Thursday, May 12, 2005

Analysis: Iraq is "Moving Toward Open Civil War"

Analysis: Iraq is "Moving Toward Open Civil War": "« In Iraq's insurgency, no rules, just death | Main

May 12, 2005
Iraq is "Moving Toward Open Civil War"
Seymour Hersh
Democracy Now!
May 11th, 2005

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine delivered the keynote address last night. Hersh won the Prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Last year, he broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He is author of the book, Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. He broke the prisoner abuse story a year ago. This is an excerpt of what he had to say last night, about My Lai and Abu Ghraib.

SEYMOUR HERSH: So, in My Lai, the kids go into – they go into a village where they’re going to allegedly -- they have lost about 15% or 20% of their people. They have come into the country in December of 1967, 100 guys. Lieutenant Calley is one of the platoon leaders, but he is a fanciful figure. There were many officers involved, but he’s -- the world has stuck it on him. Okay, but Calley was one of their officers. And they're told they're going to meet the enemy finally, after losing, as I say, 15 guys to bombs, land mines and sniper fire. So, they go in the next day. There's nobody there, women and children. They kill 550 or 540 or 530, the numbers sort of differ, but they're that high. Three groups, they shoot into ditches, mostly farm boys shooting. Some of the Hispanic and black guys told me they shot, but up in the air. They didn't dare not shoot. This is a war where a lot of bullets in the back. Unlike in Vietnam, it's better now. A lot bullets in the back if you didn’t go along. And they shot up in the air. This doesn't mean that the Hispanics or the African Americans fought the war at any level better, but in this case they did.

And so the next day, one of the kids who did most of the shooting, a kid named Meadlo, gets his foot blown off. They’re patrolling somewhere near My Lai 4, and he screams one of these oaths that everybody remembered. I was doing the story, what, in ‘69 and ’70, talked to 55 of the kids there, sad saps. Ended up thinking they were as much victims, in a sense, as the people they shot, which wasn't a way you start out, you know, mad at them. It's hard to stay mad at them because of what -- anyway -- so, they're taking away Meadlo and he's screaming, “God has punished me, Calley (Lieutenant Calley)! And he is going to punish you, too!” Calley was the one who ordered him to shoot in the ditch, and he shot 10 or 15 clips.

And so, I'm looking for him. And I'm doing the stories as a freelancer. And I'm looking for him. I'm somewhere in the West Coast. And I hear about Meadlo, and I find his phone. Somebody tells him, one of the kids I'm talking to in the unit, somewhere in Indiana – it was a lot -- we didn't have Google; it was a lot harder then – find his house. He’s southern Indiana farm boy. I get down there the next day. I fly overnight to, I think it's Indiana, Indianapolis, below Indianapolis, below Terre Haute, a place called New Goshen, down in the southern part of Indiana. A chicken farm, I pull in. It's a chicken farm out of Norman Rockwell, one of those old paintings from The Saturday Evening Post. It's poor, just chicken coops, no farm, no farmland, a bunch of shacks. That’s the home.

The mother that I talked to the night before, I said, “I'm coming.” She said, “I can't tell you he's going to talk to you.” I said, “I’m coming, and you decide.” She said, “Just come, but I can’t promise.” She's comes out to meet me. She’s 50 maybe, weathered, no man around, looks 70. And I just say, “Is Paul Meadlo in there? Is he around?” She said, “He's in there.” I said, “Is it alright if I talk to him?” She said, “Okay,” and then she says -- then she says, (quote, unquote) she says, you know, she says, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.” Okay?

Flash forward 35 years. I'm doing Abu Ghraib. I did a bunch of stories in a row for The New Yorker. I'm going right after Rummy right away, because there's no way – there’s no way, you know, as somebody who had consumed the Human Rights Watch’s and Amnesty reports, I knew that systematically this kind of abuse was going on all the time. How to get it, I had been told by Iraqis in the Middle East that I talked to about Abu Ghraib six months earlier that the prison was so bad that the women in the prisons were sending messages home to their brothers and fathers to please come kill them, because they had been defiled in prison by the Americans. I mean, I knew that, but how do you get to that story? You know -- you know, it's just impossible to get to that story. The photographs made it work.

So, I'm doing this stuff. I get a call in the middle of these stories, and does everybody know? Of course, everybody knows what's going on. Are you kidding? The timeline, the chronology, I told you, what does president not do? He doesn't do anything. He doesn't take any steps at all, confronted with Abu Ghraib, not one step to change anything. They just hope they can get away with a couple of low-level court-martials as they did with Calley. They did, but they could have. Anyway, it was a rational chance, rational gamble.

