The Emperor has no uniform...The war on terror is not the strength of the Bush abomination, it is the SHAME of the Bush
abomination...There are only 47 days to go until the
national referendum on the CHARACTER, COMPETENCY and
CREDIBILITY of the _resident and the VICE
_resident...Here is some more DAMNING evidence...Five
stories hat should fill the air waves and command
headlines above the fold...But they won't...Because
the US regimestream news media is a full partner in a
Triad of shared special interest (oil, weapons, media,
pharmaceuticals, tobacco, etc.) with the Bush Cabal
and its
wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party...Please
read these stories and share them with others. Please
vote and encourage all you know to vote. And, please,
remember that the US regimestream news media does not
want to inform you about this presidential election,
the US regimestream news media wants to DISinform you
about this presidential election...
Mary Jacoby, Salon: Over the last three years, the
group of 9/11 widows turned activists dubbed the
"Jersey Girls" have become a fixture on the Washington
political scene. Some of them are Republicans, others
Democrats or independents. But they are all determined
to hold official Washington accountable for the
attacks that killed their husbands and nearly 3,000
others. They have held news conferences, lobbied
members of Congress, pored over documents, and forced
the White House to accept an independent commission to
investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Along the
way, the women have learned about coverups,
obfuscation, political cowardice, deceptions and the
dangers of eschewing international alliances for a
go-it-alone foreign policy.
And their conclusion: For the sake of the
country's future, John Kerry must replace George W.
Bush.
Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian: 'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.
But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."
Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."
Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."
W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.
"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."
Jennifer Bundy, Associated Press: Vice presidential
candidate John Edwards (news - web sites) promised a
West Virginia mother on Wednesday that if the
Democratic ticket is elected in November the military
draft would not be revived.
During a question-and-answer session, the mother of a
23-year-old who recently graduated from West Virginia
University asked Edwards whether the draft would be
reinstated.
"There will be no draft when John Kerry (news - web
sites) is president," Edwards said, a statement that
drew a standing ovation...
"We will never send American men and women into battle
without first having a plan to win the peace and
without the training and the equipment they need,
including armored vehicles and including body armor,"
Edwards said. "We have one candidate for president who
has fought in a war. The truth of the matter is John
Kerry takes this very, very personally."
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, interviews Seymour Hersh:
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.
The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest
this hour is Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter, exposed the My Lai massacre that changed
history, the coverage of Vietnam. Now, 35 years later,
though he's done many things in between, his latest
book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib. We're talking about the prison torture, how
high up it goes. This issue of videotape, of boys in
prison, Iraqi boys, being raped. Who's raping them?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I haven't seen or heard the videotape.
What happens is in -- obviously, people with -- since
I wrote those articles in The New Yorker, I was in
contact with family members who have other materials;
and essentially, some of the Iraqi -- some of the
employees, the private contractors who were hired by
the United States. As you know, there's 20,000 private
contractors. That's a number I have heard. I can't
verify it. But we -- in the prison system in the
United States military, since we know nobody speaks
Arabic, we don't have enough translators, they hire
locals. They hire -- they go to various companies,
C.A.C.A. Is one.
AMY GOODMAN: Kaky?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't know what it stands for, but
out of Virginia. They just got a huge new contract.
These are people who do hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of business. They provide interpreters,
among other things; that's part of their business. The
private companies were all over Abu Ghraib, and they
had local -- one of the people, one of the men from
the private companies was -- did have forcible sex
with -- there's women in the prisons, which is also a
big contentious problem for the Iraqi population. The
women are held in a separate unit, but they have
children; and one of the children and one of the women
was raped by a boy. There are photographs. There is
testimony --
AMY GOODMAN: Was raped by --
SEYMOUR HERSH: One of the guards, rather. And
witnessed by Americans taking photographs. There is
testimony that has not been made public about this. I
know that there's been statements made in various
military proceedings. And the government's been very
chary about writing -- putting out any information.
People witnessed it. They had cameras, and I believe
they were video cameras. They could have been still
cameras. There were cameras photographing it, and the
boy was screaming. But I don't have a videotape of it.
I haven't seen a videotape of it. I know that such
testimony has been given. So, it's -- there is
testimony that's been given for some reason that we
can always guess about. Look, you know, I'm -- it's --
women were doing things -- I actually learned about
Abu Ghraib. I went to Damascus in Christmas of 2003 to
interview an Iraqi -- a high ranking Iraqi officer
that somehow had escaped being imprisoned by us. We --
many of the Ba'ath party leadership are still in a
prison --Camp Cropper, I think, in Baghdad. And he
came out to Damascus to see me, and he told me -- we
spent three days -- and in one afternoon he told me a
great deal about Abu Ghraib. Again, without a video
camera, without a photograph of it. And one of the
things that was most compelling about it was the women
were writing letters to their families -- women in
jail -- saying, "Please come kill me. I have been
abused. Come kill me." So, you know -- an Israeli I
know said to me, he said, "You know, I hate Arabs."
This is an old-time guy. Old-time military guy,
old-time Mossad-type guy -- intelligence guy. "I hate
Arabs. I've been killing them for 50 years and they've
been killing us for 50 years." And he said, you know,
"Let me tell you something, Hersh. But one day we know
with a wall, without a wall, we're going to have to
live with those s.o.b.'s sometime. And let me say this
to you: If we treated our prisoners the way you
treated prisoners, we could never do that."
Matt Taibbi, AlterNet: Kitty Kelley's take on the Bush
dynasty: consistently cold, calculating, predatory and
unscrupulous, generation after generation.
In other words, her book is a rollicking good read.
Kitty Kelley's "explosive" nearly 700-page tome on the
Bushes, The Family, has been barely out on the streets
for a day, but the early news reactions have already
made it plain: The sprawling biography simply doesn't
matter. The predominant media take on this book is
likely to go something like this: In Bush tome,
unreliable menopausal scandalmonger again misses mark;
world waits out irritating media buzz.
But that doesn't mean the book isn't worth a read
far from it.
Kelley's book is unintentionally I think a
surprisingly tender portrait of a small, loyal group
of vicious undead fiends, persevering against all odds
in a world of the callous, uncomprehending living.
Kelley does what no other writer to date has really
done for the Bushes: she actually makes you admire
them for their remarkable ability to remain
consistently cold, calculating, predatory and
unscrupulous in generation after generation after
generation.
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091604B.shtml
"President Bush Thwarted Our Attempts at Every Turn"
By Mary Jacoby
Salon.com
Wednesday 15 September 2004
The widows known as the "Jersey Girls" changed history
by demanding an independent 9/11 investigation. Now
they want to change who's president - though some
voted for Bush four years ago.
