| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 6:54 pm Post subject: Treason in high places: Pentagon zionists, AIPAC and Israel |
| Treason in high places: Pentagon zionists, AIPAC and Israel
James Petras
7-9-4 Rebelión
The FBI investigation into Israeli espionage agents in the Pentagon is part of a major struggle between prominent Zionists in the Pentagon and the US security apparatus. Ever since the Bush regime came to power there has been a fierce political and organizational war between the Pentagon Zionists and their militarist collaborators, on the one hand, and the professional military and intelligence apparatus, on the other.
This conflict has manifested itself in a series of major issues including the war in the Middle East, the rational for war, the relationship between Israel and the US, the strategy for empire, as well as tactical issues like the size of military force needed for colonial wars and the nature of colonial occupation. From 9/11/2001 to the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon Zionists and the civilian militarists had the upper hand: they marginalized the CIA and established their own intelligence services to “cook the data”, they pushed through the doctrine of sequential wars, beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq and projecting wars with Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. The Pentagon Zionists increased Israel’s power in the Middle East and promoted its expansionist colonization of Palestine, at the expense of US soldiers, budget busting expenditures and CIA objections.
The US military and security apparatus has retaliated. First by debunking Zionist lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, then by exposing the role of Zionist client Ahmed Chalabi as a double agent for Iran, followed by a two-year investigation of Pentagon Zionists passing documents to Israeli military intelligence and the secret police, the Mossad.
More is at stake than a turf war between the ‘Israel First’ Pentagon crowd and their opponents in the US military, diplomatic corp and intelligence agencies. The fundamental issue is the freedom of the US people to decide or at least influence their political leaders and their appointees without being subject to the manipulation and control by a foreign government (Israel) and their highly placed agents in positions of power.
Israel has for decades subverted US foreign policy to serve its interests through the organized power of major Jewish organizations in the US. What is new in the current Pentagon spy case is that rather than pressuring from the outside to secure favorable policies for Israel, the Israel loyalists are in top positions within the government making strategic decisions about US global policy and providing their Israeli handlers with secret documents pertaining to top level discussions in the White House on questions of war and peace. Today the politics of Pentagon and AIPAC espionage is especially dangerous – because what is at stake is a new US and/or Israeli war on Iran which will ignite the entire Middle East.
The move to high-level spying by top Zionist policy-makers like Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Bush Administration is the culmination of a long series of strategic policies promoted by AIPAC designed to enhance Israeli expansionist goals in the Middle East.
Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Perle, Rubin et al were the most zealous promoters of the war against Iraq. They worked closely with other Zionist ideologues like Bush speechwriter David Frum to promote the notion of “axis of evil”, to engage in a sequence of wars against Muslim regimes hostile to Israeli colonial policy in Palestine and beyond. Wolfowitz, Feith set up the parallel ‘intelligence’ agency (the Office of Special Planning) run by fellow Zionist Abram Shulsky using Chalabi to provide phony data on Iraq to precipitate that war.
An army of ‘Israel First’ academic and journalist ideologues wrote, spoke and acted to justify the US attack on Iraq as the first part of a regional war to destroy any and all regimes critical of Israeli expansionism. Cohen, Rubin, Kristol, Foxman, Ledeen and many others provided “expert” propaganda on why US soldiers should kill and be killed for Greater Israel. Almost daily meetings and consultations took place between the top Zionists officials and the Israeli military and intelligence leaders in the offices of Feith and other Zionists. The Pentagon offices of Feith and Wolfowitz appeared to be an upscale bordello for high ranking Israeli officials. Judging from the subsequent policies it is clear that Pentagon Zionists took their cues from their Israeli counterparts – Israel was given greater funding, unlimited access to US policy makers and information pertaining to US policy in the Middle East. Meantime US intelligence and military officials were marginalized, their objections to Israeli positions blown away, their very presence seen as obstacles to realizing Sharon’s vision of a Greater Israeli – sharing (?) domination over the Middle East.
Given the high level of structural collaboration and integration of US Pentagon Zionists and US Jewish organizations with the Israeli state, the boundaries of what is United States policies and interests and what are Israeli prerogatives and interests are blurred. >From the perspective of the Pentagon Zionists and their organized Jewish supporters, it is “natural” that the US spends billions to finance Israeli military power and territorial expansion. It is “natural” to transfer strategic documents from the Pentagon to the Israeli State. As Haaretz states, “Why would Israel have to steal documents when they can find out whatever they want through official meetings?” The routinization of espionage via official consultations between Israeli and US Zionist officials became public knowledge throughout the executive branch. Only it wasn’t called espionage, it was referred to as ‘exchanging intelligence’, only the Israelis sent ‘disinformation’ to the Pentagon Zionists to serve their interests while the latter passed on the real policies, positions and strategies of the US government.
The history of the key Zionists in the Pentagon reveals a pattern of disloyalty to the US and covert assistance to Israel. Harold Rhode and William Luti, both fanatical Pentagon Zionists under Feith , Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby have been under investigation by the FBI for passing documents to Israel. Rhode had his security clearance suspended recently. CIA operatives in Baghdad reported he was constantly on his cell phone to Israel reporting on US plans, military deployments, political projects, Iraqi assets and a host of other confidential information. Michael Ledeen, another influential Zionist policy maker who worked in the Pentagon lost his security clearance after he was accused of passing classified material to a ‘foreign country (Israel). In 2001 Feith hired Ledeen to work for the Office of Special Plans which handled top secret documents. Feith himself was fired in March 1983 from the National Security Council for providing Israel with classified data. The FBI investigated Wolfowitz for having provided documents to Israel on a proposed sale of US weapons to an Arab country.
It is clear that Israeli agents, not simply Zionists ideologues, infest the top echelon of the Pentagon. The question is not merely a question of taking this or that policy position in favor of Israel but of working systematically on a whole range of issues to further Israeli power over and against US imperial interests.
What is surprising is not the current investigation over Israeli spies in the Pentagon but why they have not been arrested, indicted and sentenced a decade or two earlier.
The problem of American Jewish organizational collaboration with Pentagon espionage - namely the role of the AIPAC as an accomplice in the current spy case - is not exceptional. In their books, former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky ( The Other Side of Deception, 1994), and Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon (Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy, 2002) describe how the Israeli security forces have recruited overseas Zionist Jews, who are called sayanim, to serve as back-up supporters and collaborators in Israeli overseas operations.
AIPAC is not merely a pro-Israel ‘lobby’ but a long-standing listening post and gatherer of public and confidential government information for Israel. At a more ‘philosophical’ level there is an insidious belief widely held among the leaders of major Jewish organizations like AIPAC that the basic question for all Jews is whether the “policy is good for the Jews” - narrowly defined to mean the interest of the State of Israel and its current rulers. In pursuit of “Defending Israel at all costs” it is very likely that some of these officials go over the line into wartime espionage.
President Bush has declared that he is a “wartime President” – the US is officially involved in a colonial war of aggression against the Iraqi people. In these circumstances, espionage in time of war is a capital offense… even if the spymasters are Israelis. It is no wonder that the Zionist and Israeli propaganda machine is working overtime to undermine the espionage investigation.
After the first announcement by CBS television, the rest of the mass media gave prominent space to Israeli and AIPAC denials. More seriously the CBS broadcast deliberately harmed the FBI spy investigation into the links between the Pentagon and AIPAC. The FBI blames CBS’s revelations concerning Franklin when, the latter had already confessed and was working with the FEDS to implicate AIPAC and Israeli agents. Zionist ideologues in the US mass media and the Israeli press try to downplay the incident – first through vehement denials and subsequently to reducing the case of treason to a question of a routine exchange of information by a single “lower level”, bumbling but fanatically pro-Israel Gentile functionary. They forget to mention he was hired and directed by Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz to be their expert on Iran deeply involved in handling top secret documents and formulating policy on Iran.
The Israeli officials claim that Mossad and military intelligence solemnly pledged to stop spying on the US after the Jonathan Pollard case. “We have never spied on the US since…”, they claim. In fact over 800 Israeli spies posing as ‘art’ students and tourists were expelled after 9/11 and several Mossad agents posing as movers in New Jersey and Tennessee were expelled.
The arrogance of Israeli power in then US, which Sharon publically boasted about, is largely based on the simple principle embraced by all Zionist zealots whether they are Ivy league academics or neo-fascist felons (like Elliot Abrams) is “What’s good for Israel is good for the US”. “Good for Israel” today means bloody US wars against Israel’s adversaries, unconditional support for Israeli expansion and pillage of Palestine and now spying on the US for the good of Israel. Guided by this slogan it is easy to see how everything in the US that might be of use to Israeli intelligence whether it be documents, directives or strategic debates about big wartime issues taking place in the White House are fair game for transmission to Israeli intelligence.
Rather than face the evidence, the Zionist ideologues have taken to ad hominum attacks on their espionage agent as merely a middle level official who didn’t influence policy. They overlook the fact that he was the ‘delivery boy’ for his Zionist bosses who actually do make policy and work with top echelons of the Israeli state in ‘coordinating’ US policy to fit Israel’s needs. The power of the Israeli-US Zionist propaganda machine is so overwhelming that the FBI had to investigate for 2 years, make endless wiretaps, videos and photos, interview dozens of government and not-government officials before they could prepare to make the charges.
Despite being taped and photographed in the act of taking top secret documents, AIPAC officials deny everything and then hire a string of high-powered defense lawyers. Already the pro-Zionists mass media suggest that Zionist-AIPEC spying is really a case of ‘mishandling sensitive documents’ – a case of putting top secret documents in the wrong mailbox. Really!
In less than two days the pro-Israel mass media buried the story, and a series of ‘news reports’ were published featuring AIPAC denials, Israeli ridiculing their Pentagon mole as a fanatical idiot (Haaretz) and launching a counter attack questioning the motives of the investigation and the FBI counter-espionage service. The media published stories from anonymous “insiders” who purportedly spoke of the FBI dropping espionage charges in favor of charges of “mishandling a classified document” or even simply dropping the case altogether. They claim that the spy handing over a classified document to Israeli interests didn’t know it was a crime, a case of an innocent, well-intentioned error of judgment. This piece of propaganda has been thoroughly discredited when it was revealed that the Israeli agent (Franklin) confessed and has been cooperating with the FBI for the past months.
Nothing captures the power and pervasive and corrosive influence of the US-Zionist apparatus on US politics as much as the absolute silence of both major candidates faced with a high-level security lapse and potentially damaging spy investigation. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate trailing Bush in the polls refuses to expose the Zionist Pentagon’s ‘security failures’ despite national security being at the center of his campaign. The reason is very clear: Kerry is tied to the AIPAC-Israel-US Zionist political machine and he is willing to sacrifice US security for the Zionist vote even when faced with the issue of Israeli espionage in a time of war.
The Republicans went one step further – sending their top politicos to an AIPAC political extravaganza organized in New York two days after AIPAC was cited by the FBI as the Israeli intermediary in the passing of secret documents. At no time in recent modern history has any governing or opposition party engaged in public festivities with an organization engaged in foreign espionage. The explanation is the unprecedented and unique political situation that exists in the US today – the extraordinary power that a small, economically dependent state exercises over a global imperial state via its wealthy organized political-religious agents.
If Israel can get anything it wants from its Zionist patriots in high places in the US government, then why engage in espionage? There are several explanations.
The hand delivery of documents by Franklin can be seen as a time saving and security-wise move. If discovered, Franklin’s mentors can simply deny involvement – he was acting on his own, an argument put forth in the Israeli press. The idea of Franklin as some kind of ‘loose cannon’ does not explain why he was hired, retained and given delicate assignments and praised by the senior Zionists (Feith, Wolfowitz, Ledeen and Abrams) up to the time of his exposure. Secondly the document transferred provided Israel with very timely information on a major top-level debate: US policy toward Iran, more particularly who was for or against a military assault on Teheran. This allows Israel to plan its own military strategy knowing in advance Washington’s possible response and directing its higher up Pentagon collaborators how to prepare the ground for acceptance of Israeli aggression.
<>
Fundamentally Israel wanted to be in the White House decision making loop at every stage of Middle East policymaking via Wolfowitz, Feith et al and via confidential documentary accounts which the Mossad could analyze directly. There was a ‘need’ for espionage, because the Mossad does not merely rely on one source of information, nor does it operate only on one track. It has direct formal and ‘informal’ relations (spying) with ‘friendly’ government policy-makers. It operates on many levels, legal and illegal, through Zionist collaborators as well as overseas agents, through agents with false passports and though local Zionist sleepers, who can be activated for specific tasks…
Conclusion
Investigations and evidence are usually enough to proceed with indictments, interrogations and the pursuit of the leaders and foreign handlers in a major espionage case, especially in wartime. Thousands of innocent South Asians, Arabs and Muslims have been picked up and jailed on the most flimsy excuses (“suspicions”). But in the case of Israeli-AIPAC-Pentagon espionage the normal legal processes are inoperative.
The question of espionage prosecution depends on political power - a struggle between the Israeli State backed by the major Presidential candidates and parties, the Zionist-American political machines and their mass media acolytes on the one hand and, on the other hand the FBI, professional intelligence apparatus (CIA, DIA), state prosecutor and his investigatory staff and few stray political voices.
The so-called progressive movements and policy critics are strangely silent: Even as they speak out against war, they fail to denounce an espionage case which is intimately related to the next Middle Eastern war – an Israeli attack on Iran. Why don’t progressive Jews denounce AIPAC espionage to further a new war in Iran?
A signed statement “Not in our name” would clearly separate them from these agents of foreign wars. Three days after the initial expose, the mass media have buried the story. The FBI is delaying any announcements. The prosecuting attorney is under tremendous one-sided political pressure. Lacking any mass media outlets the US republic is a helpless giant, tied in knots by malicious dwarfs, unable to defend itself, unable to define its own policy interests. The latest report from the FBI tells us that self-confessed Israeli agent was preparing to lead the authorities to his contacts in the Israeli government when CBS blew open the case.
Was CBS aware of the danger to the Israeli secret services and was it trying to undermine the investigation? No doubt some sort of official statement will be made, perhaps even an indictment will be made of the middle level functionary on secondary charges and the FBI may even dare to interview Wolfowitz and Feith on their knowledge of the espionage network with predictable consequences. However if there is anything beyond an interview, the Zionist media will charge “anti-Semitism”, a “Second Dreyfuss” case, which will probably end the current investigation.