So, in the middle of this stuff, I get a call from a mother. She wants to see me somewhere in northeastern America. I go see her. There's a kid that was in the unit, the 372nd. They had all come home early. If you remember the timeline, they did their stuff in late 2003, reported in 2004. This mother is telling me -- I'm writing in the spring of 2004 -- March of 2004, the kid had come home in the same unit totally changed. Young, pretty woman, vibrant. Depressed, disconsolate, inconsolable, isolated. Had been newly married. Left her husband, left the family, moved to a nearby town, working a night job or whatever. And nobody could figure out what's going on.

She sees the stories about Abu Ghraib. She goes, knocks on the door, shows the young woman the newspaper, and door slams, bam! And at that point, as she tells me, later -- as she tells me in real time -- this is May, early May -- she goes back, the kid had been given a computer, a portable computer like. It turns out all the G.I.s in Iraq and all over the world now, they -- portable computers are great, because you have CD drives, and you put a movie in there, and then you’re in business. And so you can watch movies and play games on your dead time. I had not thought about it, but that's what happens. That's why all the CD, these digital pictures are being passed around in the unit, because everybody has a computer.

So she claims -- this not a woman familiar with Freud or the unconscious -- she claims at that point she just decided to look at the computer after hearing about Abu Ghraib. She said she had -- she just hadn’t looked at it. She just was going to clean it up and take it to her office as a second computer. No thoughts. And she is deleting files. She sees a file marked “Iraq.” And she hits it, and out comes 60 or 80 digital photographs of the one that The New Yorker ran of the naked guy standing against a cell in terror, hands behind his back so he can’t protect his private parts, which is the instinct. And two snarling German dogs -- shepherds. Somebody said they're Belgian shepherds, perhaps, but two snarling shepherds, you know, on each side of him. And the sequence -- in the sequence, the dogs attack the man, blood all over. I was later told anecdotally, I could never prove it. I am telling you stuff that is not provable -- I mean, at least -- that there was an understanding at least in the prison corps population that the dogs were specially trained to hit the groin area, which is one of the reasons there was so much fear of the dogs. This is – I will tell you right now why they believe among many senior officers that I know in the military, I can -- but again, it's not -- it's not demonstrable. There's no way of codifying that. In any case, the fear was palpable in the picture.

So she looks at this stuff and eventually calls me. And we do it all, and we get permission. We run the photographs, just one -- how much -- and the thought there of the editors was how much do you humiliate the Arab world and the Arab man. One is enough. You know, we can describe what else is on the picture. We just don't need more than one. And then, later the mother calls me back, and we became friends. This happens a lot to people in my business. You get to like people. And she says, you know, one thing I didn't tell you that you have to know about the young woman, when she came back, every weekend, she would go and get herself tattooed, and eventually, she said, she was filling her body with large, black tattoos, and eventually, they filled up every portion of her skin, was tattooed, at least all the portions you could see, and there was no reason to make assumptions about the other portions. She was tattooed completely. It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.

And so, they sent me a boy, and I sent him back a murderer, changing her skin. This war is going to reverberate in ways that we can’t even begin to see.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Seymour Hersh speaking at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at a major media reform conference. We'll come back to his remarks, and then he joins us live in the studio here, as we broadcast from the University of Illinois.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with the keynote address last night of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Seymour Hersh. His latest book is called Chain Of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.

SEYMOUR HERSH: The prison system is -- let's see, since those stories about a year and a month ago, there's been ten Pentagon investigations, repeated talks about whether General Sanchez, the leader, could authorize dogs to do this on Tuesday, but not on Thursday, and whether or not you could put people's head underwater on Wednesday but not on Friday -- rules -- and everybody I talked to before I did this story -- and I knew about Abu Ghraib months before -- there was never a suggestion of a rule in terms of how you approach taking care of prisoners. To the young kids, everybody in the prison was a terrorist, to the soldiers, particularly the M.P.s and some of the Marines who guarded in Guantanamo, and you could do whatever you wanted. You couldn't kill them. That was stupid. That would get you in trouble. It wouldn't be so good to break many bones, unless you could claim it was an accident. But you could just do what you wanted. And everybody understood you could --that’s -- and it's only afterwards we generated a lot of rules. We can talk about this more.