Washington - Over the last three years, the group
of 9/11 widows turned activists dubbed the "Jersey
Girls" have become a fixture on the Washington
political scene. Some of them are Republicans, others
Democrats or independents. But they are all determined
to hold official Washington accountable for the
attacks that killed their husbands and nearly 3,000
others. They have held news conferences, lobbied
members of Congress, pored over documents, and forced
the White House to accept an independent commission to
investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Along the
way, the women have learned about coverups,
obfuscation, political cowardice, deceptions and the
dangers of eschewing international alliances for a
go-it-alone foreign policy.
And their conclusion: For the sake of the
country's future, John Kerry must replace George W.
Bush.
Gathering at the National Press Club in Washington
on Tuesday, the widows announced their endorsement of
the Massachusetts Democrat for president, a move made
"in good conscience and from our hearts," as former
Bush supporter Kristen Breitweiser told the news
cameras. "In the three years since 9/11, I could never
have imagined I would be here today, disappointed in
the person I voted for, for president," she said.
Added fellow Jersey Girl Patty Casazza: "It was
President Bush who thwarted our attempts at every
turn."
The widows said they endorsed Kerry because three
years of studying the facts has convinced them he will
do a better job than Bush at protecting the nation.
"This was not an easy decision to make. We agonized
over this," said Monica Gabrielle of West Haven,
Conn., an honorary Jersey Girl. "We have always been
very careful about not being partisan. We have always
attempted to uncover the truth. We have always looked
for the greater good." Still, the women said they
expect to be trashed as partisan hacks.
"We were joking amongst ourselves yesterday that
we should come down here geared up in football pads
and helmets, because we were anticipating personal
attacks," Breitweiser said. "Some other 9/11 family
members have supported President Bush, and I think we
have always been respectful of anyone's points of
view. And I hope that going forward, the debate and
dialogue will be about the issues and it will be
respectful and lively. But most important,
respectful."
The endorsement was a sword clanging against
Bush's political armor. Polls show that voters rate
Bush high on his handling of 9/11 and its aftermath,
and Republicans have been quick to exploit that
approval with television ads and their recent
convention, held in Manhattan around the theme of
Bush's leadership against terrorism. Meantime, the
families of 9/11 victims are split on whom to support
for president, with many for Bush.
The Jersey Girls' political foil is Deena Burnett,
widow of Thomas Burnett, one of the passengers on
United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in
Pennsylvania. Burnett, who lives in Arkansas, spoke to
the Republican National Convention two weeks ago,
giving an emotional account of her last conversations
with her husband from the plane. "The heroes of 9/11
weren't created that day," Burnett told the
convention. "Their actions were the result of virtues
practiced over a lifetime." Delegates wiped away
tears.
Watching the convention on television, Breitweiser
felt not teary-eyed, she said, but frightened. She
found the speakers angry and bellicose, and she
worried that the Bush administration seemed to revel
in war. "I am scared [by] the mentality that my
daughter, who is 5 years old, is being handed a
tomorrow that will be a war for a lifetime. My husband
was killed on 9/11. I do not want to lose my daughter
18 years from now when she's walking or living in a
large city, and it's payback for our actions in Iraq,"
Breitweiser said. Later she told me in an interview
that she voted for Bush in 2000 because, well, she's a
Republican. "I'm not a Democrat!" she said, when I
asked if her endorsement of Kerry meant that she had
switched parties.
On Tuesday I was unable to reach Deena Burnett,
whose name is not listed in the phone directory, for
comment about the Jersey Girls' endorsement of Kerry.
But a telephone interview I conducted with her two
years ago was revealing for her lack of knowledge
about the origins and funding sources of al-Qaida.
Burnett is a lead plaintiff in a massive lawsuit
against wealthy members of the Saudi royal family and
Saudi establishment filed by South Carolina trial
lawyer Ron Motley, who is trying to prove that the
9/11 attacks were financed out of the kingdom.
Interestingly, many people who share those suspicions
about the Saudi role in 9/11 also tend to question the
Bush family's close ties to the House of Saud, but not
Burnett. When I spoke with her for the profile, I
expected to talk with her about the substance of the
case. Instead, she directed me back to the lawyers,
pleading ignorance of such details as which Saudi
prince made which overtures to the Taliban. She
clearly wasn't a document hound.
The Jersey Girls are. They have read seemingly
every scrap of information about 9/11 and al-Qaida,
from news articles to affidavits to footnotes in
obscure government reports. And their command of the
facts is what has made them so effective. On Sept. 18,
2002, when much of the public was still sympathetic to
the Bush administration position that the attacks
could not have been foreseen or prevented, Breitweiser
gave a statement before the joint House-Senate
investigation into intelligence lapses; it may have
changed the course of history.
In a concise, straightforward manner, she laid out
the facts far more effectively than had any senator or
representative on the panel. She asked how, for
example, the CIA could fail to locate hijackers Nawaf
Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, who had entered the
United States despite being on a terrorist watch list,
when one was listed in the San Diego phone book and
both roomed with an undercover FBI informant. The day
after her presentation, the White House - once firmly
against an independent commission - reversed itself
and endorsed the idea. And it was the 9/11 commission
that would later find no operational ties between
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, one of the key reasons
Bush gave for invading Iraq.
On Tuesday, the widows cited the invasion of Iraq
as one of their top reasons for supporting Kerry.
"Unfortunately, before the work in Afghanistan was
complete ... this administration moved our most
precious resources, America's sons and daughters, into
Iraq, without the support of our allies. Iraq had
nothing to do with 9/11, and that is what we learned
from the 9/11 commission's final report," said Lorie
Van Auken of East Brunswick, N.J. "Sept. 11 was an
enormous intelligence failure, and yet nothing was
done to fix our intelligence after 9/11, and that same
intelligence apparatus took us into Iraq. So it's
doubly frustrating to learn that Iraq had nothing to
do with 9/11." Van Auken said she is also worried that
with military forces stretched thin, her 17-year-old
son and 15-year-old daughter could be called up in a
draft.
The women said they approached Kerry about the
endorsement, not the other way around. Their requests
to meet with Bush were rejected. Breitweiser and
Gabrielle plan to campaign actively. In Breitweiser's
case, it will be difficult, because she hasn't
traveled in an airplane since her husband died. "I
have serious anxiety about getting on a plane," she
said. "But that's how committed I feel."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1305360,00.html
Far graver than Vietnam
Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 16, 2004
The Guardian
'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.
But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."
Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."
Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."
W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.
"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."
After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.
"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."
"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."
General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."
Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."
General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."
He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."
General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."
· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com
sidney_blumenthal@ yahoo.com
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040916/ap_on_el_pr/edwards
Edwards: No Military Draft if Dems Win
By JENNIFER BUNDY, Associated Press Writer
PARKERSBURG, W.Va. - Vice presidential candidate John
Edwards (news - web sites) promised a West Virginia
mother on Wednesday that if the Democratic ticket is
elected in November the military draft would not be
revived.
During a question-and-answer session, the mother of a
23-year-old who recently graduated from West Virginia
University asked Edwards whether the draft would be
reinstated.
