25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was
a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and
the Post did a little story about it. They quoted --
his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had
written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern
Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter
just describing what it was like after his son died.
He said, "Today everything seems strange. Laundry is
getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast.
Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still
beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away." 

There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai --
I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story,
more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so
almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that
I discovered was that they had -- for some of you,
most of you remember, but basically a group of
American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like
today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in
a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get
shot by snipers, because it's always hidden. There's
inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the
people. We have done that with enormous success in
Iraq. They're "rag-heads". They're less than human.
The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally as bad.
Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case,
you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of
soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in
Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their
people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and
bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would
meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and
old men and they executed them all. It took a day.
They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of
the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and
Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about
90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in
the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They
collected people in three ditches and just began to
shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the
air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the
kids who join the Army Reserve today and National
Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids
did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul
Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next
day, there was a moment -- one of the things that
everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of
the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a
child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach
in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were
sitting having the K rations -- that's what they
called them -- MRE's now -- the kid somehow crawled up
through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began
-- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the
Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill
him, "Plug him," he said. And Medlow somehow, who had
done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do
it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his
carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and
shot him in the back of the head. The next morning,
Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown
off. He was being medevac'd out. As he was being
medevac'd out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one
of the chilling lines, he said, "God has punished me,
and he's going to punish you, too."

So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And
I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived
in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, "I'm coming to see
you. I don't remember where I was, I think it was
Washington State. I flew over there and to get there,
you had to go to - I think Indianapolis and then to
Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the
Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out
of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman
Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is
50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old - hard
scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see
your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows
you're coming. Then she said, one of these great --
she said to me, "I gave them a good boy. And they sent
me back a murderer." So you go on 35 years. I'm doing
in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I
did three in three weeks. If some of you know about
The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle
of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East
coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class,
very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to
talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly
somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a
daughter that was in the military police unit that was
at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in
March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the
fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games
in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home.
Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The
whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different
person. She had been married. She was young. She went
into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to
get money, not for college or for -- you know, these
-- some of these people worked as night clerks in
pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not
very sophisticated. She came back and she left her
husband. She just had been married before. She left
her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the
city, moved out to another home, another apartment in
another city and began working a different job. And
moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring
went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter,
and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and
get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly
-- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and
her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu
Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it.
And she says to her daughter, "Were you there?" She
goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door.
The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home --
before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her
a portable computer. One of the computers that had a
DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was
there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was
overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a
great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had
given her a portable computer, and when the kid came
back she had returned it, one of the things, and the
mother then said I went and looked at the computer.
She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She
doesn't know about Freud. She just said, I was just --
I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had
decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything
more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She
opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked
"Iraq". She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs.
They were photographs that became -- one of them was
published. We published one, just one in The New
Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no
mother should see and daughter should see too. It was
the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked,
two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of
him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large
photograph. What we didn't publish was the sequence
showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot
of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away
we go. There's another story.

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes
a core of -- you know, we all deal in "macro" in
Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're
nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is
nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star
General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them
we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it.
Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's
just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's
not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that.
Because there is individual integrity. It's a system
that's completely been taken over -- by cultists.
Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the
casualties mount and these stories get around, and the
mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as
the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back,
and there's wards that you will never hear about.
That's wards -- you know about the terrible
catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the
vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables
because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you
maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of
the medical journals that the number of survivors are
greater with catastrophic injuries because of their
better medical treatment and the better armor they
have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities.
We're going to learn more and I think you're going to
see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be
optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from
inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What
happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you
may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going
to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're
going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed.
Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the
economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know,
if you have not sold your stocks and bought property
in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing
is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much
longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about
our old-fashioned allies. We could see something
there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody
-- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our
graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops
buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending
$2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these
days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is
going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars.
We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could
get through that. That will be another year, and the
damage he's going to do between then and now is
enormous. We're going to have some very bad months
ahead.

Seymour Hersh's latest book is Chain of Command: The
Road to Abu Ghraib.








	
	
		
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