But anyway, in the paper again today, there’s a -- the lead story today in The New York Times -- and again, I'm not shocking you when I tell you there's never been administration which has so deliberately set out to spin the press. We have always had spinning of the press. And, as Bob mentioned earlier, that's all part of the game. We have had the horrible tragedy of the Pentagon Papers, which showed that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, particularly Kennedy, and Johnson, too -- I can't differentiate that much between them -- lied and lied and lied and got away with it. You have to understand it's not that hard inside the government to tell a lie. So, this is an administration that has brought that art, the art of lying not only to the world, not only to foreign reporters, but lying to the American press, systematic misrepresenting and lying, they brought it to a new art form.

For example, after the elections -- yeah, they were interesting elections because if anybody -- not to get into and dwell too much on it, but what did we vote for? Anybody in Iraq, they were voting not for an assemblyman or a legislator, they were voting sectarianism, sectarian lines. They were voting a religious track. It was an election solely based on religion, ethnicity. That was the issue. And it was the strangest election. You know, you don't need me to tell you, what plays out today shows that the election doesn't work.

But anyway, in the paper today, it’s the lead story in the Times, 100 rebels killed in western Iraq. We're back in the body count, by the way. Sometimes we call them “insurgents” or “rebels,” that's a great word because -- I'm wacko on this word “insurgency.” Just so you know, an “insurgency” means, suggests you’ve won the war and there are people who disagree. They’re rebels or they're insurgents, as I said. No. We're still fighting the war we started, folks. We started a war largely against Sunnis and Ba'athists, in many cases tribal groups that supported Saddam or were at least frightened enough to support him. We started a war against the people we’re still fighting. They gave us Baghdad very quickly. They retreated. They simply are not fighting the war in the way and the manner we want them to, that our press, you know, wants to tell you they did, that the government wants to tell the press, wants to suggest that we won and that an insurgency broke out again. We're fighting a resistance movement. The irony is it's a resistance movement that probably -- and has been for years, more than a year -- trying to find ways to talk to us, that just like, you know, the way we deal with most of the -- this administration deals with the Iranians or the Syrians or the North Koreans. And the resistance, you don't talk to them. It’s an amazing -- This is a government that absolutely says, we won't talk to anybody we disagree with and gets away with it on a daily level, consistently, no criticism, no suggestion, no pressure to have bilateral talks with people in any case.

So today's paper says 100 rebels. We're getting a body count going again, killed in western Iraq. And inside the story, it says -- they quote some Colonel in a telephone interview, because as you, I'm sure, know, the press in Baghdad, this is not their fault. They can't do anything much. They stay behind the Green Zone, which is pretty much penetrated, too, I believe, so I'm told, by the opposition, but, you know, the insurgency or the resistance. What will happen there, God knows. When they choose to do something inside the Green Zone, they will do it. Anyway, as the Colonel is quoted, saying that they were dying at a -- they found some insurgents. They began to attack them. The Marines and others, and they -- 100 died, and he said, “As Marines, we would rather engage them this way in face-to-face combat and destroy them and kill them.” They're dying at a rapid rate. Then in I.E.D.s, you know, shorthand for the car bombs and other explosives that have been killing so many troops.

So the suggestion of the story is that 100 rebels or insurgents who normally would be happily going along blowing up American vehicles – the military joke about the Striker. It's called an “I.E.D. magnet” inside, in the military, it's a magnet for these bombs. They instead would choose to stupidly stand up and fight us one for one and die. It doesn't make sense to me. I don't trust the story. I don't trust much that I hear that comes out of Baghdad. I don't trust it at all. Ask me later specifics. I know, since I did Abu Ghraib, lots of emails from lots of kids involved. It's complicated because what happens is we're going along -- the way the war is, it's sort of this dreary pattern. We're going along, our troops, and they're going down roads. It's really sort of astonishingly stupid. We patrol, which is stupid to begin with. What good does that do? They go down roads, certain fixed roads, certain times, certain places, usually in groups of three, four, five Humvees, Bradley tanks, Strikers, other heavy vehicles. One gets blown up. The Americans start screaming in pain. The other vehicles stop, run out. The soldiers are jammed into the back. You’ve seen some tapes or TV stuff about how they do it. They come running out and they shoot at anything that runs. And that's the war.

In one case -- after I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of digital pictures emailed me, and – was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some general rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units -- soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.'s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they're called in as an insurgent kill. It's a kill of, you know, would-be insurgents or resistance and it goes into the computers, and I'm sure it's briefed. Everybody remembers how My Lai was briefed as a great victory, “128 Vietcong killed.” And so you have that pattern again. You know, ask me why I didn't do this story. Because I didn't think the kids did murder. I think it was another day in the war. And even to write about it in a professional way would name names and all that.