"There will be no draft when John Kerry (news - web
sites) is president," Edwards said, a statement that
drew a standing ovation.
The current force is all-volunteer, and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said he opposes
reinstating the draft. But the Pentagon (news - web
sites) has taken several steps that have drawn
criticism.
In June, the Pentagon recalled to active duty 5,674
members of the Individual Ready Reserve, soldiers who
have served specified tours of duty but have years
remaining in their enlistment contracts.
Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, has
complained about the extent of the Bush
administration's use of Reserves and National
Guardsmen and a device called "stop loss," which
prevents soldiers from leaving when typical
obligations end. "They have effectively used a
stop-loss policy as a backdoor draft," Kerry said.
During the session with Edwards, a woman whose son is
serving in Iraq (news - web sites) asked why the
vehicles in his convoys are not armored. She said one
vehicle was attacked last week and three soldiers were
killed.
"We will never send American men and women into battle
without first having a plan to win the peace and
without the training and the equipment they need,
including armored vehicles and including body armor,"
Edwards said. "We have one candidate for president who
has fought in a war. The truth of the matter is John
Kerry takes this very, very personally."
Bill Ambrose, a land surveyor from Volcano, told
Edwards, "I don't know why we can't hammer George Bush
(news - web sites). The concern is we are not
supporting the troops. I think that's a separate
issue. We all support the troops. This administration
has made the most monumental foreign policy mistakes
since Vietnam."
Edwards said that when he and Kerry say they support
and admire U.S. troops serving in Iraq, "it's not just
words, it's what we really believe."
"Iraq is a mess. It is a mess because of George Bush
and Dick Cheney (news - web sites). It's that simple,"
Edwards said. "The facts are overwhelming. This
president's father did the work, the hard work, of
bringing others with us before the Gulf War (news -
web sites)."
Edwards said the Gulf War cost American taxpayers $5
billion.
"This president did not do that. The result is over
$200 billion and counting" and a thousand American
deaths, Edwards said.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1505&ncid=1505&e=5&u=/afp/20040915/ts_alt_afp/us_vote_military_040915075536
http://www.democracynow.org/static/hersh_trans.shtml
-------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however
donations help us provide closed captioning for the
deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank
you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: We're joined today by Seymour Hersh. He
exposed 35 years ago the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam,
has written a number of books since, and now, his
latest book has just been published. It's called Chain
of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Welcome
to Democracy Now!
SEYMOUR HERSH: Glad to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: It's great to have you with us. Let's
just start off with that "chain of command" and how
you came to understand what was happening at Abu
Ghraib?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, of course, nobody fully
understands how you got to where we got. What's
interesting about the Cheney call is that it isn't a
call saying, "Oh, my god! What are we doing here?
We've got to stop this. Let's clean it up. This is a
terrible outrage. In the name of America, how can we
behave this way, et cetera, et cetera." We're not
getting that from him. We're getting, "Let's hunker
down. Let's seal everything up." So, what happened is
in this particular book, this sort of came out of the
fact that I did a bunch of articles for The New Yorker
in May, that I have talked to you about on-air, sort
of posing the problem of Abu Ghraib and suggesting
that there were higher officials involved.
After that, those articles, somebody who worked for
Condoleezza Rice -- I'm talking about the people in
the White House -- got in touch with me and told me
that, in fact, there had been a lot of concern about
prisoner abuse much earlier, that in the fall of 2002,
this issue had had come up into the White House and
gotten to the level of National Security Council
meetings. It came about because the C.I.A. has an
expert on Islam on its staff, somebody who was born in
Palestine, and who -- I can't name him for obvious
reasons, because I'm glad there's somebody with that
knowledge in the government. I'm delighted to not --
not to do anything to expose him. But in any case, he
was troubled because he was seeing all of the
intelligence reports from Guantanamo. Guantanamo was
the police prison that was set up in the wake of our
invasion of Afghanistan. I think it started in January
2002, and by the middle of the year, there were 600
people there. Nothing was coming from there. Nothing.
No good intel. So, he does the rational thing. He goes
to the base, goes and takes a look. He talks to about
30 -- he speaks idiomatic Arabic -- he talks to 30 of
the prisoners. Among the first things he sees, as he
tells colleagues -- I haven't seen the report, I just
know what he told colleagues about it, people who
worked with him in the C.I.A. and in the White House
-- he sees two men easily 80 years old, living in
their own excrement bound in a jail, in a pen. He, in
talking to people, there's absolutely no
differentiation among those who are people who wanted
to do something, conspired against America or were al
Qaeda members, and those who are simply people just
caught up in the American sweeps. There's no
differentiation. His report basically says if they
weren't al Qaeda by the time we captured them, by the
time we release them, they sure will be.
Also, obviously, there's the total violation of the
Geneva Convention, not processing people, and also in
conversation with people, he described it as war
crimes, the way we treated people. His report was
done, a wonderful general named John Gordon, a retired
Air Force general, four-star general, full general,
who worked as a deputy director of the C.I.A., and
military men understand something, which is you don't
treat prisoners any differently than you want your own
soldiers to be treated if they're captured. He was
troubled by it. He began to lobby inside the White
House to deal with this report. Of course, in the Bush
administration, like I assume in all administrations,
no bad news is wanted. So he lobbies people. He gets
his pal, the C.I.A. analyst who did the report, to
come brief some people. Of course, the vice
president's office is against this. They don't want to
talk about it. Everybody in Guantanamo is a bad guy.
To hell with them. The general counsel, the counsel to
the president, Gonzalez, also is very hostile, but he
finds enough people who said, let's do something. So
Condoleezza Rice has a meeting. Don Rumsfeld comes
over to the meeting. There's a moment of epiphany when
she says, please look into it. He says, I will. He
goes off and assigns a 31-year-old aide who has had
nothing to do with prisons in his life, is an arms
control guy, to look into it. Nothing happens. As the
general tells -- is known to have said later, he was
really distressed that nobody would take it seriously.
So, what you have, if you want it talk about how Abu
Ghraib began, what you have is a attitude that these
people are not humans. Dehumanization. We do that more
all the time, but you also have an attitude that it
doesn't matter what you do. So, I proffer this -- that
all of -- we have had what, nine or seven or eight
investigations and reports, some of them very good
about what happened in the field, but in terms of how
this attitude began, how we began, how Abu Ghraib
really came to be it's -- from the very beginning,
nobody in the chain of command, nobody from the White
House on down made it clear that we will treat these
people decently. I'll tell you why it's important to
do so. Anybody who knows anything about interrogation
says the following -- you cannot get good information
from coercion. This is just a given. You establish
rapport. Particularly if you are dealing with jihadist
people, who are willing to die for what they believe
in, you're not going to get information by torturing
them. It's just not going to work. So it's dumb and
dumber to begin with. Secondly, it exposes our people
to the same kind of retaliation, and also it's a total
war crime. It's a crime against humanity, it's a crime
against the Geneva Convention, and of course, it's
also dangerous in a rational world to the presidency
itself. Because if you don't inflict values at the
very beginning, you do end up down the road with the
kind of abuses we had. That's, I think, the story in a
nutshell.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh is our guest this hour. His
series of pieces in The New Yorker and more are now a
book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib. We'll be back with him in a minute.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, Seymour Hersh. Chain of Command: The Road
from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib is his new book. You have a
pretty remarkable quote in here of J. Bibby, head of
the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. He
wrote to Alberto Gonzalez, the White House counsel,
quote: "We conclude that for an act to constitute
torture, it must inflict pain that is difficult to
endure. Physical pain amounting to torture must be
equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury, such as organ failure,
impairment of bodily function or even death."