<>The ‘underground’ struggle between the Pentagon Zionists and the US security apparatus will continue. If Bush is re-elected, Wolfowitz will most likely become Secretary of Defense. If Kerry is elected, the closet Zionist, Richard Holbrooke, will take charge of the Pentagon.
American citizens will have to face a serious question: If the security services are incapable of defending our country from foreign espionage in high places – What is to be done?
In either case we face an imminent Zionist designed and promoted military attack on Iran, which is likely to lead to a general conflagration which can only benefit the neo-fascists who run the state of Israel. And you are afraid of being called an anti-Semite for opposing the Israel’s espionage and regional wars.
August 31, 2004
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=4298 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Sep 21, 2004 3:24 am Post subject: Israeli Interrogators in Iraq |
| Look at how Hersh contradicts himself in the interview via the following URL where he refers to an Israeli Mossad type and that the Israelis 'couldn't' get away with what the USA was doing at Abu Ghraib. Then he contradicts himself later in the interview by mentioning that the Israelis have been using such tactics for years:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6010419/
'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for Sept. 14
Read the complete transcript to Tuesday's showUpdated: 12:08 p.m. ET Sept. 15, 2004Guests: Kitty Kelley, Seymour Hersh
CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: In the eye of a political hurricane, Kitty Kelley‘s “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.” It‘s making noise, it‘s raising questions. I‘ve got some of my own. Tonight, finding the truth with author Kitty Kelley.
Plus, only 14 days into September, and this month is already the deadliest for terrorists and Iraqi insurgent attacks since September 11. How did America get from 9/11 to today‘s war in Iraq? Some answers from investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, author of “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.” It‘s HARDBALL.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I will never relent in defending America.
SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The hope is there, the sun is rising. Our best days are still to come.
BUSH: We‘re on the path to the future, and we‘re not turning back.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: Good evening. I‘m Chris Matthews.
Kitty Kelley has written a lot of books that have made a lot of noise and also raised a lot of questions. And I have got some questions myself about her new book, “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.”
Kitty, thanks for joining us on the show tonight. It‘s great to have you. You‘re making all this noise. I hope you‘ll make some noise on this show tonight.
Let me ask you this. The election is coming up in less than 50 days. What in your book is useful to the voter in deciding this November election?
KITTY KELLEY, AUTHOR: I think the entire book is, Chris, because I think it is very, very relevant. They will understand this president better by reading about his family. Because he is a product of a very, very powerful family. Probably the most powerful family in the world today.
MATTHEWS: My favorite question of people who are in the news, as well as those who write it sometimes, is, where did we get it wrong? Where is the public notion of the Bush family—and I mean the generalized notion, I think you know what I mean—different from what you discovered to be the truth?
KELLEY: God, what a great question. There is such a disconnect between the public image of the Bushes and the private reality. And this is not a book just about George W. It really does go back 100 years. And it spans a lot of political lifetimes, if you will. The president‘s great grandfather, his grandfather, and his father. And shows another portrait of the class system in America.
So how did we get it wrong? Now, we‘re getting it wrong because so much is locked up. So many records are locked up and are not available to us because of an executive order that this particular president signed.
MATTHEWS: You mean for the first presidency.
KELLEY: No. I mean, George W. Bush signed an executive order which locks up his records as governor, his father‘s as president, and even Clinton‘s records. And Chris, I think that is really serious. Unless historians step forward, teachers and writers and librarians, and say—they‘ve got to challenge that executive order of the president‘s.
MATTHEWS: OK. Until we get some of that information out, let‘s talk about your book and your methodology as a reporter. What are your rules in deciding what to put in your book, if someone tells you—if I said something about someone else, how would you decide whether to use it or not?
KELLEY: It depends on who it is and what they say, where they said it and how they said it. In this book, behind every name source, I‘ve really tried to have unnamed sources. And this book was the most heavily vetted book that I have ever written in my life. It took me four years, and it also took four sets of lawyers who have gone over the manuscript.
Not all of the interviews—I did nearly 1,000 -- are tape-recorded, but I tried to where I could, providing notes. I‘ve tried to back things up with Freedom of Information documents, from State Department, from FBI. I‘ve read—I‘ve tried to combine primary and secondary sources as best I can to provide this picture.
MATTHEWS: Let‘s talk about one of the things that‘s really in the news now before your book came along. Your book is out today. But let‘s talk about this big question of whether and why President Bush did or did not take a physical exam back when he was with the Air National Guard. Let‘s look at the first quote here. “Bush‘s failure to accomplish annual medical examination, as the record states, could not have been either casual or accidental, said retired First Lieutenant Robert Rogers. There is circumstantial evidence pointing to substance abuse by Bush during this period. Is it unreasonable to raise the possibility that he was suspended from flying as a direct or indirect consequence of substance abuse? It might be if there was no way for Bush to prove his innocence. But George W. Bush can readily defend himself if he so chooses, simply by voluntarily releasing his complete military records, which he has refused to do.”
Who is Robert Rogers, Lieutenant Rogers, and what is his role with regard to Bush‘s role in the Air National Guard?
KELLEY: He is retired First Lieutenant Robert Rogers, an 11-year veteran of the National Guard. And...
MATTHEWS: What was his relationship to President Bush when he was in the Air Guard?
KELLEY: I don‘t think there‘s any relationship.
MATTHEWS: Well, why—what does he know—what does he know about -
· what does he know about the possibility or impossibility or plausibility of our current president having involved himself with substance abuse, as he says in this book of yours?
KELLEY: He says that this is a logical assumption to make.
However...
MATTHEWS: Who is he to tell us that? I‘m just curious of why you chose this man...
KELLEY: He is a member...
MATTHEWS: ... to talk about President Bush‘s use of illegal substances or whatever.
KELLEY: Well, it isn‘t just that that he was telling me, Chris. The news on the National Guard is not whether or not George Bush took illegal substances, but it is the fact, he had a solid gold record up until April of 1972. And then he is missing. And he was penalized by the Air Force, by the National Guard, and six additional months were added to his Guard duty.
I went to Rogers because he has written about the National Guard and he seems to be a historian of the National Guard. And I needed it explained to me.
Then I went to a classmate of Bush‘s, Mark Soler (ph), to just explain to me what 1968 was like at Yale. Did you get into the National Guard easily? Were there reserved slots open? How did one do it? And then I interviewed...
MATTHEWS: Excuse me, I‘m sorry. I just want to talk to you about Lieutenant Rogers.
KELLEY: OK.MATTHEWS: Did he ever meet President Bush?
KELLEY: Didn‘t ask him.
MATTHEWS: Well, do you think he ever met president—did he know anything about President Bush, the man? President Bush as he was when he was with the Guard?
KELLEY: I don‘t know that.
MATTHEWS: How old is he?
KELLEY: He is in his 60s.
MATTHEWS: Was he a contemporary of President Bush? Was he in that Guard unit down in Texas, or not? Did he ever meet President Bush?
KELLEY: No.
MATTHEWS: And yet he‘s here speculating on President Bush‘s use of drugs.
KELLEY: Chris, he is the one who told me about the National Guard and the Air Force instituting random drug testing at that time. He told me further, that every single question that I asked him and that you‘re asking of the president could be answered with the release of the Flight Inquiry Board record. And that‘s the one record that the White House has not released.
MATTHEWS: Let‘s take a look at another quote in the book. You wrote in your book—it‘s a big book—“Even as a married man, George had a whispered past, which almost surfaced during the campaign. A woman appeared in Austin, claiming to have been a call girl from Midland with an intimate knowledge of him during his days in the oil patch. Supposedly, she was ‘the other woman‘ in his life, or one of them, said Peck Young, an Austin political consultant. ‘She set herself up in a hotel here and was prepared to sell her story to the highest bidder. Word got around town, and she claimed she got a visit from some men who made her realize it was better to turn tricks in Midland than to stop breathing. She said she had been approached by what she described as intelligence types. She left town abruptly.”
Who is Peck Young?
KELLEY: Peck Young is a political activist and consultant in Austin.
MATTHEWS: What side is he on?
KELLEY: Politically, what side is he on?
MATTHEWS: Is he a Democrat or Republican?
KELLEY: I think he‘s a Democrat.
MATTHEWS: What does he know about the private life of George W. Bush in those days?
KELLEY: Exactly what he was quoted as saying.
MATTHEWS: What does he know, though?
KELLEY: Exactly what he was quoted as saying in the book. This happened. This occurred.
MATTHEWS: It just says, “Supposedly, she was the other woman in his life.” What does that mean, supposedly? Did he know that she was the other woman in his life?
KELLEY: Did he—who know, Peck Young know?
MATTHEWS: Yeah. The man you‘re quoting here. Did he know anything about George Bush‘s private life?
KELLEY: No. He was telling me what occurred in Austin when George was running. And this woman came to set herself up to tell the story. I thought...
MATTHEWS: Did he give you the name of the woman so you could talk to her?
KELLEY: Yes.
MATTHEWS: And what happened then?
KELLEY: I didn‘t talk to her.
MATTHEWS: Why not?
KELLEY: Because she wouldn‘t talk.
MATTHEWS: Do you have any indication that she had had any relationship with the former—with the current president when he was back there in Texas?
KELLEY: I can‘t really make that supposition. I can really only go as far as what I know.
MATTHEWS: But you quote this fellow.
KELLEY: And I ran into a real wall of fear on that one. And I remember, I went back to Peck Young. And I said, now, tell me about these so-called spooks. I said, they were honestly listed as spooks? But she—
I could not go any further with her.
MATTHEWS: What sense did you have that Peck Young was a good source when you—you do say he didn‘t know the president as a young man back then. And what does he bring to the table here exactly in terms of truth?
KELLEY: It isn‘t so much in terms of truth. It is truth about what happened and what occurred in Austin at that time. This was not a story that was just known to Peck Young. This was known to a lot of political operatives at the time.
MATTHEWS: But he didn‘t know for a fact that the president had an affair with—or any kind of relationship with this prostitute, did he?
KELLEY: For a fact? Was he in the room, as the French say? Was he under the bed? No.
MATTHEWS: No, no. Did he have any knowledge at all? Any real knowledge at all?
KELLEY: Only what he is quoted on in the book, Chris. That‘s as far as I can go.
MATTHEWS: OK. Well, let‘s come back. More with Kitty Kelley when we return. And later journalist Seymour Hersh on how America went from September 11 to the war in Iraq and coming up this Friday, the debut of HARDBALL: THE HORSERACE with all the biggest stories, the latest polls and the hottest ads this week in the presidential race. That‘s THE HORSERACE this Friday at 7:00 Eastern.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: We‘re back with author Kitty Kelley whose new book is “The Family, The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty” which is now number one on Amazon. Kitty, I‘ve got a quote here. This is very alluring. “Some people felt that George—this is George W. Bush, the president, his past did not seep out and embarrass him and his family because he was protected by a coterie of former CIA men with an allegiance to his father” who is of course for a while there director of the CIA.
Where did that come from? How did you get upon that?
KELLEY: You‘re quoting me or you‘re quoting...
MATTHEWS: This is just a direct quote from you, the author, on page 551. Some people felt that George Bush‘s past did not seep out because you had been talking about drug use and extramarital affairs and embarrass him and his family because he was protected by a coterie of former CIA men with an allegiance to his father. That‘s not in quotes. That‘s just right from you.
KELLEY: That is the author. That is an informed opinion based on information and belief and the interviews of nearly 1,000 people. I don‘t think it is preposterous. It is really—where does logic lead us?
MATTHEWS: You didn‘t use logic. You used the word felt. You said some people felt. That‘s an unusual way of saying something if it‘s basically even secondhand testimony.
KELLEY: But you and I just talked about Peck Young. He felt that way. He saw what was going on in Austin. He saw a coterie of people surrounding George Bush. It is a theme of this book throughout that George Bush has—George W. Bush has really been protected and enabled by his family. I think it is part of his political success, Chris.
MATTHEWS: But Peck Young, the Austin political consultant, the Democrat you quote here said, all he said was supposedly she was the other woman. Even he was loose in his testimony. Even he was being speculative. And then you say, after citing him as your source here, you say some people felt. That is even a looser attribution. Feeling is hard. First of all, you or I don‘t know how anybody on earth feels except ourselves.
So when you say some people felt, that is a softer way of saying, they believed. Do they believe that he was being protected by the CIA or not?
KELLEY: How about this, Chris? Some people asserted. I found that when I interviewed people who worked at the CIA, even when George was director there, how he protected the black sheep in the family, his brother James Smith Bush. Yes. This can‘t be a huge surprise to you.
MATTHEWS: I‘m trying to learn all this, Kitty, and I‘m trying to be good here...
KELLEY: And you are.
MATTHEWS: Let me talk here about this other question. This is about George Bush and his wife Laura. This is your account. They “used to go down to the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands to visit Laura‘s college roommate Jane Clark and her boyfriend, the former baseball great Sandy Koufax. Elsewhere on the island, the Bushes used to attend and enjoy heavy pot-smoking parties. This was not inconsistent with Laura‘s past. She graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1968 and had been known in her college days as a go-to girl for dime-bags of marijuana. She not only smoke doped, said public relations executive Robert Nash, an Austin friend of many in Laura‘s SMU class, but she sold dope.”
OK. Robert Nash, what personal knowledge did he have of any illicit traffic of drugs by the first lady?
KELLEY: It was hardly illicit traffic in drugs. It sounds like a Colombian cartel.
MATTHEWS: It says smoked dope.
KELLEY: She did.
MATTHEWS: OK. How do you know she sold dope?
KELLEY: Because I interviewed people who were there. People who smoked dope with her. People who were in...
MATTHEWS: Where is that in your book?
KELLEY: Their names? Their names are not there. Their names are...
MATTHEWS: Where are the first-person witnesses to this illegal drug use? Where are they in this book? I see a guy named Robert Nash who as you quote is an Austin friend of many in Laura‘s SMU class. That suggests to me he didn‘t have a personal relationship with her either.
KELLEY: Oh, yes, he did.
MATTHEWS: He did?
KELLEY: I mean, he knows Laura Bush.
MATTHEWS: Why did you say many in Laura‘s SMU class? Was he a friend of Laura‘s or not?