In any case, the paper also says -- this is the last one of these things that I found great interest -- that the Lummi tribe, one of the members – it’s a major tribe in the Sunni heartland of Baghdad, the four provinces that Saddam -- the center post of the resistance, the Lummi tribe probably had something to do with turning in Saddam. He had turned on some of those people. Anyway, the new Defense Minister is a Sunni, from the tribe, and he says he's going to continue the policies of Mr. Allawi, the former Defense Minister, which is what? What's the defense policies of Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister? Well, basically, what we have done since -- in the last year, is we have recreated the Iraqi Mukhabarat. This is the heavy-hitting secret police that Saddam ran. We have gone in and recreated many of the members, put them through a little acid test, made them vow that their allegiance – to what? – I guess, to America, or they're no longer Saddamites. In any case, this is our main force right now. This is the force that Allawi controls. This is a force, the former, you know, whatever the guys, whatever you want to call them, the former roughest guys that Saddam had are now working for us. They're our most prominent security force. And we have had really an amazing spectacle of the Secretary Of Defense, Rumsfeld, making at least two trips in the last five months, I think it’s three, but I know of two, I think it was three, though -- going in and basically -- once before the election was announced, and two more trips -- basically pleading on the inside for the two major factions, the Kurds and the Shia, I'm assuming some knowledge of -- I hope I'm not -- Iraq? -- you know, the country? and there's -- anyway, I don't want to kid you. But we're negotiating -- obviously the whole point of the election was to keep Allawi in play so that he could serve as a bridge, our man, between the Kurds and the Shia. And what he delivers is, of course, is the Mukhabarat.

And here you have Rumsfeld. We went to war to get rid of Saddam and all of that. Here you have Rumsfeld going at least twice in the last four months or so to beg, to beg for Allawi to stay in, and beg basically for the former Mukhabarat security forces to continue doing what they do, terrorizing. It was an amazing piece in The New York Times Magazine. I mean, amazing in its inability to go beyond the immediacy of what they were reporting about one of these militias that are former Mukhabarat, former Saddam people, that are now working for us, killing, (quote, unquote), “insurgents,” which means they're basically -- I don't know, when do you describe what's going on as a civil war? I don't know. When is somebody going to say that? But if it's not a civil war, it's very close. And I don't know -- I can’t see an end game. I'll give you a ticket out.

I think the Blair stuff is interesting. If he wants to stay as Prime Minister, there might be a lot of pressure to him to begin reducing troops -- what I'm telling you now comes from a four-star General who was just speculating the other day in a conversation -- might begin to reduce troops in the South where the British have an enormous amount of influence and are operating in the South. Maybe that's one way out. Maybe the new Prime Minister to be, Brown, will do something. I don't know. And that could be a way out. I don't see a way out, because this President -- as I have said many times, as some of you have heard me speak on the radio or whatever -- one of the things about this guy that's really a little overwhelming is, you know, you all applaud when I come in, because I do have – you know, I do think I wear the white hat. I think I'm fighting the good fight as a journalist and trying to do what I can, and I feel virtuous. And I'm up against a President that's absolutely inured to me.

And he's inured to the other good reporting. There is good reporting. It's not just me. The Washington Post has done good stuff. Knight-Ridder newspapers has done good stuff, Amy Goodman’s show, Naomi Klein have done a lot of brilliant stuff about the war. It’s not as if there's any monopoly on critical reporting about the war. Even in The New York Times had a marvelous story a month ago about a group of Marines that came back disillusioned with the lack of equipment, the stupidity of their mission. It was an amazing story. It went down, it just went down. No stories seem to have bounce anymore, in part because, I guess, because of the networks and their cowardness, which is, you know, duh. You know, I'm tired of worrying about the networks. They just are what they are.

But I think what's more important than that is that this guy, this Bush, absolutely believes in what he's doing. He's not like a nervous Richard Nixon, worried about, you know, “They're coming after me,” or Lyndon Johnson quitting over Vietnam with great uncertainty about whether he is doing the right thing. This guy is absolutely convinced. This guy for -- I don't know -- I don't know what's in his mind. I don't know whether he -- God talks to him or whether he's undoing what the mistakes his father made, but he is convinced that he has got to bring democracy to Iraq, and then change -- they altered the plan a little bit. No, I don't think they’re so big anymore into democracy in Syria or Iran, they just want to get regime change. I think moving Wolfowitz out was a sign of sort of diminished ambitions. And it's good. I'm happy. I'm one of those people that said, "Yes, World Bank, yes." Then you can just, you know, starve people, change societies, change economic structures, force everybody from any socialist program to private enterprise, but he's not killing people, and that is a plus. And so, I -- you have got to applaud it. I mean, I would -- [ applause] Oh, hey! Bush for Pope. I don't care. I mean, let's do it.