SEYMOUR HERSH: What can I say? That's what he wrote.
It was in a memo to the White House, and I generally
characterize the legal memos written early -- this is
a memo written in early 2002, as being a sort of
internal competition to see who can be the hardest
line guy there was. I think the gist of what he says
in effect, he also in one of the memos described
intent, that you cannot inflict torture if - it's not
torture if your intent in abusing somebody or hurting
somebody to get information was to protect the
national security. In other words, what your intent is
when you are hurting people, it's very important, and
to what -- as important as the act. So, it's very hard
for a journalist because if you use the word -- since
the White House has its own definition of torture and
the White House has its own definition of abuse, it's
very hard to write about it, because the White House
denies, you know.
One of the lawyers for the White House in a meeting I
write about with a human rights official, somebody
from Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, said, he describes
the act of pulling a hood over somebody, goggles first
and then a hood, he said, "People complain if we
blindfold people." That's blindfolding, putting a hood
over somebody's head and over goggles. And so, if you
define things your own way -- Anthony Lewis, the
former New York Times columnist who knows a great deal
about law, writes on legal issues, described these
memos that were written by the White House as sounding
like lawyers for the mafia writing memos to the capo
about how to handle a problem. It's really sort of --
that this stuff came at the top of the government is
-- again you have to say, 9/11 happened. America was
stunned, upset, people were trying to hurt our
innocence. There was fear involved. There was a
tremendous fear on the part of the government that we
knew nothing about these people very much. We didn't
know much. Would they strike again? I'm giving you
their arguments. So, therefore, extraordinary measures
had to be taken.
AMY GOODMAN: With just this one case, Bibby, he ended
up being promoted.
SEYMOUR HERSH: He's now a federal judge, I think in
the Circuit Court of Appeals. Again, was he promoted
because he wrote that memo? I would guess not, but
still, it's not something I want on my resume, let's
put it that way.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Operation Anaconda in
Afghanistan?
SEYMOUR HERSH: This is -- it's interesting. I have
been doing interviews, and you're the first person to
ask me about it. This is a story that I didn't write.
I was doing a lot of work, as you know, since 9/11. I
have been sort of writing the alternative history of
the war, with the help of people on the inside. I'm
not -- you know, people -- there are people all along
very high levels who don't approve of what's going on.
It's very hard for people in certain positions in the
military and the intelligence to come forward.
Anaconda was an operation to take place March 1, 2002,
where we were going to attack in the mountains, in the
eastern mountains of Afghanistan.
The idea was to attack what we believed were a group
of embedded al Qaeda living in redoubts, in caves, et
cetera. And the army wanted to do it. There had been
-- the war had been going on for months. It had been
largely a special forces war and air force war. The
army and the commander at this time was General
Franks. Little did I know then that this Tommy Franks
would end up running the war and be described as sort
of a hero, because this was Katzenjammer Kids stuff
what he did. It was really sort of really dumb. The
plan was to recruit some Afghans and with the American
soldiers, they initially wanted the marines, they were
going to drive -- there was going to be no advanced
bombing of the area or artillery, because we did not
want to tip off the al Qaeda we were coming. Never
mind we were dealing with all of the local Afghan
tribes, all of whom we know, history shows, who pays
the most determines their loyalty. The idea that you
could run a covert operation, particularly the way we
move, like General Motors, but that was the idea, so
we could have no -- the air force wasn't allowed to do
preparatory bombing. We're going to send boys from the
Tenth Mountain Division out of Ft. Drum, New York.
They're going to paratroop land by helicopter into an
area. There's going to be no advance bombing and
there's going to be no artillery. And the first wave
is going to be a group of Afghans going up a mountain
with the marines. The marines said, "Are you kidding?"
I quote an ex-- a wonderful marine officer saying --
that's why I love the marines - "We said 'Are you
nuts? F*** you. We're not going. We'll go, fight and
kill anybody, but we're not stupid. We don't go up a
mountain without artillery and without intelligence.'"
They wouldn't go, so they send the Afghans up, they
get wiped out in what they call registered mortar
fire.
In other words, the opposition had mortars aimed at
the various congregation sites they had already
planned in advance. They were going to be points where
they rendezvous. And the fire was already registered.
Clearly they knew what the points were going to be.
When the Ft. Drum soldiers landed by chopper, up
higher in the mountains, their landing zones were also
the target of registered mortar fire. In other words,
the enemy knew. I think they suffered 28% casualties,
not deaths, mostly wounded from shrapnel and other
shells in the first thee minutes. Then they ran down
the mountain, 100 people, literally, some didn't,
perhaps, but many did, including the junior officers,
ran from an ambush, not irrational, leaving behind
night vision gear, weapons, radios, they just shed
themselves and went down the mountain, because
otherwise they were in real trouble. They would have
been wiped out. It's a nightmare. It was just a
nightmare. Then, of course, the press is down below in
Bagram near a base. After the first day was over,
that's my favorite quote of the war, a lieutenant
colonel from the Tenth Mountain Division briefs the
American press corps that's down below about what a
victory it was. And he said, "The best thing about it
is we found and engaged the enemy right away." Which
is -- I have to think I said it was a very strange way
to describe an ambush. And an air force officer -- the
air force went crazy about this. I got there after
action started, which was just devastating, I mean,
brutal. There's always interesting warfare, but this
was extraordinary. They just said, this was the worst
they have ever seen. One air force colonel, who is a
wonderful, bright young air force colonel said to me,
"Well, the army demonstrated that they were able to
send a bunch of boys up a mountain to their death."
That's what they showed in this mission. Complete
disaster. They tried to tell the press as many as 700
al Qaeda were killed. Newsweek reported ten bodies
were found. Shades of Vietnam again. But I didn't
write it.
What makes it interesting, while doing reporting on
it, I called Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander,
who is sort of an interesting guy in this stuff,
because early in the war, early in my reporting on the
war, I had written critically about a Delta Force
operation. Delta is the secret unit of the army. The
commander unit. They had been ambushed. The Delta guys
were enraged. I'm talking about the first month of the
war because they had been sent on this stupid
operation and they had gotten hurt very badly. And
they don't like it. Delta guys, they like to crawl in
little holes for a week and get to their target. They
were ordered to do it in a different way. Everybody
denied the story like crazy. And Wes Clark, to his
credit, told a bunch of newspapers, "Look, I know this
is right." I had said 13 people were hurt and he said
12 was the number that he had. I saw in him somebody
with a great streak of integrity, difficult he may be.