KELLEY: Because I interviewed a lot of people in Laura‘s SMU class. I interviewed a lot of people in Tortola who were there. Do they want to be named? No. Are they going to be named about smoking dope with the first lady? No. I interviewed someone who did cocaine with George Bush at Yale. Is he going to go on the record? No. He did verify it to Erica Jong, a writer in New York City. But as he said to me, now it‘s a felony, one. Two, I did it with him. He wasn‘t holier than thou about it. And he said, I have a little bit of institutional loyalty to the university.
MATTHEWS: What about the accusation in your book that George Bush, the president of the United States now, snorted coke at Camp David when his father was president. Who was your firsthand source on that?
KELLEY: The firsthand source is unnamed. I confirmed it with his former sister-in-law.
MATTHEWS: What do you think of the pattern in your book of citing sources that don‘t have firsthand experience by name. No, listen. And then making statements about sources whose names can‘t be used? What good is it getting the names throughout this book of people who don‘t know what they‘re talking about in terms of firsthand experience, and then not citing the ones who you claim or say as an author do have firsthand experience.
What good does it do to the reader to constantly come across names that don‘t know what they‘re talking about in terms of firsthand experience and then be told by you the author that there‘s a plethora of people out there who are on the record with you but don‘t wish to go on the record in terms of publication. I understand journal. I‘ve been dealing with this for years myself. I know how tricky it is to try to get people to come forward. Could you get anyone to come forward and say that any of the Bush family. Let‘s start with the president and first lady broke the law.
Did anyone come forward and say, I am willing to go on the record and say, I sold them, I was with them, I did it with them, I know they did it, anybody?
KELLEY: No.
MATTHEWS: Well, that‘s a hell of a shield, isn‘t it?
KELLEY: No, Chris. You know in the instance, in the book, where in New York City attorney is quoted about the former George Bush and the mistress that he had in the early 1960‘s in New York City. And he shared an apartment with her. He is unnamed. The woman, her first name is in there. But the last name, the reader sees, it goes bracket. Last name deleted for privacy reason. He went back to his records. He gave me a date. He gave me a time. His law firm is in there. Would he step forward and put his name after it, no.
MATTHEWS: Here‘s the problem. When you go to sources as a journalist, you‘ve had to do and it I‘ve had to do it. You go and get them to say something at a dinner or a lunch or a maybe over a few drinks, wherever. The minute you turn on the tape-recorder and you say I‘m going public with this with your name on it, they change the story. They don‘t quite have the excitement behind the way they deliver the story. It gets a little less juicy. There‘s something lost when you start to say to a person, I won‘t use your name.
KELLEY: No Chris. No, no. Time out.
MATTHEWS: Go for it. You‘ve got all the time you want.
KELLEY: That didn‘t happen with this, because it was no surprise that Kitty Kelley was doing this book. I didn‘t ambush anybody. Anybody that I approached knew that I was doing it for this book. So it wasn‘t a matter of seductive cocktail conversation and then going back to them. It wasn‘t that way at all.
MATTHEWS: It just stun me that the 700 page book can‘t have one on the record bit of testimony. On the record testimony. When of course, all the noise about this book will be caused by the words you use, and that nobody will stand by those words.
KELLEY: I think you have just—you have just underlined the power of this family, Chris. This is a sitting president. His father is a former president, a former director of central intelligence. People are frightened. And I had to accommodate four sets of lawyers. I can tell that you. The book is fully documented. And I stand beside every word of it. I know that it seems dicey.
MATTHEWS: The problem is there‘s not a word in the book against the first family that‘s in the headlines today.
KELLEY: That is the problem. But that‘s not my fault. That‘s the media coverage of this book.
MATTHEWS: Let the buyer beware. Thank you very much. Good luck with the book, Kitty, you always do well.
To read an excerpt, go to hardball.msnbc.com. Still to come on HARDBALL, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, on whether top Pentagon officials were behind the prison abuse scandal in Iraq. Your watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Tomorrow on HARDBALL, we‘ll talk about Kitty Kelley‘s new book and get a response from Republican strategist Ed Rogers, who was an aid to the first President Bush. Up next, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib and whether top Pentagon officials were behind it. You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: This half hour on HARDBALL, journalist Seymour Hersh on his new book, “Chain of Command: The road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.” Did the top advisors of the Defense Department set the tone that lead to the prison abuse scandal. Seymour Hersh is coming here, but first lets check in with the MSNBC News Desk.
(NEWS BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
Joining me now is Seymour Hersh, whose investigative reporting for “The New Yorker” magazine has unflinchingly examined U.S. activities post-9/11. They‘re weaved together with new reporting in his new book, “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.”
I want you ask you about something. You broke My Lai, right?
SEYMOUR HERSH, AUTHOR, “CHAIN OF COMMAND”: Yes.
MATTHEWS: Is this bigger than My Lai?
HERSH: No. My Lai, they sat around all day and killed people,
stopped in the middle and had some K rations, chewing and having their
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: As they‘re killing people in the ditch.
HERSH: And then went back and went back into it.
This is, I think, internationally, just as My Lai, once we discovered
it was a horror, this has the same sort of impact. It is not—it is not
· it is funny to use words...
MATTHEWS: I think it has got a bigger impact. Let me tell you, let‘s
talk about Abu Ghraib. People tell me who know something about Islamic
culture that as much as we are, to put it lightly, turned off by beheadings
· they shock the hell out of us because we can‘t think of anybody doing that, although electrocution is pretty bad, too—they say that is part of killing the enemy. That‘s what we do. That‘s execution for crime. That‘s the way they deal with enemies.
But stripping guys and making them do weird things in front of other guys, in front of women, is apparently horrendous to the very soul of an Islamic man.
HERSH: And I had an Israeli, a very hard-nosed Israeli guy, one of commandos, intelligence guys, old-timer, said to me, you know, I hate Arabs. I‘ve been killing them for 50 years. And they hate us and been killing us for 50 years.
But we know one day we‘re going to have to have peace with those SOBs and share a border some way. And I‘ll tell you something, Hersh, he said. If we had done to our Arabs in prison what you had done to yours, we couldn‘t do it.
That‘s how bad it is.
MATTHEWS: That‘s why I‘ve been saying for 10 years now the reason the Israelis don‘t engage in massacres when they sometimes get in terrible situations is, they have got to live there. Blood doesn‘t forgive. You kill a bunch of people, you humiliate a bunch of people, they spent thousands of years getting even with you. Isn‘t that it?
HERSH: I‘ll tell you, literally, generations can go by and they can do revenge, particularly the Taliban. Some of those people, 100 years for revenge is not—we don‘t know what we‘ve done.
MATTHEWS: OK. Let‘s talk about your story.
(CROSSTALK)
HERSH: Let me say one more thing about your point.
MATTHEWS: OK.
HERSH: Because it is an interesting point.
Around the world, America has lost some prestige because of Abu Ghraib. It‘s certainly as profound as My Lai and perhaps more because it gets to the soul of anybody who is Islamic. Our friends that are Islamic are horrified by us because they see us—people who want to send their children, who do business here...
MATTHEWS: Sure.
HERSH: They say things to me like, you‘re a perverted, sexually perverted culture. What? An Arab man, you‘re photographing him faking homosexual acts with other men, with girls going like this?
MATTHEWS: Yes.
HERSH: And I actually—there were some people, as you know, even in the Armed Services Committee investigating it, compared this to college hijinks. Not a chance.
MATTHEWS: No.
HERSH: Not a chance.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about—well, the ramifications, I think, are obvious. We had friends in the world until recently, good friends, like Egypt. Certainly people in Jordan are friends of ours, certainly people in Morocco. All over the Arab world, we‘ve had friends. What is their life like right now?
HERSH: Well, look, the Egyptians still do things for us. There‘s still the Egyptian security service. But the people, the erosion of support for the United States among our allies is huge.
MATTHEWS: Right.
HERSH: That‘s the issue.
MATTHEWS: I remember walking through the streets of Cairo back in ‘71, after coming out of the Peace Corps. And the little kids on the street, Cairo kids, would come up to you and say, do you know John Wayne? They loved America. Do you know Muhammad Ali? Don‘t say nothing against Muhammad Ali. There was a kind of rough and tumble back and forth in those days.
HERSH: Don‘t give up on that, because I was in Damascus just recently and they still like Americans, believe it or not. Most people make a distinction between the government and the people.
American, we are pretty up-front, straightforward people. And they like us.
MATTHEWS: Not after we reelect the president. Won‘t they think then that we‘re with the government or will they think the election is fixed? What will they think?
HERSH: It is going to be real interesting next year.
MATTHEWS: Yes, that‘s right.
Let me ask you about this—on this show, we try to ask a lot of questions and hard questions, hopefully get the answers to come out of it all.
(CROSSTALK)
HERSH: Are you apologizing for getting tough with me in advance?
MATTHEWS: No, I‘m trying to explain my method here and I‘m trying to get the answer out of you. I‘m being nice for a second to get you disarmed here.
We have a problem of Americans abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib. And a lot of tough guys in this country would say, so what? They deserve it. Fine. Let‘s put them aside. Did this order from the top? Did the masks, the dog chains, the leashes, the collars, sort of the notion of sexual humiliation, did that come from the smart guys at the top of an intelligence or did that come from a bunch of country kids who just thought up all this stuff?
HERSH: No question it came from the top, from a bunch of guys in intelligence.
MATTHEWS: OK. How do you know that?
HERSH: I‘ll tell you what happened.
Very early on, one of the things you need to do in the insurgency in Iraq, you need to penetrate it. Right now, we know nothing about the insurgency. We knew nothing when we began the war in Iraq because we were surprised when it happened. And we‘re surprised today. When a bomb -- 10 Marines are killed the other week, we don‘t know about it. A bomb today outside a police station, we don‘t know. We have no intelligence inside.
We can‘t penetrate the insurgency. We never have been able to, which is why we have got a lot of problem in Iraq. But that‘s a different issue.
At one point when the war was going bad last year, the thought was, bring
in some of the pros. We have a—I‘ve written about it—we have a
secret, top secret unit that has been doing stuff for—since December of
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: They‘re super interrogators.
HERSH: Yes. And they operate in the cold. They‘re out there, way out there.
MATTHEWS: What do you think of their practices? Are they OK? Are they tough, borderline?
(CROSSTALK)
HERSH: You have to say, in the beginning, it‘s not such a bad idea to go get that guy, grab him, and don‘t worry about legality.
MATTHEWS: Sure.
HERSH: We thought that...
MATTHEWS: What do you do? What is standard interrogation practice? It is not humiliating somebody sexually as much as keeping them up all night, making it so they can‘t dream. You know that stuff.
HERSH: The good guys will tell you what—the good guys—and I‘m talking about the good guys not only in the FBI, but in the CIA and special ops guys. I know some of these guys. The good guys will tell you, establish rapport.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
HERSH: You never coerce. Coercion, particularly with a guy who wants to commit jihad, a guy who is willing to—comes from a group of people who want to fly airplanes into our buildings, willing to die, how are you going to get them to do anything other than give you something canned, even under duress?
Rapport. Show them you‘re a good guy. Show them they don‘t understand. Take the time. This is standard practice. And anybody who says coercion works, they don‘t know what they‘re talking about. There‘s absolutely no sophisticated person in the government, in the intelligence community who will argue seriously...
MATTHEWS: Can you argue that to some ideologue in the Defense Department who wants to break this insurgency so he can prove he was right there wasn‘t going to be one? Because isn‘t that what all this is about, the surprising—as the president said, he miscalculated. We have got this big insurgency in Iraq right now that nobody counted on. Now they‘ve got to crack it so it doesn‘t embarrass them even further, right? Isn‘t that what is going on?
HERSH: You can‘t crack it now, the way we‘re doing it now.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Right.
But what created this special push in your book? Tell me what you learned in your book about this special push—you say it came from the top—to break these prisoners.
HERSH: The idea was to get some people—in Iraq, the idea was this.
We could not penetrate, as I said, the insurgency. We have got 20,000 people. Who knows. Thousands of people arrested, some just in roadside street, random street arrests with roadblocks. We don‘t know who is who inside the government inside the prisons. Get some of the guys, the young guys, the young males who have no connection to the insurgency. Get them naked. Show them photographs. Simulate a sexual act. Get photographs so you can blackmail them. Tell them—this is, as you said, totally shameful humiliation for them, beyond belief. It‘s all over for them.
MATTHEWS: Whose idea was this?
HERSH: It comes from a lot of guys.
MATTHEWS: Well, name some names.
HERSH: No, it is not a question of naming names.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: What offices in the Pentagon?
HERSH: Even the Israelis have done this.
MATTHEWS: But what office in the Pentagon did it come from?
HERSH: High up. This came from a special operations group we had.
MATTHEWS: Cambone?
HERSH: Cambone was certainly aware of it. So was Rumsfeld of the notion of a special unit.
MATTHEWS: The Special Plans guys, Feith and the others, did they get involved in this or not?
HERSH: I just don‘t know if they were briefing
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: But how do you know it came from the top if you don‘t know who it was at the top?
HERSH: I‘ve been told by people in a special unit, what—let me just finish the sentence.
The underlying theory was, get—and you‘ll hear it. It is not so crazy. Get some of these guys, get the book on them, so we can tell them, we‘re going to send you home to your community. We want to you join the insurgency and start telling us what‘s going on or else we‘re going to spread these pictures out to your neighbors.
MATTHEWS: So they were trying to not just break them and get the truth out of them.
HERSH: They were turning them.
MATTHEWS: They were going to use them as double agents.
HERSH: They were going to turn them. That was one of the underlying intellectual ideas.
MATTHEWS: How did you get that?
HERSH: From—I‘ve got good people. Look
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Can you describe them?
HERSH: People with access to something known as a special access program, a SAP. It‘s the special program I talked about. We have a small group of commandos that operate without American I.D.s, and probably Canadian, Jordanian. Who knows.
MATTHEWS: And this is firsthand information from them?
HERSH: Don‘t push me on this stuff. It is real information.
MATTHEWS: We‘re going to come right back with Seymour Hersh. The name of the book is “Chain of Command.” Back with him.
And don‘t forget, you can keep up with the presidential race on HardBlogger, our election blog Web site. Just go to HARDBALL.MSNBC.com. And while you‘re there, sign on to our free daily e-mail briefing.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: We‘re coming back with journalist Seymour Hersh and his new book, “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.”
HARDBALL returns after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL. We‘re back with Seymour Hersh, Sy Hersh, author of “Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.”