So, this guy can't be reached by us. Not just me. I mean, they can ignore me, but the networks, any time there's a good story, not a blip. And what does that mean? That means, you know, the body bags aren’t going to stop him. This is a guy who is convinced for whatever reason that even 1,000 or another -- you know, the body count goes on. It just goes on. Of course, nobody counts the Iraqis. I love the stories -- every time you talk about Vietnam, it's always -- the Vietnam war is summarized this way, "58,000 American killed and anywhere between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese." There is a distinction between 2 and 3 million, but that’s okay. I used to joke all the time -- racism in America, you know, is so endemic and so hard to see, but I was always -- I used to joke that I was very proud of Bill Clinton because he was the first president in Kosovo, the former Yugoslavia, since World War II to actually bomb white people. It usually -- it wasn't worth the trouble. It's like going after Israel. Forget it. The racism is just -- anyway -- so, you’ve got a guy that thinks he's doing the right thing. I think he thinks in five years or ten years or 20 years he will be like Lincoln. I think, you know, I don't know. He will be judged as one of the great presidents. You know, you have to understand something about presidents. They -- war -- Jack Kennedy once -- is it David Donald Duncan? Yeah, the Lincoln scholar, he once said to Duncan, the Harvard historian, he once said to him that no President can be great without a war. This is early in the Vietnam War. This is in 1962. Obviously, he died a year later. But I think presidents like Bush understand about how important war is, you know, even a vague reading of history, and Bush is far from intellectual -- you know.

I have a friend who is a major player who went to Iraq recently. There's been a series, unreported, a series of missions in Iraq that have all been there to study the war -- where are we? -- and they’ve all come back pretty negatively. This guy came back and he saw the President months ago. And he said, "Mr. President, we're losing the war in Iraq." And there was a sort of a three-second beat and Bush said, "You mean we're not winning." And this guy said, "Hey, I told him what I had to say. If he wants to turn it the way he wants to, that's the way it goes." You know, so he hears what he hears.

And so, when you're inoculated like that, and presidents always are, but war is important to presidents, which means that instinctively, heuristically, I can tell you this president's totally immersed in the war. We can’t see it. I can’t prove it. I have come close, with somebody on the inside, but this person hasn't gone belly up yet. But anyway, by that I mean, he's listening to the war. He's watching the war. He's getting daily reports. There's something called a Fusion Center that came off the prison system and he was getting reports from that. There were people in the White House with direct connection to the war, not known, military officer, one in particular, who could get to the President for -- between 2003 and 2004 at any time. And so, I think the notion that he is disconnected is wrong.

He is strange in one way. You know, Wolfowitz, who if nothing, if not smart, would understand this, but Bush is truly a Trotskyite, a believer in permanent revolution. We have never had one as a president before. He wouldn't understand that, but Wolfowitz would. He truly is. And he's doing it -- what he thinks he has to do, the revolutions he has to create, without any information, without any -- without an ability to absorb information that's counter to what he wants to hear. And so, I don't know where you are when you have a man with as much power as he controls and as much ability to do something. I don't know how we can get at him. We can all work hard in the next election and try -- forget the party. Just go find good candidates and support them. I mean the Democratic Party, because I don't know. When you have a devalued opposition party, you have a devalued Congress. On any given day, I can’t decide whether the U.S. Senate is supine or prone. On any given day, you know.