In any case, I called him about this story while I was
doing it. He encouraged me to write it. I didn't write
it. About a year-and-a-half later, he's running for
president. I mention this in the book, and I bump into
him, and he jumped all over me. He said, "Why didn't
you do that story?" I said, "Well, I just thought, it
just would have been -- I just didn't do it." He said,
"You should have done it. That was your job." Pretty
scary. You know, he was right.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh. He has
written a book Chain of Command, about what happened
at Abu Ghraib, and well beyond that. So, let's talk
about what happened at Abu Ghraib. How you learned of
it, and then we'll talk about the chain of command
right up into the White House.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, the honest answer to that
question is I learned about it because CBS wouldn't do
it. CBS did break the story eventually and published
the photographs. But I learned very early that CBS had
these extraordinary photographs. I was ecstatic about
it in a way. I'm pro-reporting. I'm glad to see tough
reporting on the war. I hadn't seen them, but I heard
there was a really devastating story. And I love
stories. That's what we do for a living. So, nothing
happened. Nothing happened. Eventually somebody who
had been interviewed by CBS, somebody in the
intelligence community, told me that they were sitting
on a great story. So, I found out what the story was.
I found the photographs, and I also found more
importantly the internal report written by a general
named Taguba, General Taguba, born in the Philippines,
enormous integrity, wrote a blistering report. It
still is the most outstanding thing. It says an awful
lot about us, that there are people like that that can
produce things like that, even about the military.
That report is devastating, because everything that
you want to know, that I have even learned, that the
whole responsibility goes higher, it's not explicit in
his report, but it's written with an edge of anger.
It's clear that he's really profoundly distressed that
so much wrong could be done, and so many people
clearly knew about it. In any case, so I have all of
this stuff, and that's how I got into it. Eventually
before we could do it in The New Yorker, CBS did
produce the photographs to their credit. They did an
excellent job when they did it, Dan Rather. I presume
there were people in the news side that were fighting.
There is a war that we can't begin. This is - if you
remember, General Meyers called up CBS, that was, it
became known and got them to hold off. So, the story I
wrote --
AMY GOODMAN: The head of the joint chiefs of staff.
SEYMOUR HERSH: General Meyers, yes --
AMY GOODMAN: Called CBS and said, "Don't do the
story."
SEYMOUR HERSH: And they didn't do it. He gave them
something -- they held off another week or whatever.
That's their business, but they did eventually do the
story. And by the time they did it, I had not only
actually more photographs or I think more, I had
another set, two different sets of them, but I also
had the report.
AMY GOODMAN: Where did you get them?
SEYMOUR HERSH: What do you mean?
AMY GOODMAN: The photos?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, from people who had them, of
course. I'm not going to tell you that. I mean, you
know, I honor your questioning, but -- I got them from
people that had ever right to have them. And -- and
the report -- it's never. It's always the cover-up.
Although one thing I will say about the pictures, if
we hadn't had the photographs or the Taguba report I
could have written all week about abuses and nothing
would have happened, because actually, as we know,
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, International, various
reporters had been producing extraordinary stuff. A
lot of journalists, even some of the journalists from
The New York Times and particularly The Washington
Post, a reporter they had in Afghanistan had done a
lot of very good stories interviewing people that had
been in our custody in about them being exposed, the
nakedness, et cetera, et cetera, but it didn't work.
It didn't work because there wasn't any visual
evidence. So, once -- and you know, my -- you know,
The New Yorker, although it's a weekly, popping in on
a Sunday and saying, we have to go next week with
something, that's hard for them. And to the credit of
The New Yorker people, I think I did three stories in
three weeks, which you have to know what The New
Yorker is like to know that's impossible, because of
the fact checking and the editing. And you know, it's
just -- it was amazing.
AMY GOODMAN: The famous picture on that first piece of
a prisoner in a sort of Christ-like position, arms
out, wires at the end of his fingers, the bag over his
head. We actually just saw the kid in Boston at the
Democratic National Convention, who had stood outside
the army recruiting station in the same position to
protest what had happened, and they originally charged
him with being a terrorist. But you say you have even
seen worse?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what you have seen?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I'll tell what you the judgment was of
the editors at The New Yorker, they published some
pretty horrible pictures. There's a sense of out of
respect for the Arab -- Arab men you know, in Arab
society, as you know, the Koran says Arab men cannot
be photographed nude in the front. It's so hard for
Americans to understand that. We are sort of the
slapping each other with towels in the shower crowd.
If you go into a sports club in Cairo, for example.
Everybody has a private stall and a private shower.
Privacy is incredibly important. Not only to women,
but clearly to men, too. Photographing somebody nude,
photographing somebody in a simulated homosexual
position, photographing them with women having thumbs
up or thumbs down next to them are the ultimate
humiliation.
AMY GOODMAN: So that the photograph when people ask
why did these soldiers take these pictures, especially
with the soldiers themselves in the pictures, since it
incriminates them, it was part of the torture?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. It's by the way, by every
definition, this kind of psychological treatment of a
prisoner is equivalent to torture. Every standard
textbook and reference says this kind of excruciating
humiliation is equivalent to torture. It's torture.
You don't have to drive a nail into somebody's hand to
torture them. Here's the important thing about the
people in the photographs who are all being prosecuted
and should be. They did wrong things. There's a couple
of things to say about it. One, of course, is when we
send our kids to war, we send them in the hands of
officers in loco parentis.
The objective of the officers, the men in charge of
the military, is not only to protect them from death,
but also protect 18-19-year-old kids from themselves,
from doing dumb things. There's a tremendous
obligation on the part of the military to protect
their soldiers. It's not only from casualties, as I
said. It's a failing of such staggering proportions.
In other words, is it really safe to send your child
into the army, above and beyond getting wounded? The
lack of sensibility, but more importantly, I write
about a secret unit that I'm sure that you are going
to ask me about in a minute, but one of the things,
one of the intellectual underpinnings of what happened
in Abu Ghraib, and you have to understand this, the
people in the audience have to understand this, it's
not just randomness, what happened. You can -- we in
the fall of 2003, the United States of America was in
huge trouble in Iraq, just like we still are. We know
nothing about the insurgency then. We knew nothing
then. We still know nothing about it. We don't know
whether there's going to be another bomb like there
was this morning tomorrow. We have no intelligence,
zippo. We had no intelligence then. The insurgency by
August of 2003, the U.N. had been hit, the Jordanian
embassy where we really do a lot of operating,
intelligence stuff, was hit. Lesser known, pipelines
were hit again for oil. Water lines were hit, and
electrical power stations were all hit anew in August.