Let me ask you, Sy, you are one of great historians—not historians. You‘re one of the great investigative reporters, starting back in the Vietnam days, when you were covering there and you got involved with the McCarthy campaign and things like that. I always thought of you very nicely because of that.
Let‘s talk about deep history here. Harry Truman had to quit the presidency in 1952. He was 23 percent in the polls. He had to quit not because people didn‘t think he was an OK guy, but because they hated Korea. Korea, we had gotten bogged down around the 38th Parallel. We were fighting our way back up to that parallel, incredibly costly campaign.
Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson was Mr.—he was Mighty Mouse for two or three years in this country. Nobody stood in his way in the early ‘60s, after the Kennedy assassination. By ‘68, he had to quit. Jimmy Carter had to quit—or was beaten because of the Iranian hostage crisis, something far less than this thing we‘re in right now, far less in terms of dimension and cost to this country.
Why is President Bush, in the midst of what looks to be a bogged down war, where we‘re continuing to face whole stretches of Iraq we cannot pacify, Fallujah, Najaf, all the places in the Sunni Triangle, all these areas that are now building up civilizations against us, how come he is doing better than ever in this campaign and he looks like he‘s going to win right now? What is going on?
HERSH: Well, we don‘t have a Democratic candidate that is posing an option, a choice. I think there isn‘t a clear choice.
The American—you and I both know a lot of people, a lot of Republicans don‘t like this war.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
HERSH: A lot of military guys I can tell firsthand I know don‘t like this war.
MATTHEWS: But there are ways to beat a president without going 180 on him. Ike in 1952 said, I will go to Korea. He didn‘t say, I was going to buckle. He just implied he would fix the damn problem, right? I will go to—Nixon said, I got a plan, right?
HERSH: He said, I have got a plan to end the war. And it turned out to be to win it.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Well, he stuck in four more years with a deal he could have gotten four years earlier. Right, all that. And Humphrey, I don‘t know what he was talking about.
But it seems to—and Reagan in 1980 beat Jimmy Carter. I can tell you. I was on the plane. He beat him because he basically said we‘ve got to be strong. He didn‘t have any particular solution to the Iranian hostage crisis either.
Why can‘t this country focus on the debate, is there a better way to go in Iraq and the rest of the Arab world than we‘re going right now that is costing us all these men and women?
HERSH: Look, if I had the answer to that question, I would put it in a bottle and sell it for a buck and be a millionaire overnight.
I don‘t have the answer. But I have—I can tell you one thing. The 200 octane fuel that drives this is us, the Americans. I had a friend of mine who is a high-tech guy who worked in special ops all his life, very tough-nosed guy, very American, willing to die for his country, did his service, was an officer and a Delta Force-connected kind of guy. He is approached by American companies.
I had lunch with him the other week. He said he is approached by CEOs of major companies to do security in Iraq because he has got some good ideas. And he says to them, are you an American company? And they say yes. He said forget it. It is over. Americans are over. We‘re over. There‘s no—there‘s not—you are not going to make it in the United States. We are not going to make it in Iraq. I don‘t care what they say politically, what the White House says.
And I think until somebody articulates the idea that maybe another thousand lives isn‘t worth what we‘re doing, and God knows how many countless Iraqi lives—and it has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein anymore, whether he was good or bad, or WMD. We‘re looking at, we have put a guy in business, Iyad Allawi...
MATTHEWS: The new prime minister of the interim government.
HERSH: Who has no support. He couldn‘t walk on a street in Baghdad.
MATTHEWS: Well, why do these conservative writers, neoconservative writers I read in the paper and everybody watching reads in the papers, say, give him time; Allawi will put together a government over there? What are they talking about?
HERSH: I would like to smoke what they‘re smoking, because it isn‘t going to happen.
Look, we promised democracy. You have got a country where the Shiites are the majority. You‘re not giving the Shiites what we promised. We‘re not giving them democracy.
MATTHEWS: They want an up-and-down vote. They want the country.
HERSH: We didn‘t give it to them. We back off our...
MATTHEWS: Sistani wants it and he has a right to it if you believe in one man, one vote.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: He‘s got a right to it.
HERSH: That‘s what we said.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
HERSH: Sop we‘re walking away from first principles ourselves.
And they talk about an election, election. And they talk about—the White House now or the president was talking at the convention about there will be an election and then this will be this Iraqi army that is going to materialize. Are you kidding?
MATTHEWS: What are you hearing about the issue that is really cutting edge this week, Sy? And I don‘t know if you know. Just say you don‘t know. That would be refreshing around here. We have decided apparently not to go into those parts of the country, the Sunni Triangle, the really rough places, where they‘ve set up their own sort of militia against us because we don‘t want a big loss of Americans. That‘s a damn good reason, as far as I‘m concerned.
And some people think maybe—we had Barry McCaffrey on last—he allowed the fact that we may be also doing it because of the timetable here at home as well. We have got an election. Who wants a lot of hell to pay between now and Election Day. Is that smart military decision-making or is it just politics?
In other words, are we better off, if you‘re for the war, going out and fighting for these areas where we‘re—are contested right now and they‘re really fighting against us, or put it off until the Iraqis can go do the dirty work for us?
HERSH: First, you are never going to get the Iraqis to do the work for us, dirty work for us. That is not going to happen.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: They are not going into those tough neighborhoods?
HERSH: No.
And the second thing is, the answer is, of course I don‘t know what the inside politics—I‘ll tell you something that always interested me. We walked away from Najaf. Remember the Najaf issue? We were face to face with Muqtada al-Sadr and all of a sudden, we allow him to walk out with his arms. When? A couple days before the Republican Convention.
I was always struck by that timing. I think politics always takes over at the end.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Do you think Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is signalling his officers to move militarily based upon the political calender?
HERSH: No, I can‘t say I know anything about that. How would I possibly know what Rumsfeld is doing?
I do know that, look, he is a patriot. I disagree with him profoundly on everything. But do I think, ultimately, he would allow a decision to go forward? I hope not.
MATTHEWS: Why do we all like Rumsfeld? I do, too. I don‘t get it either, but we all like him.
HERSH: Well, he‘s got a certain...
MATTHEWS: And there‘s so much trouble in this foreign policy, so many questions to raise.
HERSH: I don‘t like his policies, but I like him.
MATTHEWS: I wish I could get him down under sodium pentathol sometime and see what he thinks.
Anyway, thank you, Sy Hersh.
The name of the book, “Chain of Command.” For an excerpt of “Chain of Command,” log on to HARDBALL.MSNBC.com.
When we come back, retired General Montgomery Meigs will join us with his response to Seymour Hersh‘s interview here today.
You‘re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
Retired Army General Montgomery Meigs is an MSNBC military analyst.
General, I‘ve got to ask you. The main thrust of what we heard from Sy Hersh tonight is that this came from the top, this abuse of prisoners, the whole shebang. What‘s your sense of this?
RET. GEN. MONTGOMERY MEIGS, NBC MILITARY ANALYST: I think it‘s too early to tell.
I‘m sure that there were policy issues that got in the way that confused people. I listened to what he said about this special compartmented group that was running around doing stuff. I don‘t know that for a fact. It‘s likely. It‘s possible. It‘s plausible. But right now, we don‘t have enough really good primary evidence on this.
MATTHEWS: Right.
MEIGS: And if you look through the book, a lot of it is sort of so-and-so said. But show me the documents. Show me the real hard proof of this kind of stuff.
MATTHEWS: What‘s our sense, being a military man, of the reaction by our guys and our women to the story, Abu Ghraib?
MEIGS: I think—all the people I have talked to, both retired and on active duty, are horrified by it.
MATTHEWS: They feel bad as fighting men and fighting women?
MEIGS: Absolutely. Absolutely.
MATTHEWS: They feel that this is a disgrace?
MEIGS: It‘s a terrible failure. You look at those pictures and you say to yourself, how could this have happened?
MATTHEWS: POWs, Geneva Convention. Prisoners of war in this war or insurgency, does it get dirtier when you‘re fighting an insurgency than it would normally be in the field?
MEIGS: The restrictions you have to put on the troops in terms of discipline have to be tougher. It‘s hard enough in conventional combat, when you are supposed to pick up prisoners who have just killed some of your buddies.
I mean, look, this is violent stuff. Very hard to get the troops to do the right thing. But you can. In this kind of insurgency thing, it‘s very, very difficult. And you‘ve got to try to do two things. What are the rules? Make the troops follow the rules. Don‘t treat your enemy as a subhuman, because the minute you start to lose respect for your enemy, two bad things happen. One, you underestimate him. Two, you can tend to do things that—or your troops can—that lead to this kind of behavior.
MATTHEWS: Do you think there was a morale situation where—or a military situation where you‘ve got a lot of guys in prison and you‘re guarding them, and you know that a lot of them were involved in IEDs, explosive devices, blowing limbs off of people and setting up these mines along the roadway? Is that how soldiers look at these guys?
MEIGS: Sure.
MATTHEWS: You were in combat. You may be here for a while, but I know we‘re still at war.
MEIGS: There‘s some of that going on.
Plus, remember, the unit that was taking care of these prisoners was not properly trained for it, was poorly led, was put under all kinds of pressure to get results. You have all these intelligent people running around. We‘re not clear which ones were Army and which ones were civilian and who was directing what to whom. That still isn‘t clear. And maybe the court-martials will bring that out for us.
MATTHEWS: Well, the big question to me is the police kind of question, which is, where did they get the hoods, where did they get the leashes, where did they get the dog collars? All the stuff we see in those gross pictures from Abu Ghraib look like they were issued. That‘s not the kind of stuff you bring from home for midnight sport.
(CROSSTALK)
MEIGS: The hoods were mostly sandbags.
MATTHEWS: Were they?
MEIGS: If you look carefully, a lot of those are sandbags.
Secondly...
MATTHEWS: They look awfully small for sandbags.
MEIGS: No.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Really?
MEIGS: Normal sandbags are about that big.
(CROSSTALK)
MEIGS: The other issue is, the dog handlers will have leashes. The dog handlers are going to have collars.
MATTHEWS: And that all would be available in that prison?
MEIGS: It would be available in the dog handler unit.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Where would the M.P.s get it?
MEIGS: Dog handlers were an M.P. unit.
MATTHEWS: Why would they go do something like that? Why would they go somewhere else to some other unit and try to get something issued to them?
MEIGS: They had dog handlers in the prison.
MATTHEWS: Right.
MEIGS: So if you‘ve got dog handlers in the prison, hey, I need a leash, that‘s easy to get. That‘s not a big question.
MATTHEWS: What is your view as a military man? Did this come from prisoners—I‘m sorry, did this come from the enlisted people who were in the M.P. unit there, the ones guarding the prison? Or did this come—the whole suggestion of how you humiliate someone sexually in this perverse way, do you think average G.I.s would think up this stuff? Do you think average reservists would think up this stuff?
MEIGS: I think it‘s a combination. We have already had individuals plead guilty to abuse that they initiated. The question that you always...
MATTHEWS: Was that a variation on what they saw was being done by the M.I., military intelligence people?
MEIGS: That‘s the issue. That‘s what I was getting to.
What you always ask in a situation like this, Chris, is, what is the command climate? What kind of subtle messages are being sent in that sort of unofficial way? What‘s going on there? And that really hasn‘t been developed yet. And hopefully as we go through these courts-martial, more and more of that will come out. And the reason I underline courts-martial, that‘s sworn testimony.
MATTHEWS: Yes. I would like to hear from the majors and the colonels. I would like to hear from the guys in the middle.
MEIGS: Well, I think you‘re going to hear from some more senior people as their defense counsels take them into courts-martial.
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about this war. We have a lot of military experts on MSNBC, and it‘s great to have them, like yourself. Is there a problem in questioning a war?
MEIGS: No.
MATTHEWS: For a retired officer, for a retired field officer?
MEIGS: I don‘t think so.
MATTHEWS: Field ranked.
MEIGS: I mean, look, we‘re citizens, just like everybody else.
MATTHEWS: Because you hear the scuttlebutt that people in the military don‘t like this war in Iraq. And then you get them on TV and it‘s very hard to get anybody to say that.
MEIGS: I don‘t think I would typify it that way.
I think the problem with this war is, we haven‘t really—we aren‘t directing our energy against the enemy‘s center of gravity. Look, if you‘re taking down a football team, you‘re running a business, what do I go to, to my competitor that takes him out of the game the quickest? The thing that takes al Qaeda out of the game the quickest and its surrogates is going to their ability to keep spinning off these cells and regenerating themselves.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
MEIGS: That‘s not our major effort.
MATTHEWS: That‘s not in Iraq.
MEIGS: Our major effort is—you just said it yourself.
MATTHEWS: OK. Well, that‘s been my skepticism from the beginning.
Anyway, thank you very much, General Montgomery Meigs.
Join us again tomorrow night at 7:00 Eastern for more HARDBALL. And then tomorrow at 9:00 Eastern, we‘ll be back for a special edition of HARDBALL. It‘s HARDBALL Wednesday from now on.
Right now, it‘s time for the “COUNTDOWN” with Keith.
END | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 4:30 pm Post subject: MER: Seymour Hersh protects Israel |
| From: "Ronald"
Subject: MER: Seymour Hersh protects Israel
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 14:49:10 -0400
Mark Bruzonsky's (MER) analysis below is right on target. Hersh turns out to be a unique mixture of someone who at one at the same time points to Israeli responsibility and disguises it. Here we see him pointing ludicrously to Iran instead of Israel as being behind the Iraq war as if people like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney et al , people who are evidently working in Israel's interest, didn't exist. It's too weird. Hersh's book on Israel's nuclear arsenal, The Sampson Option at one and the same time exposes Israel and justifies their nuclear policies, as if he's aware of the heat that he will take from the usual suspects. --RB
----- Original Message -----
From: cbrad4334@aol.com
To: net
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 6:22 PM
Subject: [eFreePalestine] Seymour Hersh
Sy Hersh - Used for Israeli Disinformation and Cover-Up?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MER Washington Scene:
Watch with MERTV Journalist Seymour Hersh speaking Sunday in Washington about what to expect from a Bush/Cheney/Neocon II Administration -- it's today the Feature Video at MIDDLEEAST.ORG.
Much Worse Yet To Come
Warns Journalist Sy Hersh
Iraq Torture Scandal - On Target but incomplete
Iran - Crafty Planted Disinformation?