I think Bolton will probably get through and the critical vote on the nuclear option, of course, is probably going to be John Warner of Virginia, I'm told. He's the guy who promised to investigate Abu Ghraib. And he does investigate it. Every time another report comes out, he has a hearing, and the officers who write the report come and they testify about their report, and everybody agrees that the report they're talking about is the one they’ve written. And that's the extent of the investigation. Imagine this. Just alone on what we have in the Abu Ghraib, there's no serious investigation. The renditions, which is a three – or what, ren-di-tion – three-syllable word to describe a process that really is very simple. It still goes on, by the way. We send people in undercover, mostly military guys, not approved, no C.I.A. stuff, because if you do the C.I.A. route, you have to have a formal presidential finding under the law and you have to tell Congress. So you stick this stuff in the military. A bunch of guys go in sterile, with no I.D.s. They go into a country, you know, they get together. They go to some village. They go to some house. They grab some guy by the hair. They drag him to an airport where they have a private plane. They fly him somewhere where the sun don't shine. They torture them and sometimes kill them. And that's called rendition. It's been going on. It's -- another word that we used a couple of decades ago for Argentina and Brazil was “disappearing” people.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter giving the keynote address last night at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. When we come back, Seymour Hersh joins us live in the studio.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Seymour Hersh. It's very good to have you with us. Very interesting to listen to this speech.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to start off with, is it true that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld attempted to break into your home?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, no, not literally, of course, but it is true that they asked the FBI to in 1975, when I was a reporter in Washington for The New York Times. I had written a story about, oh, some secret stuff involving the Navy and spying on Russia and intercepts. It was pretty sensitive stuff. It was given to me by people inside the bureaucracy who thought it was stupid, counterproductive and wasteful and dangerous, so there was a reason to write it. I mean, it wasn't as if I was just exposing something -- it had been the source of enormous dismay inside that we continued to do these provocative operations. This was at the end of the Vietnam War. And so, they got upset. Cheney and -- they were both -- one was Chief of Staff, one was his deputy. Maybe Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense then.

And what happened is that during the 2000 campaign when Cheney was nominated, a bunch of reporters from Newsweek went to the Ford Library in Michigan, Gerald Ford -- I don't -- Grand Rapids, I think it was. There's a library there, and they discovered they had declassified some documents, sort of a 25-year time period, and out popped this file on me. And those guys at Newsweek were very excited about it. They even shared it with me. They sent me a copy. It was about 50 pages of worrying about what to do, and at one point they did ask the -- Rumsfeld -- Cheney was writing notes. Rumsfeld was involved and others were, too, in the White House, the White House Counsel, etc., and people from the Pentagon, and they asked the FBI to do -- to go into my house as -- one of the options was go into my house. There were a series of options. One was do nothing. One was to ask The New York Times to try to do something about me, you know, to shut me down, but the most dramatic one was to go into my house.

And they sent it over – and then Ed Levi, who was also a participant in these discussions, he was then the Attorney General. And as I said last night here, o, if we had an Attorney General like that again, former Dean at the University of Chicago Law School, and eminent jurist. He wrote them a smashing memo saying, are you guys -- excuse me, guys, the White House cannot order the FBI to go into someone's house. You have to -- we have to begin a criminal investigation. It has to be determined by appropriate judicial figures, people in the Justice Department. The Department of Justice has to decide there's a case there. Then as part of the investigation, we can authorize it, you cannot. And so they were sort of rebuked. And it was in writing. And Newsweek never did the story. And so --

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Do I know why anybody doesn't do anything? I don't know why. And it never really became a story. It was sort of -- you know, this came up because somebody asked me about it last night. I decided not to talk -- write about it and talk about it.

AMY GOODMAN: And what would they have found if they broke into your house?

SEYMOUR HERSH: A dog. A cat. As if -- as if somebody would keep memos and, you know, -- I don't keep anything around, period. I just don't do it.

AMY GOODMAN: This latest news that we get out of Jordan right now about the pardoning of Ahmad Chalabi -- King Abdullah of Jordan agreeing to pardon the one-time CIA asset. For years he faced a 22-year prison sentence in Jordan for fraud after his Petra Bank collapsed with more than 300 million dollars in missing deposits. The Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, asking the king to do this. What's going on here, and the significance?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I’m sort of glad and not glad you asked me that question, because I do know something about it. Here's what I know about that. I know that King Jordan comes to visit America quite a bit – the United States. And the President likes him -- our President, George Bush, because he speaks good English. He went to a prep school here in America, and he's very pro-Western. And he sees the President, and he has told friends -- this is about nine months ago -- he was stunned. He was seeing the President. The President said, you know, "Your" -- whatever he calls him -- "I have a favor." He said, "Of course, anything." "I want you to pardon Chalabi." And he was stunned, because, you know, how can he pardon Chalabi after what he had done. The money he stole was from old women and children, you know, little funds, and he was reviled, Chalabi. I have actually read -- I actually somebody in the intelligence community once gave me the transcript of his trial in Arabic. And we had it translated at The New Yorker. This time he was sort of out of vogue, and a story never emerged out of it, but the trial was devastating. I mean, they had him nailed. And he was smuggled out of the country. He probably was in cahoots, by the way, with various members of the royal family then during this stuff, you know, bribery, etc. In any case, he was stunned, and he didn't know what to say. He went back and he asked people in the parliament, who said, “Are you kidding?” So all I can tell you is that Abdullah is doing what the President of the United States, to his amazing shock, because this was after the stuff came out about Chalabi and his connection to Iran. This is probably a neo-con, a neoconservative play. I guess if you wanted to extrapolate it, I don't know whether -- if anybody cares, but I’m sure the White House would deny it and say it's not true, but I can categorically tell you this is Abdullah's story, this I do know. And he was stunned. And he couldn't do it then, so obviously, he thought time had passed. The idea that the President after Chalabi was in big trouble over his connections to Iran and being accused of leaking information whether rightly or not --