It was like a huge escalation.
So, there was panic in the White House because August
is, what, almost a year from re-election time. So, it
became a political issue, just as you noted in the
beginning. Cheney and the White House moves together
when there's politics involved. We have to do
something. So, they not only -- they decided they had
thousands, 10-20,000 Iraqis in detention. And they had
been unlike in Afghanistan where they were picked up
on a field, many of these people were picked up at
traffic checkpoints or they were busted -- people
broke into their homes and grabbed all of the men. We
had -- the idea was get some of the guys in captivity
who had nothing to do with the insurgency, get them
photographed, get a dossier of them looking like they
were committing homosexual acts, blackmail them and
send them home into the community, and have them
become our agents inside the insurgency. Tell them to
join the insurgency. That was the intellectual idea,
so I've been told. The idea was let's get some guys
and turn them, because sexual humiliation does proffer
enormous blackmail. You're ruined forever. Just like
in the Arab world, they still kill the daughter that
commits adultery, et cetera, et cetera. They try to.
That's still a reality. And so, that was the
intellectual idea. So, what the kids were doing, or
the young men and women, they weren't all kids, some
were in their 30's, the awful acts that we saw in the
photographs were the playing out of a process that at
the beginning had some sense but it simply
deteriorated to the point where whatever the initial
idea was, they began this in September of 2003, the
idea was to get better intelligence and use the prison
population to find some people that could do it for
us. By October, the C.I.A., which is not adverse to
being tough in certain interrogations, they pull their
people out and send them home. Because the C.I.A.
realized that this was a mess. If you are telling me
that people in Washington weren't aware that there was
real problems going on in the prison system, you have
to be kidding.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh. We have
to break. When we come back, I'll ask about the secret
unit and also about videotape he has said he has seen
of Iraqi boys, prisoners, being raped at the Abu
Ghraib prison, hearing the screams of the boys. This
is Democracy Now! We'll be back with the Pulitzer
Prize winning reporter, in a minute.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.
The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest
this hour is Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
reporter, exposed the My Lai massacre that changed
history, the coverage of Vietnam. Now, 35 years later,
though he's done many things in between, his latest
book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib. We're talking about the prison torture, how
high up it goes. This issue of videotape, of boys in
prison, Iraqi boys, being raped. Who's raping them?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I haven't seen or heard the videotape.
What happens is in -- obviously, people with -- since
I wrote those articles in The New Yorker, I was in
contact with family members who have other materials;
and essentially, some of the Iraqi -- some of the
employees, the private contractors who were hired by
the United States. As you know, there's 20,000 private
contractors. That's a number I have heard. I can't
verify it. But we -- in the prison system in the
United States military, since we know nobody speaks
Arabic, we don't have enough translators, they hire
locals. They hire -- they go to various companies,
C.A.C.A. Is one.
AMY GOODMAN: Kaky?
SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't know what it stands for, but
out of Virginia. They just got a huge new contract.
These are people who do hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of business. They provide interpreters,
among other things; that's part of their business. The
private companies were all over Abu Ghraib, and they
had local -- one of the people, one of the men from
the private companies was -- did have forcible sex
with -- there's women in the prisons, which is also a
big contentious problem for the Iraqi population. The
women are held in a separate unit, but they have
children; and one of the children and one of the women
was raped by a boy. There are photographs. There is
testimony --
AMY GOODMAN: Was raped by --
SEYMOUR HERSH: One of the guards, rather. And
witnessed by Americans taking photographs. There is
testimony that has not been made public about this. I
know that there's been statements made in various
military proceedings. And the government's been very
chary about writing -- putting out any information.
People witnessed it. They had cameras, and I believe
they were video cameras. They could have been still
cameras. There were cameras photographing it, and the
boy was screaming. But I don't have a videotape of it.
I haven't seen a videotape of it. I know that such
testimony has been given. So, it's -- there is
testimony that's been given for some reason that we
can always guess about. Look, you know, I'm -- it's --
women were doing things -- I actually learned about
Abu Ghraib. I went to Damascus in Christmas of 2003 to
interview an Iraqi -- a high ranking Iraqi officer
that somehow had escaped being imprisoned by us. We --
many of the Ba'ath party leadership are still in a
prison --Camp Cropper, I think, in Baghdad. And he
came out to Damascus to see me, and he told me -- we
spent three days -- and in one afternoon he told me a
great deal about Abu Ghraib. Again, without a video
camera, without a photograph of it. And one of the
things that was most compelling about it was the women
were writing letters to their families -- women in
jail -- saying, "Please come kill me. I have been
abused. Come kill me." So, you know -- an Israeli I
know said to me, he said, "You know, I hate Arabs."
This is an old-time guy. Old-time military guy,
old-time Mossad-type guy -- intelligence guy. "I hate
Arabs. I've been killing them for 50 years and they've
been killing us for 50 years." And he said, you know,
"Let me tell you something, Hersh. But one day we know
with a wall, without a wall, we're going to have to
live with those s.o.b.'s sometime. And let me say this
to you: If we treated our prisoners the way you
treated prisoners, we could never do that."
We have really dug a hole for ourselves on this Story,
and that's why it's so profound. The book You're
talking about, I think it's published this week. I
finished this book in August, I mean, I'm jamming. And
it was being translated -- as --page after page -- I
think ten countries are publishing it -- all over
England yesterday, and Germany, because there's -- you
know --This is a bad thing for us.
AMY GOODMAN: The secret unit.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, three months after the war, we set
up -- Look, the war takes place, as I said. They're
panicked. We don't know what to do about it. We don't
have intelligence. A lot of people in the world want
to extradite people to us. We have a lot of friends,
even in places -- Sudan, Yemen. Everybody responds to
our America -- this terrible tragedy of the World
Trade Center, etc. Getting people out of a country
involve extradition, rendition they call it. Legal
process. Not fast enough for Rummy -- Rumsfeld. So
Rumsfeld sets up a secret unit known -- doesn't matter
what the code name was, but it was - there's something
known in the military as a S.A.P., Special Access
Program. This is a very secret unit, often on the
fifth floor (they call it the fifth deck) of the
Pentagon in a secure area where all of our secret
weapons -- the Predator aircraft, the Stealth bomber,
were built in S.A.P.'s, because you can control
access. There's something called an "unacknowledged
S.A.P." which is a really really secret unit, and you
can run operations out of it. He set up an
unacknowledged S.A.P. He needed a finding and they did
tell the Congress. I can tell you right now I know, I
write that I've talked to members of Congress who saw
and signed the finding. It's a unit completely
composed of men in undercover --probably Jordanian,
Canadian passports, who knows? -- and their job is to
find the bad guys, grab them out of their beds, no
extradition. Put them --they have secret -- they have
their own aircraft, their own helicopters--grab them,
pull them out, and bring them to Egypt, Singapore,
other places for interrogation. Initially by locals,
eventually by us, very tough stuff. But to get intel.