Israel - Self-Censorship, Appologist, Cover-Up?
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 21 Sept: Last weekend at All Soul's Church in the heart of Washington the well-known journalist Seymour Hersh gave a chilling warning about what's yet to come if the Bush/Cheney/Neocons retain power in an election now looming just weeks away. Hersh is the author of the new book, Chain of Command : The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, an expansion of his New Yorker Magazine articles published earlier this year that single-handedly exposed the U.S. torture scandals in Iraq.
In addition to watching Hersh's Sunday talk this interview with Hersh also was published last weekend in Salon.com. Note the surprising lead about Iran about which there is very little in the interview, and quite literally nothing of substance. Indeed one does have to wonder if Hersh hasn't been set up by some of his long-time big-time Israeli spook friends when it comes to pushing the confounding thesis that it was "Iran not Israel" that pushed the U.S. into invading/occupying Iraq. And maybe even something more than set up, for Hersh simply refuses to really get into the Israeli angle of things in so many cases. He doesn't focus on how the Israelis have been using horrendous torture, bombing, infiltration, and assassination techniques for years now, with ever-growing CIA and Pentagon involvment. He doesn't focus on the powerful Israeli-Jewish lobby in Washington -- in fact he seems to avoid it like the plague. He dosn't focus on the interconnections in the Middle East between the mis-nomered 'peace process', Iraq, and events throughout the region from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon to Turkey to Pakistan. And he doesn't highlight the clear connections between the Washington Neocons whom he does criticize -- though rarely ever mentioning that most of them are Jewish and hard-line Zionists -- and the intimate practically conspiratorial connections they have had for years with the Israelis.
In fact, the more one thinks about this, the more one reaches the possible conclusion that while Hersh is on target (though incomplete) when it comes to the torture scandal, when it comes to the geostrategic, especially when it comes to matters relating to Israel, Hersh may well be being used for disinformation and continually engages in a kind of self-censorship and cover-up.
Bottom Line: Take Hersh very seriously when he is writing about massacres and torture -- his long-time specialties since Vietnam and his New York Times days. But when it comes to matters relating to Israel and geopolitics and now Iran -- which he admits in this interview to be "too cosmic" for him -- be extra skeptical. Hersh, liberal Jewish Democrat himself, has a long history in Washington of not being willing to seriously report about the crucially-important realities involving the Israeli-Jewish lobby. And after the trouble he had years ago with his limited book The Sampson Complex Hersh seems to have made extra efforts to stay on the good side of his 'liberal' Jewish and Israeli friends who not only make up a considerable segment of the book-buying public and New Yorker subscribers but whose influence in the American media is so tremendously powerful...and thus dangerous. MER
Seymour Hersh's Alternative History of Bush's War
By Mary Jacoby
Salon.com - 18 September 2004: The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Seymour Hersh has written more than two dozen stories for the New Yorker magazine on the secret machinations of the Bush administration in what the White House calls the "war on terrorism." His revelations, including an investigation of a group of neoconservatives at the Pentagon who set up their own special intelligence unit to press the case for invading Iraq, have consistently broken news.
Arguably his most important scoop came last spring, when the legendary investigative reporter received the now infamous photos of prisoner abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq, as well as the explosive report on the abuse by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. The story Hersh published in the New Yorker, followed by a report by CBS's "60 Minutes," created an international scandal for the Bush administration and led to congressional hearings.
In a new book, "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," Hersh expands upon his work in the New Yorker to contribute new insights and revelations. He discloses how a CIA analyst's report on abuses against captured Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, made its way to the White House in 2002, putting National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on notice two years before the Abu Ghraib scandal that human rights violations were taking place in U.S.-run prisons abroad.
In March 2002, Hersh writes, a military action against al-Qaida, known as Operation Anaconda, was botched in Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan. Billed at the time as a success story by the Pentagon, it was in fact a debacle, plagued by squabbling between the services, bad military planning and avoidable deaths of American soldiers, as well as the escape of key al-Qaida leaders, likely including Osama bin Laden.
Hersh's story is well known. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which American soldiers killed more than 500 civilians. He is the author of eight books, including 1983's "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House." And, since 1998, he's been a staff writer for the New Yorker.
I visited with Hersh this week in his tiny, unadorned two-room office in downtown Washington, where he works amid a whirring fax machine, a constantly ringing phone and delivery men knocking on the door with packages. A map of the world, slightly off-kilter, is taped to the wall behind his desk, which is piled high with papers.
He speaks quickly, answering questions before the sentences can be completed, and hopscotches through conversational topics, as if everything's a race against time. "I have some Brazilians coming in. You know, just to talk about ... wait! Turn it off for a second," he says, gesturing at my recorder. He shares with me a lead he's working on. He flashes me a look at an intriguing document before stealing it away. "OK, let's talk about the book. I've gone over the top here. I'm not pimping anymore. I'm now a full-fledged whore, with red paint," he says, pretending to smear rouge on his cheeks. He loosens his tie. "Let's get on with it!"
What is new in the book, and what is based on your published work?
I'd say about 35 percent of the opening material on Abu Ghraib is new, maybe about 15,000 words, altogether about, I don't know what percentage. Maybe about a third, maybe a little less, is either new or revised or significantly changed. But the bulk of the book is the articles I did, put in a different form and combined in a different way by a very competent editor of mine. This book was edited by the New Yorker and fact-checked by the New Yorker. Everything that is new in the book was fact-checked by the New Yorker.
Who was the editor?
Her name is Amy Davidson. She's a senior editor, and she's great. A man named John Bennet, who is a wonderful editor, was my editor for the first couple of years, and then Amy came on because John's good that way. John is very avuncular, and he wants other people to start editing significant stuff, because among other things, he's always stuck with the big pieces. It was fact-checked by the same people, and the publisher paid for it. And Remnick, to his everlasting credit, David Remnick the editor, agreed that even though there's a very good story at the beginning - the whole Condi Rice meeting issue - he said publish it in your book and go make some money. It was sort of nice of them. It reflects well on the New Yorker. His point was, your being out there reflects well on the New Yorker. We all fight for making a living.
To talk about the new revelations ...
Let me tell you the one I like the most; aside from the obvious stuff about Abu Ghraib, there was a story I didn't write two years ago about Operation Anaconda. I didn't write it because, oh, a lot of complicated reasons. One, it was very hostile to our soldiers, and the military, and General [Tommy] Franks, and [Major Gen. Frank] Hagenbeck, a very nasty story. And then secondly, there was bad blood between the Marine Corps, and General Franks, and CentComm and the Air Force, and it just didn't, uh ... it's one of those stories. The real reason in a funny way is that even though my sources were angry in talking about it, it's one of the stories they really would have regretted, because you're talking about internecine warfare among the services. It's about boys ... anyway.
They would have regretted it?
They would have regretted talking to me about that. In there is an account of the Marines insisting that General Franks sign an MOU, a memorandum of understanding, of how the Marines would be used. We're talking about in combat, this kind of war going on between the services. And, you know, I probably guess it was the right decision, because I had to do obviously an alternate history of the war. And obviously there were certain people talking to me. People on the inside know what's going on. And so, I probably agree it was OK to do it. But I felt bad when I saw [former Gen. Wesley] Clark later. I had talked to Clark about the story at the time. Then two years later I ran into him when he was running for president, or right before, and he said, "Whatever happened to that story?" I said, "Well, I just decided not to write it." And he said, "Well, you should have. It's your job."
He's an amazingly straight guy. A difficult guy. "You should have." He basically told me, "Punk kid. You didn't know what you were doing." I also respect him because ...
Let's talk about some of these revelations.
Oh, so that was the one I liked the most.
But why didn't you write it at the time? You thought it would be too hostile?
No! There was, you know, it was a tough story about troops running from the battlefield, you know; it was just a tough story. [Hersh is referring to the lost battle of Anaconda.] I was writing a lot of other tough stories, and, uh ... it just didn't work. Let's put it that way.
Isn't that what a lot of the mainstream press get accused of - certainly not you - but holding back important information out of sensitivity for the feelings of the nation?
Ain't none of us perfect. It just seemed at the time, some of the people who were talking to me at the time, it would cause a big stink, and some of the Marines who were talking to me would not talk anymore. I also know, in order to do the story right, I would have had to go find some of the guys who were in the mission ... There was a lot of reporting to do, and I don't know, I just didn't do it.
But now you've gone back and revisited it in the book?
Oh yeah. Give me the book. I'll show you right where it is. So I'm not backing off. It was a story that should have been written. Of course I should have written it.
Let's talk about this anecdote about Vice President Cheney saying there would be no resignations [over the Abu Ghraib scandal]. Your publisher emphasized this in the press release, and I wanted to know ...
Now, wait a minute. Are you asking about a press release? Excuse me. That's like asking me about a headline.
Just tell me why you feel it's important.
What? Tell me why I feel it's important that Cheney called up?
What does it reveal?
It's more complicated than you think. For one thing, it reveals that they're all as one. The notion that they're going to fire [Donald] Rumsfeld, as people actually entertained, is comical. After 9/11 he gets in this swaggering mode and says we're going to smoke those terrorists out of their snake holes. And then it's clear there's prisoner abuse and torture going on. But does Cheney call up and say, "Oh, my God! What's going on over there, Don? What kind of craziness are you doing to those prisoners? This is devastating to our campaign. What's going on?" I don't hear that. What I hear is, "Let's all pull together and get past it." Very interesting.
You're an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who ...
I'm an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed.
Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?
Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn't it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn't believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that's moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.
They thought it would happen quickly?
Very quickly. I don't have any empirical basis for it, but if I had to bet, the plan was to go right into Syria. That's why the fourth division was hanging for so long in the desert out there right on the border with Syria. In the early days of the war, before this government figured out how much trouble they were in - which took them a long time - they would drive practice runs, somebody told me. Again, I'm just saying what was told to me; this is not something I reported, but I was told pretty reliably, they were doing practice runs that amounted to the distance from the border to Damascus. It's my belief always - again this is not empirical, it's sort of my heuristic view - that the real reason [Paul] Wolfowitz and others were mad at [Gen. Eric] Shinseki when he testified before the war about [the need for] 200 or 300 troops - it wasn't about the numbers - was, "Didn't he get it? What had he been listening to in the tank? Didn't we explain to him in the tank what we told the chiefs? This is the way it's going to be. Didn't he understand what it's all about?" He didn't get it. He hadn't understood what they meant. This was all going to fall down. It was all going to be peaches and cream. And Shinseki just didn't get it! It wasn't about the numbers. He wasn't a member of the clan. He didn't join the utopia crowd.
You've answered one of my questions. Let's elaborate on it. Clearly there's very little that's, well, in touch with reality in these policies.
Ha, ha, ha. It's so easy for you to say that!
But it's not so clear actually. Many Americans ...
I think I used actually ... I'll get you this word [grabs book from my lap and begins flipping through it] ... there was a "fantastical" quality to the White House's deliberations. Fantastical. That was the phrase I used.
Yes, I read that. And that was my next question. With Kissinger, there were lies, and he knew exactly what he was doing ...
Yes, one of his aides was assigned - literally assigned on one of the secret flights they made to China - to keep track of the lies, who knew what. I think they used to describe it as keeping track of what statements were made, but essentially it was who was being told what, because so many different people were being told different things. But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it's not! It's not about oil. It's about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it's idealism that's dead wrong. It's like one of the far-right Christian credos. It's a faith-based policy. Only it wasn't a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish.
So you don't think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative ...
I used to pray it was! We'd be in better shape. Is there anything worse than idealism that doesn't conform to reality? You have an unrealistic policy.
It seems that they are very selective not only about what kind of information they present to the public but even in what they decide to believe in themselves.
I think these guys in their naiveté and single-mindedness have been so completely manipulated by - not the Israelis - but the Iranians. The Iranians always wanted us in. I think there's a lot of evidence that Iran had much to do with [Ahmed] Chalabi's disinformation [about nonexistent Iraqi WMD]. I think there were people in the CIA who suspected this all along, but of course they couldn't get their view in. I think the Senate Intelligence Committee's report's a joke, the idea this CIA was misleading the president. They get some analysts in and say, "Were you pressured?" And they all say, "No, excuse me?" Is that how you do an investigation? The truth of the matter is, there was tremendous pressure put on the analysts [to produce reports that bolstered the case for war]. It's not as if anybody issued a diktat. But everybody understood what to do.
Talk about the ...
Wait. You're missing something now. The Iranian stuff. I think Iran probably had more to do with Chalabi's information than people know.
We know that Chalabi had Iranian agents on his payroll.
Yeah, but, well, he admits to that. He had a villa in Tehran. But basically I think Iran was very interested in getting us involved. We get knocked down a peg; they become the big boys on the block.
Are you working on this now?
Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'm reporting on it. But I'm not working on it. I'm just - it's too cosmic.
Was Chalabi the conduit?
I think Chalabi thought he could handle the Iranians. They were helping him all along with disinformation and documents he could give to the White House. Don't forget, once the neocons decided to go to Iraq in the face of all evidence, they were like a super-reverse suction machine, and anything in the world that furthered the argument that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was hot. I call it stove-piping, because it's a technical work of art. But it was much more than that. It was anything - vavoom! - into the president's [office]. It was so amateurish, it was comical. How hard was it to get some crapola into the White House about WMD without the CIA looking at it?
Do you have any idea of the origin of the forged Niger documents that Bush cited in his January 2003 State of the Union address as proof that Iraq was seeking uranium to make nuclear weapons?
I don't really know. I know that they think it was an inside job. And my idea is that there were people in the government who knew that you could give these guys [the neoconservatives] anything, and within three days, if it said the right thing, there would be a principals meeting [of the senior foreign policy officials] at the White House on it. And one idea would be to get them in a position where they really walked on their dongs, in a way. Give them some bad stuff. They'd have a big meeting about it and [the neocons] would finally be exposed as ludicrous. Nobody anticipated that [the forged documents] would end up in the State of the Union address. I mean, it's beyond belief. I don't believe in these conspiracy theories, about [Michael] Ledeen [a neocon operative] and these things. He's too smart for that. Because it was designed to be caught.
Do you think the responsibility for Abu Ghraib goes directly up to Rumsfeld?