AMY GOODMAN: Remind our viewers and listeners, they raided his home in Iraq, the US forces?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, and they claimed that he had been relaying information about American intercept capability, our signals intelligence to the Iranians who are clearly a presence. You know, Abdullah is one of the people along with --

AMY GOODMAN: The King of Jordan?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. The King of Jordan, along with, of course, the Saudis and the Egyptians who see what's going on in Iraq right now as an existential threat in this sense – that they believe the United States is making a terrible mistake by letting much of Iraq fall into the hands of the – of what they consider to be Iranian Shia. They see the Irianian influence spreading south, and for the Sunni -- those are Sunni countries, that's a devastating effect that hasn't happened before. So it's a huge issue. Then to pardon Chalabi is just -- it's a personal favor for the President. I don't know -- I don't know what, obviously, what's in his mind. I do know the President, I think all of us understand, he's more attuned. He wouldn't have done what he did in Iraq if he hadn't been more attuned even before becoming President to the idea that all things in the Middle East revolve around Iraq as the neo-cons always believed.

AMY GOODMAN: The news of this Operation Matador that is taking place right now, US forces carrying it out, one of the largest post-Saddam military operations in Iraq, the US admitting it’s facing fierce resistance. What is the significance of this? When do casualties count, when don't they?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, they're not counting now. American casualties are discounted in the newspapers. We have had an awful lot of people, more than a dozen die in the last few days alone in Iraq. American casualties are back up. And it's not a major story. Once in a while it gets to be a story. And so, they put out -- they do their own sort of accounting. The one way they balance the bad news is they have raids. And we suddenly show us on the offensive. And part of it is what the information -- it's an operation, it's a public relations. It's a strategic deception in a way. I’m not suggesting the raids are not there. I’m not suggesting they may even be finding people. God knows who they find. But clearly, one reason they're being emphasized is to detract from what's going on, which is a steady increase in the insurgency and the resistance.

And what happened is after the election of January 30, the elections so widely hailed by this President and the government, which as we now know has had very little consequence on the reality of what's going on on the ground, as we move towards an open civil war there, but after the election, there were orders put out to change the reporting requirements on incidents. In other words, you had to have a serious American fatality or casualty, not necessarily death, but a serious incident, to get reported. So just a mine going off and somebody being lightly wounded wouldn't get reported. So the numbers went down right away, suggesting that somehow the election had worked.

And again, if you remember before the election, there was nothing but talk from the White House about how the resistance was going to challenge us repeatedly and go after us on election day. How do they know? I mean, we know nothing about what the resistance does. We have no intelligence about who they are, where they are. We have some ideas. We know they used to operate in three-man cells in 2003 and then 15-man cells last year. We don’t know when they’re gonna hit, where they're gonna hit. So how do we know what they were planning to do before January 30 last year? We don't. But we created an image that they were planning massive attacks. And when they didn't come off -- they were the usual daily assortment of attacks -- it's a victory. I mean, the information is totally controlled by the American government. I don't fault the press in Baghdad, because they can't get out and they can’t do it. They're stuck.

AMY GOODMAN: Civil war?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Why not? What is it? Where do you think we're at? There was a piece in The New York Times a week ago Sunday in the magazine section. I would say one of the most stunningly obtuse -- I don't know what they're thinking in my old newspaper. A piece essentially praising the fact that we have -- the United States is supporting a paramilitary group --.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the cover of the magazine, the "Salvadorization of Iraq."