And this operation was called into Abu Ghraib. And I
guess you could say we've been in the disappearing
business; because we really don't know much about it.
It still exists. It still goes on. I've written about
it. I write in this book that -- I know some reporters
in my old business, good reporters in Washington know
about it. There hasn't been much reporting done on it.
It's a secret unit that reports directly to Rumsfeld
(and, obviously, approved by the President) so we can
get -- we don't have to go through a legal -- you know
going into a country to get somebody out you have to
talk to our ambassador, the legal authorities, and et
cetera. You just get them, put them on a Gulfstream 5,
fly them to Egypt, bam, bam.
I think the program in the beginning was really well
-- they tried to run it well. People involved tell me
in the beginning that we got some very good stuff. The
people we tried to get were bad guys. But eventually,
and this is -- I write about this in the book, too
--eventually it began to turn, became more political,
and in the end, I quote somebody in the unit as
saying, "What do you call it when you torture somebody
to get information? And you leave them for medical
help, and he doesn't get it and he dies?" And after a
second, he said, "Execution." So, in the end, it ends
up getting a little bit out of control. They did bring
this unit, some elements of this unit into the Iraqi
prison system in the fall. This is a decision made by
the President. And this is where the idea of sexuality
and using nakedness -- I think it came from this group
because that's something they're very good at.
Breaking down people that way.
AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, how high does this go?
Chain of Command, is the title of your book.
SEYMOUR HERSH: If you're talking about Abu Ghraib, did
Rumsfeld and the President know about it? No. If
You're talking about the idea that -- a military unit
is really interesting, anybody who served in the
military knows, from a platoon to a company to a
battalion to a division to the Secretary of Defense to
the White House to the President, if you set the
policy, if you say, we will not tolerate stupid abuse
of people whose information we need, if you make it
clear we're going to treat people with dignity,
because we want our soldiers to be treated with
dignity, and that's also the way to get the
information we need, it would be -- go down like a
rock from the beginning. It never happened. So it goes
to the very top. That's why the story I tell at the
beginning of the book about Conde Rice. I can't tell
you that the President knew about this briefing from
the C.I.A. official and that -- I can just tell you
that everybody else in the White House did.
AMY GOODMAN: And that C.I.A. official who originally
went down to Guantanamo and came back so disturbed --
conservative Palestinian?
SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. Conservative Palestinian.
AMY GOODMAN: C.I.A.?
SEYMOUR HERSH: With integrity, an awful lot of
integrity; and thank God there are people like that
there. And there are there. And I can tell you there
were many people in the C.I.A, many more than some of
the reports want you to believe, the Intelligence
Committee, who knew that there were problems with our
intelligence all along, not only on W.M.D., but about
the war. Just in general the idea that the C.I.A.
misled the President is not true. This is a White
House that wanted it the way they got it. They call it
-- the clichι is - "intelligence to please." The
pressure was always on the intelligence agency to tell
us anything bad about Saddam and weapons you can. The
standard for that information was much lower than for
any other intelligence. Well, so, here we are. You
know, we got the bombs going off. No solution to this
war coming. No exit plan from this White House. No
exit plan from John Kerry, either.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, do you believe this White House
will be there again?
SEYMOUR HERSH: If I was a betting man? Sure. If John
Kerry thinks that he can go to the Germans and the
French and the Italians and say to them, you put your
-- the Italians are there, the Germans and French --
his plan to get our allies to send their troops in
there, it's just changing the color of the corpses.
It's not going to work.
AMY GOODMAN: Given what John Kerry said in 1971, it's
rather surprising 35 years later that he has not
raising Abu Ghraib torture as an issue in this
campaign?
SEYMOUR HERSH: In all fairness to him, I think the
campaign is just barely -- the book was published
yesterday. I don't know what the campaign is going to
do. I've actually been in contact with -- some people
have called and asked for copies of the book. I
presume -- Look, torturing people --
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you have been writing about it for
more than year.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, torturing, well, but torturing
people is -- you know --
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there.
Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to
Abu Ghraib. The book was published this week, the
story he's been reporting for quite some time now.
Thank you very much.
SEYMOUR HERSH: Glad to see you, Amy.
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/19888
Kitty's Litter
By Matt Taibbi, AlterNet. Posted September 15, 2004.
Kitty Kelley's take on the Bush dynasty: consistently
cold, calculating, predatory and unscrupulous,
generation after generation.
In other words, her book is a rollicking good read.
Kitty Kelley's "explosive" nearly 700-page tome on the
Bushes, The Family, has been barely out on the streets
for a day, but the early news reactions have already
made it plain: The sprawling biography simply doesn't
matter. The predominant media take on this book is
likely to go something like this: In Bush tome,
unreliable menopausal scandalmonger again misses mark;
world waits out irritating media buzz.
But that doesn't mean the book isn't worth a read
far from it.
Kelley's book is unintentionally I think a
surprisingly tender portrait of a small, loyal group
of vicious undead fiends, persevering against all odds
in a world of the callous, uncomprehending living.
Kelley does what no other writer to date has really
done for the Bushes: she actually makes you admire
them for their remarkable ability to remain
consistently cold, calculating, predatory and
unscrupulous in generation after generation after
generation.
In one of the great laugh lines of this or any other
biography, Kelley sums up the Bush charm by quoting
(third-hand, mind you there's that damn credibility
thing again!) none other than Richard Nixon:
The writer Gore Vidal recalled a conversation with his
friend Murray Kempton shortly after one of the
journalist's periodic lunches with Murray Kempton.
Kempton had mentioned George Bush [Sr.], and according
to Vidal, Nixon had responded: "Total light-weight.
Nothing there sort of person you appoint to things
but now that Barbara, she's something else again!
She's really vindictive!" Vidal characterized the
comment as "the highest Nixonian compliment."
But then Richard Nixon hadn't met W.
Kelley's book covers some six generations of Bushes in
some detail, focusing primarily on the Big Three:
Prescott, George H.W., and George W. It is less an
intergenerational saga than a breathtaking tale of
genealogical one-upmanship in which each successive
Bush child strives to indelibly stamp the family name
on some previously unconquered region of human
iniquity. Each successive Bush is Worst of All in his
own way.
The title of Meanest Old Bugger goes to George W.'s
great-great grandfather, David Davis Walker, who once
wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Republic
that said:
I consider [Negroes] more of a menace ... than all
other evils combined ... For humanity's sake, I am in
favor of putting to death all children who come into
the world hopeless invalids or badly deformed ... I am
in favor of a whipping-post law ... for wife-beaters
and all other petty offenders on whom jail sentences
are imposed.
In squirming out of combat duty, it turns out W. was
merely following a long family tradition, first
initiated by D.D. Walker, who Kelley claims got out of
the Civil War by paying someone to take his place in
the Union army.
But D.D. Walker hardly represents the pinnacle of the
family's achievement. His son, George Herbert (Bert)
Walker, had his father declared insane late in life to
prevent him from giving away too much family money.