I think they [Rumsfeld and senior administration officials] had a chance in the fall of 2002 to set the limits, and they chose not to. I don't think the CIA analyst who did the report was very explicit in his written document about the abuses. That isn't the way to get ahead. But he certainly told his peers there was a real mess there, so they know it. All she [Rice] had to do was put the word out there. The chain of command is very responsive. If you put out the word that you're not going to tolerate this crap, it's not going to happen. But that's not the word they put out.
Nobody would have countenanced in his right mind Abu Ghraib. But then again, if you think a bunch of kids from West Virginia understood the way to the soul of an Arab man is to take off his clothes and photograph him ... they didn't know that. Somebody told it to them. And that's the thing about the military. In loco parentis. They have an obligation to take our children and protect them, not only from land mines but from doing stupid things that could land them in jail.
The book is filled with reporting that shows how newspapers either got it wrong, or simply accepted the official version of events. What do you think of the performance of the main newspapers people look to as sources of information?
Well, so here I am, I'm busy trying to peddle a book and you're asking me to commit self-immolation! (Laughs). Well, all I'll say is, it speaks for itself.
"Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib"
By Seymour M. Hersh
HarperCollins - 416 pages | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 5:21 pm Post subject: Israeli Interrogators with US Special Forces in Iraq/Afghan |
| Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 14:38:00 -0700 (PDT)
Dear Mr. Pyes,
With regard to the your Los Angeles Times article (which was discussed on the 'To the Point' nation radio program yesterday on PRI which one can listen to via the link at www.moretothepoint.com), General Janis Karpinski (of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal) had mentioned that she had met an Israeli interrogator working with the Delta Force (special forces) interrogation team at the detention facility near the Baghdad airport (so there is a strong possibility that Israeli interrogators were also working with US special forces in Afghanistan - perhaps with Delta Force there as well):
http://www.latimes.com/news/yahoo/la-fg-detain21sep21,1,4636052,print.story
You can hear General Karpinski's BBC interview about such via scrolling down to the link at the following URL (the Jane's article about Israelis interrogators working for the USA in Iraq is also linked at the following URL):
Israeli Interrogators in Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/07/03/breaking-news-bbc-airs-israeli-torture-connection-to-iraq.php
Forwarded:
Israeli torture tactics (hooding, sexual abuse, etc) used at Mosul Prison in Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/20/israeli-torture-tactics-in-mosul-iraq-as-well.php
Israeli Interrogators in Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/07/03/breaking-news-bbc-airs-israeli-torture-connection-to-iraq.php
Zionists and torture in Iraq:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/08/19/the-zionists-and-torture-in-iraq.php
Treason at the Pentagon:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/08/treason-in-high-places-pentagon-zionists-aipac-and-israel.php
You might also be interested in James Bamford's new book ('A Pretext for War') which conveys the motivation for why the USA has been attacked (at the World Trade Center in 1993 and on September 11th, 2001). 'A Pretext for War' also conveys the neoconservative agenda for war in Iraq and beyond:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/07/22/james-bamford-on-msnbc-hardball-about-a-pretext-for-war.php
http://www.latimes.com/news/yahoo/la-fg-detain21sep21,1,2698482.story
U.S. Probing Alleged Abuse of Afghans
Inquiry focuses on an 18-year-old soldier who died while in American custody. He and seven other prisoners were tortured, witnesses say.
By Craig Pyes and Mark Mazzetti
Special to The Times
September 21, 2004
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — American military investigators have opened a criminal probe into allegations of murder and torture involving an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit who died while in U.S. custody last year. The new inquiry, which will also focus on the alleged torture of seven other Afghan soldiers, was confirmed Monday by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command.
The previously undisclosed death occurred in March 2003 after the eight soldiers were arrested at a remote firebase operated here by the U.S. Army Special Forces, according to witnesses and an Afghan military investigation.
Motivation for those arrests remains cloaked in Afghan political intrigue. The action was requested by a provincial governor feuding with local military commanders, an Afghan intelligence report says.
In the end, none of the eight men was charged with a crime or linked to anti-government conduct.
The dead soldier, identified as Jamal Naseer, a member of the Afghan Army III Corps, was severely beaten over a span of at least two weeks, according to a report prepared for the Afghan attorney general. A witness described his battered corpse as being "green and black" with bruises.
Alleged American mistreatment of the detainees included repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks, being hung upside down and toenails being torn off, according to Afghan investigators and an internal memorandum prepared by a United Nations delegation that interviewed the surviving soldiers.
Some of the Afghan soldiers were beaten to the point that they could not walk or sit, Afghan doctors and other witnesses said.
Afghan military prosecutors looking into the incident privately recommended more than a year ago that the Afghan attorney general's office pursue a murder case against unnamed American soldiers at the Gardez firebase. No action on the recommendation was taken, but the prosecutors say the case is still open.
The prosecutors' confidential 117-page investigative report recently was reviewed by a Washington-based nonprofit educational organization, the Crimes of War Project, and the information was provided to The Times. The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, or CID, stymied in an earlier attempt to investigate the incident, launched its probe over the weekend in response to questions by The Times about the Afghan report.
The eight-man Afghan army unit was taken prisoner as part of a campaign by U.S. forces and the local governor to bring Paktia province in southeastern Afghanistan under the control of the central government, Afghan and U.N. officials said. American forces suspected that some Afghan commanders were selling weapons to anti-government forces, they said.
After Naseer's death, the seven other troops were transferred to Afghan police custody and released without charges. None was linked to Al Qaeda or the forces of the ousted Taliban regime.
Former Atty. Gen. for the Armed Forces Yar Mohammed Tamkin, who directed the Afghan investigation, concluded in the report that there was a "strong possibility" that Jamal Naseer was "murdered as the result of torture" at the hands of his American captors.
He added that under Afghan law, "it is necessary for our legal system to investigate the torture of the seven individuals and the murder of Jamal, son of Ghazi, and other similar acts committed by foreign nationals."
One witness account provided to Tamkin's investigators came from Naseer's brother, an Afghan army commander also among those detained at Gardez. He told investigators in a statement that soon after Naseer died, two "high-ranking" U.S. soldiers squabbled near the body.
One American, he said, grabbed the other by the collar, scolded him for torturing the youth and said he "should have been shot with a bullet," according to the report.
None of the suspected Americans was identified in the Afghan military's investigation.
The 20th Special Forces Group was in charge of the Special Forces mission throughout Afghanistan at the time of the Gardez incident. It is a National Guard group based in Birmingham, Ala., that also draws soldiers from units in Florida and Mississippi. Officials said it was customarily assigned to Latin American operations.
The 20th group was replaced countrywide on March 15, 2003, by the 3rd Special Forces Group from Ft. Bragg, N.C., U.S. officials said.
'The Gardez 7'
In Washington, Pentagon officials said they could find no reports passed up the chain of command as required when a death occurs in U.S. custody, raising questions about possible efforts by American troops in Afghanistan to cover up the incident.
Earlier this year, the CID received a tip about the incident from an Afghan prison official but said it was unable to investigate the matter because of a lack of information.
The case of the "Gardez 7," as CID officials dubbed it, was filed away as unfounded because investigators had no records, victims' names or witnesses, said Christopher E. Coffey, an Army detective based at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
Access to the Afghan military report on the death of Naseer was obtained during an independent investigation of prisoner abuse allegations by the Crimes of War Project.
The group was established in 1999 to provide information that could "lead to greater pressure to prevent [war crimes] and to punish those who commit them." It is described on its website as "a collaboration of journalists, lawyers and scholars dedicated to raising public awareness of the laws of war."
Coffey said that with the new information, the CID would pursue charges of murder and of abuse of a person in U.S. custody.
"We're trying to figure out who was running the base," Coffey said. "We don't know what unit was there. There are no records. The reporting system is broke across the board. Units are transferred in and out. There are no SOPs [standard operating procedures] … and each unit acts differently."
Remote bases such as Gardez are usually operated by Special Forces and intelligence agencies and report to special operations commanders. Even representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross are not allowed to visit such bases.
"Gardez is the worst facility — it is three or four times as bad as any other base in Afghanistan," said Coffey, whose CID group has been assigned to Afghanistan since April 2003.
Disclosures this year of U.S. military abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison damaged America's image around the world, prompting a series of high-level military reviews by the Pentagon.
A report last month by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger found that prisoner abuse by interrogators in Iraq could be traced, in part, to the use of unauthorized techniques that had previously been applied in Afghanistan.
In July, an investigation of detainee operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Army's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, disclosed 94 cases of alleged abuse, including 39 deaths in U.S. custody — 20 of them suspected homicides. The report said the inspector general had found "no incidents of abuse that had not been reported through command channels."
No Documentation
But Naseer's death was not among those counted. The absence of documentation appears to undermine findings that all abuse incidents were properly reported through the chain of command.
Witness accounts provided to Afghan military investigators suggest the possibility that U.S. military officials at Gardez tried to distance themselves from the incident almost immediately after the death. All seven survivors and Naseer's bruised corpse were turned over to local police later the same day, after American officers sought assistance from the governor and local security officials, according to the Afghan military report and interviews.
The Afghan soldiers were transferred to police custody on the governor's orders — with no arrest warrants, no criminal charges filed and no documentation of Naseer's death, Police Chief Abdullah Mujahid acknowledged in a letter to the provincial governor.
The letter was included among evidence in the Afghan military investigation.
At the time, the Gardez police chief told officials of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, that he was keeping the prisoners in custody only at the request of U.S.-led coalition forces.
An American Special Forces commander also had threatened to kill the chief if he released any coalition prisoners, said a UNAMA official who witnessed the warning.
Gardez police held the men for a month and a half with as many as 13 other inmates in a "secret detention room" built for five prisoners, according to the attorney general's report. While in police custody, the prisoners were treated by local doctors. They told UNAMA that they had received no medical attention during their 17-day detention at the Special Forces base.
At the jail, the men were still wearing the soiled clothes they had on when they were taken into custody, Afghan doctors and other independent witnesses said, and their wounds were not bandaged or treated. Eventually, the men were transferred to a prison near Kabul, but only after their injuries "showed signs of improvement," the military report said.
Their arrival at the Kabul prison without arrest warrants or criminal charges prompted the Afghan government investigation.
The following account is based on evidence and information developed in that investigation, as well as the inquiries conducted by UNAMA and the Crimes of War Project. It was culled primarily from documents and testimony in the Afghan report, the UNAMA internal memorandum and interviews with witnesses and sources familiar with people and events surrounding the death of Naseer.
Local Intrigue
On the morning of March 1, 2003, a group of eight Afghan soldiers manned a frozen military checkpoint at the Sato Kandaw Pass in southeastern Afghanistan's Paktia province, a strategic outpost on the trade route to Pakistan. It was also a crossroads for political rivalries.
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, then the special presidential envoy to Afghanistan, had months earlier declared Paktia one of the three most troubled regions in the country in terms of warlord violence. Local intelligence agents also reported suspicions that some military units allied with interim President Hamid Karzai's central government were selling arms to Taliban elements.
Provincial Gov. Raz Mohammed Dalili, a Karzai ally, was being challenged for regional power by tribal warlord Bacha Khan. Local military and police commanders loyal to the central government also opposed Khan but feuded as well with the governor and among themselves.
One way feuding Afghan factions settle old scores or seek fresh advantage is by reporting their enemies to the Americans as Al Qaeda or Taliban members, an Afghan legal expert said.
"It doesn't matter if you're a criminal or not," said Lal Gul, chairman of the Afghan Commission for Human Rights. "People can say what they want against you. The Special Forces, if they want to arrest you, will just take you away…. They can't distinguish between real and false suspects."
One of the governor's projects at the time was to clear the roads of illegal checkpoints run by provincial army commanders.
Dalili said in a recent interview that the Karzai government and the U.S. Embassy had asked him to work closely with American Special Forces in the region. In Kabul, Dalili was considered too weak to take on local commanders alone. The governor said he asked "Mike" — the nom de guerre of the Special Forces commander at Gardez — to move against the Sato Kandaw checkpoint.
UNAMA officials in Gardez said they knew a succession of Special Forces commanders as "Mike." The "Mike" in charge during March 2003 was so aggressive in his avowed mission to rid the country of "bad guys" that a fellow soldier called him "Crazy Mike," a UNAMA official said.
At a March 10 meeting of local security officials sponsored by UNAMA, Mike reportedly warned local commanders that he would kill any one of them if they released his Taliban prisoners or sided with anti-coalition forces. One official in attendance said he stood up and interrupted.
" 'Mike, sit down. This is the United Nations. We don't talk about shooting or killing people here…. If you want to tell him you'll kill him, commence your own meeting and tell him there.' "
Today, Dalili continues to speak proudly about his association with American Special Forces and is effusive in his praise of Mike.
"My only purpose was to bring peace and security," he said in the interview.
Afghan military intelligence in Paktia took a dimmer view. They concluded in a report that the governor ordered the arrests of the men at the Sato Kandaw checkpoint to defame the Afghan Army III Corps commanders with whom he was feuding.
The arrested soldiers also blamed warlord Khan, who coveted control of Sato Kandaw Pass, for providing false intelligence about the soldiers to the American Special Forces.
Tea and Shackles
Most of the eight Afghan soldiers on duty at the pass were in a basement shelter when the U.S. Special Forces unit and its interpreters drove up to the checkpoint about 11 a.m. The "foreign friends" asked to join them for tea and they were invited inside, the men recalled.
The Afghans were led by Naseer Ahmad, known as Commander Pare, a 25-year-old soldier with a vivid scar from the corner of one eye to the lobe of an ear. A thick shock of black hair burst from under his pakol hat. The youngest Afghan soldier was Pare's brother, the slightly built, bearded 18-year-old Jamal Naseer, a new recruit looking for his first permanent job. The security checkpoint was heavily armed, according to the Afghan report.
Just as sugar was being put in the cups, the Americans "pointed their weapons at us and told us, 'Don't move!' " one of the Afghans told prosecutors.
According to accounts from the arrested men, they were disarmed, handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded. Some said they were struck by rifle butts.
"We were taken like animals" to the Gardez firebase, Momin, one of those arrested, told prosecutors. "The behavior of the authorities was completely wild."
17 Days in March
The men said they were interrogated individually. They were asked about Al Qaeda. They were grilled about stealing wood from trucks grinding north over the pass toward Kabul.
The Afghans said they were pummeled, kicked, karate-chopped, hung upside down and struck repeatedly with sticks, rubber hoses and plastic-covered cables. Some said they were immersed in cold water, then made to lie in the snow. Some said they were kept blindfolded for long periods and subjected to electric shocks to their toes.
One of the men, Abdul Rahim, said the beatings stopped only after he convinced the Americans that he was simply the unit's cook.
"They beat us a lot. They tore off our nails…. I was beaten very hard by punches and kicks," Momin, who, like many Afghans, goes by one name, told investigators. "I was seriously injured from the beatings."
In his statement to prosecutors, Noor Mohammed said: "They put us in the water and on the snow and beat us up…. They were throwing us against the wall."
Afghan authorities found substantial corroboration for such claims from witnesses describing the soldiers' physical condition after 17 days in U.S. custody.
Gardez Police Chief Mujahid told military prosecutors that when the men arrived at his jail from the American compound, many had injuries that appeared to be the result of severe impacts. A doctor was called to treat the prisoners.
Dr. Aziz Ulrahman, who worked at the Gardez Hospital, examined Commander Pare that night at the police station. He told the Crimes of War Project that the man's feet were swollen and black and blue, injuries "caused by blunt-force trauma."
The UNAMA delegation interviewed the men at the Gardez jail and described similar injuries in a confidential memo dated March 26, 2003. It reported that two of the men were visibly wounded and one was unable to walk as a result of what he said were beatings to his knees and legs. The men unanimously blamed U.S. soldiers for their injuries, the U.N. team said.
The delegation recommended an investigation into possible human rights violations, torture and other cruel and inhumane treatment by Special Forces personnel.
In an interview, UNAMA officials said they did not know the status of that recommendation.
A Cold, Quiet End
Witnesses remembered it was a bitterly cold day when American soldiers half-carried Commander Pare's younger brother to the warmth of the cook's room at the U.S. firebase. A wood stove held off the late winter chill outside.
But Jamal Naseer was not comforted. He complained to the witnesses of pains in his abdomen. He was so badly bruised he could not walk unaided. After a short time he asked for help getting outside to urinate.
Two Afghans working in the cook's room lifted the 18-year-old under each arm and eased him out the door. In an interview, one of the men who asked not to be named recalled that the young man started to loosen his trousers, then went limp and collapsed to the ground.
The men knelt beside him. They saw his eyes roll upward in a frozen stare. The young soldier died in their arms. It was about midday, the witness said.
Hours later, Commander Pare was brought to his brother's side in a long tent in the prisoner compound, he told a reporter. Apparent efforts by the camp's medical personnel to resuscitate Naseer had failed.
"After I entered the room, I observed that a plastic tube was in my brother's mouth and an injection into his arm," he told investigators. "Meanwhile, three senior [U.S. soldiers] entered and asked the translator who had done the beating…. At this moment, [one soldier] grabbed [another soldier] by the collar and said that he should not have been tortured and should have been shot with a bullet."
Pare said the American officers left, then one returned and offered personal condolences. He said the American told him there had been a misunderstanding.
"They told me that they respected my religion and they asked for forgiveness in mistreating us," Pare told Afghan investigators. "Afterward, they asked what they could do to help me."
The commander said he refused their offer of money for burial expenses. He said he would burn anything given to him by the Americans rather than "spoil the martyrdom of my brother."
Later, the Afghan who had witnessed Naseer's death came to visit Pare. They both wept over the body. The witness later told a reporter he was deeply saddened by the death. "Whether he was innocent or guilty, he was still a Muslim."
The man helped Pare turn the youth's body to face Mecca. Pare sat beside his brother's remains until 10 p.m., until a police vehicle arrived to transport it to the hospital.
At the hospital, doctors were unwilling to conduct an autopsy to determine officially the cause of Naseer's death. They were fearful police would return and beat them, according to a deputy hospital administrator later interviewed by Afghan prosecutors.
What exists of an official death record was provided in a formal statement by a hospital security guard named Haji Abdul Qayum, who prepared the body for burial.
In his statement to prosecutors, Qayum described himself as "a Muslim eyewitness and … someone who has seen the corpse of Jamal."
Describing the state of the corpse after it was picked up from the American compound, the security guard said in his statement: "The body seemed green and black. The area around his knees was injured and was black, and his toes were swollen and his right elbow was bruised and seemed to be burned."
Qayum said in a later interview with a reporter that Naseer's "face was completely swollen, as were his palms, and the soles of his feet were swollen double in size. The face was dark and looked like it was burned, and both eyes were swollen shut."
He recalled that when he stripped away the dead man's clothes, a length of insulated cable fell out of a pant leg. He said it had copper loops at each end. He said he discarded it.
Naseer's mother also attested to the body's condition. In a statement to prosecutors she said, "I observed his entire body, with wounds to his chest and legs and injuries all over his body."
Foreign Friends
Within hours, Americans contacted the governor and other security officials to get the corpse and to transfer the remaining detainees to the custody of Gardez police, according to the military report. The transfers were completed during the night of March 16 and into the next morning on the governor's personal order, the report said.
The transfer set in motion a number of inquires by Afghan civilian and military authorities to determine why the dostan kharagi, or foreign friends, as they referred to the Americans, had arrested and allegedly tortured their soldiers, and on what grounds the men were being held.
In the end, none of the concerned agencies said they had evidence that the men had committed any crimes, or were linked to anti-government elements.
The sole reason for their continued detention, the investigators concluded, was because the Americans wanted the prisoners hidden until their wounds had time to heal.
The men remained in custody another month and a half. Gardez police finally transferred them to the national prison facility near Kabul.
But in Kabul, prison authorities again questioned on what legal grounds the soldiers were being held and asked the Afghan attorney general of the armed forces to investigate.
Afghanistan's attorney general ordered that the case be fully investigated by military prosecutors. A request by Afghanistan's Army III Corps for an explanation of the incident from U.S. military officials received no response, according to documents in the Afghan report to the attorney general.
Much of that lengthy report is written in longhand Dari. Official statements by illiterate soldiers were commonly stamped with their fingerprints after the statements were read back to them.
In the end, the key findings were confined to one page of the report.
The first was that "the seven soldiers who had been transferred to the Kabul prison were being held without evidence of guilt." In response, the attorney general immediately ordered their release.
Second, there was "a strong possibility that one of those arrested, Jamal, son of Ghazi, had been murdered by coalition forces as a result of being tortured." The authors cited the 14th amendment of the penal code of Afghanistan to keep the case open for further investigation. To date, the attorney general has not acted on that recommendation.
The dogeared dossier has been filed away in a provincial outpost. Under Afghan law, there is a 10-year statute of limitations running on any future criminal prosecution of the case, one of the prosecutors said.
Prosecutor Abdulghani Kochai said no one involved in the case on the Afghan side was willing to quit. The mother of Jamal Naseer, he said, wants to eventually testify against those she believes killed her son.
"She cut away a piece of skin from his leg showing the marks of torture, and has wrapped it in a scarf to use as evidence on that day."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Freelance reporter Pyes reported from Afghanistan, where he also prepared investigative reports for the Crimes of War Project. Times staff writer Mazzetti reported from Washington. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2004 10:56 pm Post subject: Seymour Hirsh at Berkeley, California - A must read |
| Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2004 3:13 PM
Subject: Seymour Hirsh at Berkeley, California - A must read
A must read especially for the Bush advocates here and Germany (one only).
"My parents were immigrants," Hersh said. "They came here because America meant something…the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us."
Published on Tuesday, October 12, 2004 by the University of California-Berkeley
Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh Spills the Secrets of the Iraq Quagmire and the War on Terror
by Bonnie Azab Powell
BERKELEY – The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).
The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"
From My Lai to Abu Ghraib
That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as "to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty…to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong." He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey.
Hersh was working the phone with sources up until the minute the presidential debate began, which he watched with a crowd in North Gate Hall.
His country has not always thanked him for it — neocon Pentagon adviser Richard Perle has called Hersh "the closest thing we have to a terrorist," while his 1998 book on John F. Kennedy's administration, "The Dark Side of Camelot," cost him many friends on the left. But Hersh's reputation remains more bulletproof than most. The author of eight books, he first received worldwide recognition (and the Pulitzer) in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. 1982's "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," painted Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and won Hersh the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography.
Most recently, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Hersh has relentlessly ferreted out the behind-the-scenes deals, trickery, and blunders associated with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in May 2003, he was the first American reporter to state unequivocally that we would not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (A mea culpa from a Slate journalist who doubted Hersh on WMDs also inadvertently confirms his prescient track record.) And in April of this year, he broke the story of how U.S. soldiers had digitally documented their torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The several articles he wrote for the New Yorker about Abu Ghraib have been updated and edited into his latest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib."
"Bush scares the hell of me"
Hersh came to Berkeley at the invitation of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the California First Amendment Coalition. His appearance in the packed ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union was the fitting end to a week of high-profile events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
The Hersh event began only minutes after the second debate between President George W. Bush and John Kerry concluded. Krasny naturally asked Hersh — who had watched the debate at North Gate Hall stone-faced in the middle of a rowdy crowd — what he thought of the match.
"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what [Bush] thinks."
With that, he was off and running. One could safely say that for the next hour, Hersh proceeded to scare the hell out of most of the audience by detailing the gaps between what they knew and what he hears is actually going on in Iraq.
While his writing is dense but digestible, in person Hersh speaks with the rambling urgency of a street-corner doomsayer, leaping from point to point and anecdote to anecdote and frequently failing to finish his clauses, let alone his sentences. His train of thought can be difficult to catch a ride on. This evening, it was a challenge for Krasny to slow him down long enough to get a word or question in edgewise. For example, here's a slice of raw Hersh on the current situation in Iraq:
I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside — and there are a lot of good people inside — are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place — and here's what really irritates me again, about the press — since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 — the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordinance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.
And yet — despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the horrific number of Iraqi casualties — Bush continues to believe we are doing the right thing, according to Hersh. "He thinks he's wearing the white hat," he said, adding that is what makes this administration different from previous ones whose hypocrisy Hersh has exposed. Bush and the neocons "are not hypocrites."
Enter the utopians
"I think it's real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood," explained Hersh. "I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing." In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are "idealists, you can call them utopians." As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.
"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush]," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win' anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're play Go.'"
Later, Hersh shared something he had yet to write about. Sources were suggesting that the many acts of domestic terrorism in Iraq that U.S. officials have been attributing to suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are in fact a smokescreen set up by the insurgents. "They decided to wage war against their own population," he said. "It's a huge step, with enormous consequences.…The insurgency has simply deflected what they're doing onto this man. And we fell for it."
'We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame…The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes.'
-Seymour Hersh
What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had "privatized" so many of Iraq's institutions, it had decimated the job market in the country."This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family," he said.
Hersh has been accused many times of sympathizing with "the enemy," and told that his publicizing of incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture only fan the flames of anti-American sentiment around the world. He related that he's been asked if he feels guilty about the beheadings of two Americans who were wearing uniforms like those worn at Abu Ghraib. "As if the Iraqis needed me to tell them what's going on in that prison!" he responded. He also repeated a question often posed to him: "Was it immoral to go in … [T]he idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn't that lend a patina of morality to going after him?" The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, "is of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we're doing it."
In addition to adding more details to the woeful chronology of the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which the military stopped the abuse only after Hersh's story brought it crashing down onto front pages around the world — four months after it was first reported to the Department of Defense — Hersh speculated on why those dehumanizing techniques had been used. He was sure that they were not, as some have claimed, the "stress outlet" or other spontaneous recreational ideas of young soldiers from West Virginia. Instead, he said, they were the outgrowth of a massive manhunt for information, any information, about first Al Qaida, the Taliban, and then the Iraqi insurgency:
My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret document…There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do …
The original idea behind the sexually humiliating photos taken at Abu Ghraib, Hersh said he had heard, was to use them as blackmail so that the newly released prisoners — many of whom were ordinary Iraqi thieves or even civilian bystanders rounded up in dragnets — would act as informants. "We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame," Hersh explained. "The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes."
And the fact that Americans had perpetrated such acts — and refused to take responsibility for it — ended America's role as any kind of moral leader in the eyes of not just the Middle East, but the world, Hersh railed. He talked about an Israeli, a longtime veteran of the troubles between his country and the Palestinians, who had emailed him to say, in essence, "We've been killing them for 40 or 50 years, and they've been killing us for 40 or 50 years, but we know that somewhere down the line we're going to have to live with those SOBs…If we had treated our Arabs the way you treated them in Abu Ghraib, the sexual stuff, the photographs, we couldn't live with them. You guys do not begin to understand what you've done, where you have put yourself in the Arab world."
"They just shot them one by one"
There was more — rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.
"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'
"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."
The story seemed to leave Hersh sincerely, deeply saddened. While his critics may call him a "muckraker" and unpatriotic, on Friday night it was obvious that Hersh takes the crumbling of America's image, very, very personally.
"My parents were immigrants," Hersh said. "They came here because America meant something…the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us."
Watch the Webcast: Seymour Hersh, 1 hour 22 minutes
© 2004 UC Regents | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Oct 13, 2004 7:08 am Post subject: Bush Scares the Hell Out of Seymour Hersh |
| http://www.kurtnimmo.com/blog
October 12, 2004
Bush Scares the Hell Out of Seymour Hersh
“It doesn’t matter that Bush scares the hell [out] of me,” journalist Seymour Hersh told KQED (UC Berkeley) host Michael Krasny. “What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can’t speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community.”
Is there a reason they can’t speak out? Is it because they are afraid they will ruin their precious careers?
Obviously, not only do we no longer have brave souls like Daniel Ellsberg working for the government, we no longer have journalists like Neil Sheehan, who managed to get the Pentagon Papers published in the New York Times. It was easy for Bush and the Straussian neocons to take over the government and launch their Crusade against Islam because there are so many gutless people working for the government and the corporate media. It’s not the 60s anymore, Dorothy.
That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as “to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong.” He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that “a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,” a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey.
Hersh stands alone in a sea of quislings and back scratchers, more worried about their condos and BMWs than what happens to this country. As for Edward Abbey, if he were alive, he’d be on the no-fly list and the FBI would be following him around. He’d be characterized as a terrorist. Hersh’s Abbey quote is certainly relevant, but here’s one even more relevant: “Society is like a stew. If you don’t keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.”