Bert would later gain some renown during Poppy Bush's
tenure in the White House as the family's great
investor in Nazi businesses. And until W. came along,
Bert Walker was the family's most exalted Maker of
Suspiciously Successful Stock Deals. He was also best
in the family at buying things (companies,
tournaments, land, towns) and naming them after
himself.
Most importantly, Bert also began the proud family
tradition of Bush/Walker men who were driven to
extraordinary accomplishments by their unconcealed
contempt for their fathers, who in turn hated their
sons.
Then there was Prescott Bush, W.'s grandfather, who
took part in the failed theft of Geronimo's skull (he
and his creepy Yale friends stole the skull of a ten
year-old Apache boy instead) and denounced playwright
Edward Albee on the Senate floor without ever reading
his work. Prescott appears in the book as the family's
great Cringing Ass-Licker; much of the middle chapters
are concerned with his tireless efforts to flatter (in
succession) Eisenhower, Nixon, Rockefeller and Nixon
again.
Prescott, however, was a relative political moderate
who supported civil rights and limited forms of
socialized medicine and aid to the poor. He is also a
vitally important character in understanding our
current president as the fruit of the Bush family
tree. Prescott represents the moment in the family's
evolution before the Genteel Yale Snobs of the Bush
family fully merged with the Mean Unscrupulous
Moneymaking Bastards of the Walker family.
It is only with Prescott's son, George Herbert Walker
Bush, that the two strands of the genetic lineage come
together in perfect alignment, hence paving the way
for the creation of W.
People who are accustomed to viewing Bush I as the
moderate in the family will be shocked at reading
Kelley's book. The "bombshell revelations" in the book
are likely to be the numerous extramarital affairs
Kelly hangs on the neck of Bush I, using language that
makes it seem almost inevitable that reporters will
now find these mistresses that somehow escaped public
detection for all these years. The most obvious lead
Kelley offers appears to be an unnamed New York lawyer
who claims he was engaged by an Italian woman he calls
"Rosemarie," who considered suing Bush I after he
broke a promise to leave Barbara for her. I will be
shocked if the lawyer and the mistress are not
identified by some British tabloid by the end of the
baseball season.
But the more damning details about Bush I are the
things that he said on the record during his first
Senate run statements that we somehow never heard
about when he was running for president. His
accomplishments include calling Martin Luther King a
"militant," being a member of three all-white clubs in
Houston (GHWB: "I always believe people should
associate with their friends in things like that"),
and deriding the concept of medical care for the aged
as "medical air for the caged." It was as useless as
putting air-conditioning in a ship hold for caged zoo
animals.
And as chairman of the RNC during the Nixon years,
Bush I attacked Watergate investigator Carmine Bellino
by falsely charging him with wiretapping Nixon in 1960
while working for John F. Kennedy previewing similar
tactics that both he and his son would use as
president.
Bush I's fierce campaign to the top of the political
totem pole allowed the next generation of Bushes to
make their dastardly mark on the world in an
atmosphere of relative leisure. This round of Bush
children with names like "Neilsie" and "Georgie"
marked a radical departure from the Bush family
tradition. The previous Bush patriarchs, for all their
moral flaws, had been men of indomitable will,
superior culture, and remarkable ingenuity. With
George W., they began an evolutionary march backwards,
back toward a more perfect and streamlined ancestor,
the Horseshoe Crab Bush, the Coelocanth Bush.
In the book, W. appears as the evolutionary essence of
a long and nasty family lineage, boiled down and
stripped of civilizing ballast. While popular culture
derides Bush II as a bumbling buffoon who has been
lucky since birth, in The Family he appears almost
beautiful: a pure vision of human ugliness, born to
rule an ugly world that deserves him.
The W. sections of the book contain many of the same
allegations that have already shadowed his political
career: drug and alcohol abuse, adultery, his use of
connections to evade military service. The Air
National Guard sections includes some new reporting
that may move the story forward. Kelley traces Bush's
acceptance into the guard, where there was a waiting
list 100,000 people long, back through the ranks of
the Texas reserves to a phone call from Bush I. But
for the most part, these hot-button angles are not
documented sufficiently to really hurt Bush.
It is notable that in Kelley's numerous bites at the
coke-story apple, she always talks in generalities
about drug and alcohol use in the Bush family, as if
to convict W. by implication ("We all got hit... Our
family suffered terribly," says Bush cousin John.).
There is an unmistakable desire to hint at controversy
that pervades Kelley's writing, and it shines through
particularly in her "revelations" about W.
While this is certainly a flaw in the book, it doesn't
detract from the priceless details about the young W.
that she does get right. For example: his job as a
"pillow-toter" for Republican Senate candidate Edward
Gurney, who had a war wound that needed the aid of
something soft and portable. Time and again in the
book, you witness the future president joyously
non-performing in non-jobs in the company of horrified
colleagues forced to listen to him ramble on and on
about what a great life he has and how he always gets
away with everything.
Here's a description of W. when working on the
campaign of congressional candidate "Red" Blount in
Birmingham (the same time period as when he was
supposed to be in the Guard in Texas):
Those who worked with George... recall that he liked
to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat
fistfuls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the
Cloverdale grill in Birmingham... [he] tended to show
up late every day at work, "around noon," come into
the office, prop his cowboy boots on a desk and start
bragging about how much he had drunk the night before.
W.'s most distinctive quality in the book is his
completely unapologetic attitude about being a child
of privilege. He brags to new acquaintances in a
political campaign of how his father's name got him
out of drunk driving arrests. He tells a Harvard
professor openly that he got into the Business School
through his dad, happily adding that he got out of
Vietnam the same way, as well. Throughout the whole
book, W. is mostly bragging or getting drunk, or
bragging about getting drunk. It is indeed a great
life.
W. does appear more wayward than mean, however, until
he gets to Harvard Business School in 1975. That is
when he really comes into his own. In one class, he
buttonholes a professor for showing "The Grapes of
Wrath": "Why are you going show us that commie movie?"
Later in that same class, during a discussion on the
Great Depression, W. the same man who has spent his
entire life to date boozing and shoving fistfuls of
peanuts in his mouth says: "Look. People are poor
because they are lazy." The class freaks out at him,
but he holds firm just as he's holding firm now.
What few people realize about George W. Bush is that
it takes balls to be him it takes balls to go to
room full of intellectuals in Cambridge, sit in class
without a clue, blast the poor, and call John
Steinbeck a commie. The same kind of balls it took to
invade Iraq and get the nation into an open-ended war
when the whole world told him over and again that it
was a terrible idea. His unwavering belief in the
righteousness of his idiotic life of privilege is so
impressive that you almost come away believing he
might be right. The rest of us have doubts; Georgie is
always sure, even when he is toting pillows.
As a book, The Family will me
Posted by richard at September 16, 2004 10:39 AM