I’ve been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside—and there are a lot of good people inside—are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he’s re-elected, has only one thing to do, he’s going to bomb the hell out of that place. He’s been bombing the hell of that place—and here’s what really irritates me again, about the press—since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28—the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There’s no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordinance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we’re basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can’t find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.
It’s called a dictatorship with a few remnants of democracy (for instance, the First Amendment, for the moment, still stands, as evidenced by the fact I am able to write and post this, but mostly because I am a nobody blogger and absolutely no threat to the dictatorship—not yet anyway). I’m reading William L. Shirer’s classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, and believe me the parallels between Hitler and the Bushcons are staggering. “Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote,” Shirer told the New York Times in 1969. Consider that Kerry and Bush are supposedly neck-to-neck and you get a sense of what Shirer is talking about. It’s too bad Shirer didn’t live to see the Rise of the Bushcons. Here’s another great Shirer quote: “I don’t understand what there is in the American character… that almost automatically, even when we have a liberal President, we support fascist dictatorships or are tolerant towards them.” Now we have a Christian Zionist reactionary president and the American people are not only “tolerant” of fascism abroad, many of them enthusiastically support it at home. Like the German people under Hitler, the American people under Bush have no problem with fascism—so long as they can drive their SUVs and watch CSI and Law and Order. Maybe some day, after our cities are smoldering ruins and the mindless TV watchers and plastic flag-wavers are scraping the scorched earth in search of tubers for dinner, they will arrive at the same conclusions the German people did after Hitler offed himself in that bunker—then again, maybe not (consider the rise of fascist ideas and political parties in the recent German elections).
Unfortunately, Bush will be “re-elected” in a few short weeks and then all hell will break loose—not only in Iraq but here in America as well. Bush and the Pentagon are waiting to get over the election hump before they begin bombing countless innocent Iraqi citizens in earnest. I believe the Bushcons know they cannot possibly hope to “win” the “war” in Iraq so they will bomb ‘em back to the Stone Age just like the Nazis bombed Stalingrad (although they will try not to make the same mistakes the Nazis did, that is to say send thousands of soldiers into Fallujah and Samarra—instead they will simply pulverize “insurgents” from the air). Bush will also use tried and tested Nazi tactics—disappearing thousands and killing innocent relatives and neighbors of the “terrorists.” As Jonathan Gumz writes, “German combat commanders were themselves exceptionally brutal toward suspected Partisan sympathizers, killing civilians almost indiscriminately, including women and children. Such ruthlessness by both Ustasa [Serbian] and German units stimulated popular support for the Partisans, ironically undermining Nazi efforts against them. … estimates of the number killed range from 700,000 to as many as 1.7 million.”
“I think it’s real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood,” explained Hersh. “I’m serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he’s doing.” In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are “idealists, you can call them utopians.” As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.
Here’s The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language definition of the word utopian:
1. Excellent or ideal but impracticable; visionary: a utopian scheme for equalizing wealth.
2. Proposing impracticably ideal schemes.
But a “visionary” for whom? Certainly not the people of the United States or in defense of the Constitution, the primary document of the United States Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al, are sworn to uphold. It’s no secret the Bushcons are sworn to uphold one thing only—the tiny and outlaw state of Israel and its interminable war against Islam (see Philip Zelikow’s comments), even if such a war kills thousands of Americans (and countless Muslims), squanders this nation’s wealth, shreds the Constitution (a process well under way) and reduces America to the same renegade status of Israel, a consistent violator of international laws and United Nations resolutions. I accept that what the Bushcons and the Likudites in Israel are doing is “impracticable” because it is impossible to effectively go to war against 1.3 billion Muslims and 300 million Arabs (and more than 66 million Iranians). But then maybe that’s what the “New Triad” of Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review Report is all about—using nukes against millions of recalcitrant Muslims and Arabs.
“No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush],” said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh’s sources say the war in Iraq is “not winnable. It’s over.” As for Kerry’s war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator’s plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. “This is a disaster that’s been going on. It’s a civil war, the insurgency.”
It appears some people in Washington are unable to grasp the overriding concept here—the Iraq war is not about “winning,” it’s about fomenting chaos, about bombing Arabs and Muslims, about “reshaping” the Middle East with bunker-busters and depleted uranium so Israel will be the dominant force for the foreseeable future. It’s about breaking Arab nations into small mini-states based on ethnicity and tribal affiliation, thus emasculating them. It has nothing to do with “liberating” the Iraqi people or bestowing democracy on benighted Arabs.
Hersh is right in one aspect though—no “amount of body bags is going to dissuade” Bush or the Straussian neocons. For these “utopians” the American people are nothing more or less than cannon fodder and meal tickets to realize Greater Israel and the Zionist dream of ruling over the Arabs, who they consider sub-human. Bush is a Christian Zionist—or proclaims to be a Christian Zionist (in my estimation he is not a Christian or anything but a destructive dry drunk nihilist)—and for Christian Zionists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell the only thing that matters is that Israel rebuilds the temple so their fictional God can start a genocidal war and they can float up to heaven and sit beside their lily-white, blue eyed, blond hair Jesus. For some reason most Americans refuse to accept that this is what Bush is all about—or says he is all about (his 20-30 million “evangelical” supporters certainly believe this nonsense and that’s why they will vote for him, even though he will eventually send their kids to die in Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, and eventually Mecca).
What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had “privatized” so many of Iraq’s institutions, it had decimated the job market in the country.” This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It’s because there’s nothing else for them to do. They’re willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family,” he said.
Once again, this is what the destruction of Iraq is all about—not so much “privatizing” the country but rather destroying civil and government institutions (as a mildly socialist state, most business was either owned or sanctioned by the state—large business owners were required to join Saddam’s Ba’ath Party), as evidenced by the unchecked looting and arson after the invasion. Unemployed Iraqis? No problem. How many Palestinians are unemployed? The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports that unemployment has reached 310,000 people, amounting to 34.3% of the labor force; the loss to the Palestinian economy from Israeli military activity between October 1, 2000 and December 31, 2002 stands at $4.94 billion, amounting to an average of $182.9 million a month. Bush, however, does a better job at impoverishing Arabs—a recent study carried out by economists at Baghdad University indicates the unemployment rate in Iraq is about 70%. Bush likes to claim he is providing jobs for Iraqis, although the Iraq Weekly Status report indicates otherwise: 45,844 Iraqis were employed in projects funded by USAID, according to 15 September data (see previous link), compared with 88,436 recorded in the previous week’s report, amounting to a 48.2% decrease. Of course, considering what Bush is doing to American workers—I can testify to this—engineered unemployment should probably not come as a surprise.
“Was it immoral to go in … [T]he idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn’t that lend a patina of morality to going after him?” The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, “is of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we’re doing it.”
And who helped Saddam torture and kill his own people? It was the United States government and the CIA. “There’s no question,” Roger Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, told Reuters last year. “It was there in Cairo that (Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency. … As in Iran in ‘53, it was mostly American money and even American involvement on the ground. … We climb into bed with these people without really knowing anything about their politics. … It’s not unusual, of course, in American policy. We tire of these people, and we find reasons to shed them.” Alfred Mendes ("Blood for Oil,” Spectrezine).writes: “The Ba’athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba’athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate [then military dictator] Qasim. Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the clandestine Ba’athist Intelligence organization. As such, he was soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam’s rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!” (see my Saddam Hussein: Taking Out the CIA’s Trash). Morris, however, is wrong—the CIA knew damn well what they were getting into. The CIA’s agenda is to stifle democratic movements not supported by Washington, assassinate popular leaders, disappear and kill dissidents. For as the war criminal Henry Kissinger once quipped, “Foreign Policy is not missionary work.”
My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret document…There’s a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don’t carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn’t know what to do …
Of course they knew what to do—the CIA has disappeared (and tortured and killed directly and indirectly) people for decades—and 9/11 was a perfect excuse (possibly even an engineered excuse) to escalate this noxious behavior. “Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression,” writes former CIA agent John Stockwell. “Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States.” It is interesting Hersh would mention Brazil and Argentina—the CIA engineered coup in Brazil in 1964 overthrew the democratically elected government of Joao Goulart (Brazilian General Castelo Branco, notes Steve Kangas, organized “Latin America’s first death squads, or bands of secret police who [hunted] down ‘communists’ for torture, interrogation and murder. Often these ‘communists’ [were no] more than Branco’s political opponents. Later it is revealed that the CIA [trained] the death squads) and the U.S. routinely ignored Argentina’s serious human rights violations (even the “human rights” president, Jimmy Carter, had little problem selling Argentina’s Junta President Rafael Videla military hardware—hardware he turned against his own people).
It is surprising, however, that Hersh would state that there was “some rationale” to disappear people after 9/11, especially considering it has never been definitively (or even circumstantially) proven who is responsible for that terrorist event. Hersh, like far too many journalists and Americans in general, simply accepts Bush’s explanation that it was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, minus even a shred of evidence. If Hersh admits that Bush is a liar, why does he unquestioningly accept his ready-made (within hours of the events) explanation? For some reason even intelligent journalists have a disconnect when it comes to blaming Osama bin Laden, lacking any credible evidence.
Indeed, there is plenty of reason to be scared of the Bushcons. However, this particular camarilla of “utopians” is but the latest in a long line of presidents and their advisors who have waged war against the people of the third world (and against their own people as well) Bush simply represents a more transparent and somewhat more noticeably vicious continuation of business as usual. John Kerry represents the Clinton school of American imperialism—that is to say he is more of a neoliberal, more of an “internationalist,” and less of a neocon, although he is decidedly onboard with the Bushcon plan to make the people of the Middle East suffer for the sake of Israel and the Likudites who currently rule that tiny outlaw nation. Kerry is outwardly more “likeable,” as was Clinton, even though Clinton made the Bushcons look like pikers when it came to killing people (Clinton’s record includes murdering innocent civilians in Yugoslavia, the Sudan (an incalculable number of people have died as a result of his bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant), Afghanistan, and Iraq (as to the latter, Clinton is responsible, as are Bush I and II, of bombing that country for over a decade and imposing sanctions that have resulted in the death of upward to a million people, 500,000 of them children).
I’m thankful for Hersh’s comments, especially considering there are precious few other journalists willing to step up and take the heat for telling the truth. I consider it a badge of honor for Hersh that the Prince of Darkness, Straussian neocon Richard Perle, called Hersh “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.” If Hersh is indeed a terrorist, America needs more such terrorists to report and uncover the real terrorists such as Perle, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and their Straussian neocon network determined to reduce America to a fascist dictatorship in the name of Israel, Big Oil, the multinational corporations, and the so-called “defense” industry. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 5:35 am Post subject: Frederick Gets 8 Years in Iraq Abuse Case |
| Frederick Gets 8 Years in Iraq Abuse Case
1 hour, 48 minutes ago Middle East - AP
By TINI TRAN, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The highest-ranking U.S. soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib prison case was sentenced Thursday to eight years in prison, the severest punishment so far in the scandal that broke in April with the publication of photos and video showing Americans humiliating and abusing naked Iraqis.
Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick's civilian attorney, Gary Myers, called the sentence "excessive" and argued that the military command was at fault for failing to train his client — a veteran military policeman and a corrections officer in civilian life — and for failing to address the horrid conditions at the prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad.
The abuses occurred at a time when American intelligence officers were under strong pressure to gather as much information as possible on the burgeoning insurgency, which threatens the entire U.S. mission in Iraq (news - web sites). Since then, the insurgency has spread throughout Sunni Muslim areas of the country, engulfing regions which were relatively safe for Americans and other Westerners only a few months ago.
Attacks across Iraq have increased by about 25 percent since the beginning of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month that began last weekend, with mostly car bombs and strikes on civilians rather than direct assaults on U.S. forces, Pentagon (news - web sites) officials said. U.S. and Iraqi authorities want to curb the violence in order to hold elections in January.
Besides his prison sentence, Frederick, 38, of Buckingham, Va., was reduced in rank to private, ordered to forfeit pay and given a dishonorable discharge under a plea agreement that requires him to testify against others charged with abusing Iraqi detainees. All military verdicts are subject to appeal.
Frederick pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees, assault and committing an indecent act.
He admitted that he forced one group of detainees to masturbate publicly and later piled them into a naked, human pyramid. During another infamous incident captured on photos seen around the world, Frederick said he and other guards hooked wires on the hands and feet of a hooded detainee who was told to stand on a box or else be electrocuted.
Photos and a video taken by the soldiers were submitted as evidence during the trial. Frederick said he snapped the photos "just to take back home."
"He's an adult capable of making decisions," the prosecutor, Maj. Michael Holley, said. "He's an adult and capable of telling, as we learned, the difference between right and wrong. How much training do you need to learn that it's wrong to force a man to masturbate?"
Frederick admitted that what he did was wrong but told the court Wednesday that when he complained to his superiors, "they told me to do what MI told me to do," referring to military intelligence.
His company commander, Capt. Donald Reese, testified Wednesday in a video hookup from the United States that Abu Ghraib was "a dangerous place" subject to frequent mortar attacks and with Iraqi guards who "were not to be trusted."
"It was very confusing as to who was in charge of the place," he said, with coalition authorities, the FBI (news - web sites), military police and military intelligence all playing a role.
Reese said the OGA — an acronym for Other Government Agency, which generally refers to the CIA (news - web sites) — interrogated Iraqi inmates at night, when supervision at the prison was low. He said one inmate suffered "panic attacks" after CIA interrogators deprived him of sleep.
Reese said he was angered by the treatment, and demanded the interrogators issue written orders explaining how certain prisoners should be interrogated.
"From that point on, we demanded they put everything in writing," Reese said. "It was very confusing."
Seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cresaptown, Md., have been charged in the scandal, including Frederick and Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., who already is serving a one-year sentence after pleading guilty in May to three counts.
In addition, Spc. Armin Cruz, 24, a military intelligence soldier, was sentenced last month to eight months in jail.
In violence across Iraq on Thursday:
_ Gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Iraqi women to their jobs at Baghdad International Airport, killing one and wounding 14.
_ Three people who worked in Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's office were killed and a fourth was wounded in an ambush in western Baghdad. Also, mortars fell near the Iraqi leader on a visit to Mosul.
_ Eight people were killed and two wounded in clashes between insurgents and American forces around the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, the local hospital said. There was no confirmation from the U.S. command.
_ Several explosions shook central Baghdad, and sirens wailed from the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