SEYMOUR HERSH: Right, and as you mentioned in your talk last night, with one of the American commanders who was involving and supporting and aiding the El Salvadorian hunter-killer teams back two decades ago, in charge, being the adviser to this group -- this is a group that, in The New York Times story, committed significant violations of the Geneva Convention, and it's almost being praised by it. There isn't a sense in the article -- there is not any sense of the big picture, that these are violations of the Geneva Convention, that this is exactly -- this is the former Mukhabarat, the former secret police of Saddam. These are the people that we went to war against, and we're now writing articles in favor of them. The New York Times reporter was embedded with them. Although, I must say to his credit, that is acknowledged in the story, it's explained, but it doesn't really explain what that means, the context. And, you know, I can say because I have a lot of respect for The New York Times, I don't know what the guys on the top -- I mean, I know when I worked there, if I wrote a magazine piece, the senior editors read it, discussed it, gave me notes. It's not just done in the magazine. The guys that run the newspaper read it. What were they thinking of?

AMY GOODMAN: And what about this issue of the Salvadorization, the idea that John Negroponte has been the US Ambassador -- of course, he’s head of National Intelligence now -- formerly in the early ‘80s, Ambassador to Honduras, the staging ground for the Contra War? Do you see a connection between the people that are being brought in now who worked Salvador, two decades ago working with paramilitaries?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't want to beat my breast, but I think I used the notion that it's an El Salvadorian war in an article in The New Yorker about six months ago, saying it's gone El Salvador. And Negroponte is a true believer. He really supports this administration and Bush. He's totally on the team. Somebody said to me when he was named head of the overall intelligence apparatus by Bush, you know, we all joked that everybody who goes to the White House has to drink the Kool-Aid in order to get there. In other words, you only want to hear from people who believe what you’re -- there's no opposition, no dissent allowed. I mean, there's just no dissent allowed inside. Any dissent is not just honest dissent, it's being a traitor. And somebody said to me, well, he's going to mix the Kool-Aid. That's his job now as head of intelligence. He’s very nice, a very pleasant man, he’s very articulate. And I think what he has done in terms of setting up a covert, off-the-books apparatus and a hunter-killer team, that's what we have now. We’re taking down -- the idea is, I think it’s ungodly in a way, really, what he has done. The idea is right now in Iraq, the goal they have now is they want to go into the various major cities in the Sunni heartland, the four provinces of Iraq that are considered to be pro-Saddam or pro-Ba'athist, and which what 40% of the population reside, around Baghdad. The idea is to go to major cities. They did Fallujah, they're doing Ramadi right now, take it down, make the people of the Sunni heartland more afraid of the American/Iraqi Mukhabarat than they are of the resistance. That's the idea. And Abizaid, so I have been told, has made it clear that he thinks he can, within a year, he can take down four or five of the major strongholds. And I think the plan is to go from Ramadi to another major city of 300,000 or 400,000 and begin the same kind of operation. No more embedded journalists, only on a rare occasion. We're not there like we were in Fallujah. We don't really know what's going on in Ramadi. It seems like it’s holy hell there, but we don't know. And I think that’s the game plan. It’s sort of a desperate game plan. It's not going to work, obviously. Occupiers, terror and these techniques don't work. You know, the Israelis, you could argue, did well --

AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, when the Palestinians, because it was an existential threat for the Israelis. They learned a language, they got there. It’s not for us. We’re just in there dabbling. We’re dabbling at this Mukhabarat and this kind of stuff. We're just causing chaos. Then we can walk away.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much, Seymour Hersh, for being with us, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9-11 to Abu Ghraib."

posted by JBOC @ 5:47 PM 2 comments

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Seymour Hersh: Bush is "Unreachable"

March 31, 2005
Seymour Hersh: Bush is "Unreachable"

"A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Gloria R. Lalumia, BuzzFlash Columnist

Seymour Hersh visited New Mexico State University (Las Cruces) on Tuesday, March 29 as part of his speaking tour for his newest book, “Chain of Command: the Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.” He opened his presentation by announcing that he intended to discuss “what’s on my mind” and “where we think we are.” The first thing on his mind was a chilling assessment of George W. Bush.

“The President,” Hersh sighed. “Bush is as absolutely convinced he’s doing the right thing,” just as journalists are who think of themselves as white knights think they are doing the right thing. “Even if we have another thousand body bags, it won’t deter him.”

“This is where he is. He believes he won’t be measured by today, but in 5 or 10 years” in terms of the Mideast. With regard to Iraq, “he thinks it’s going well.” Iran, according to Hersh’s contacts, is “teed up.” “This is his mission,” he continued. “What does it mean?”

And then he delivered the most chilling comments of the evening. “Nothing I write” is likely to influence Bush, he said. “He is unreachable. I can’t reach him. He’s got his own world. This is really unusual and frankly, it scares the hell out of me.”

From this point on, Hersh offered a compendium of the Bush policy failures, misjudgments, and out-of-touch convictions that have fueled his fears.

Iraq

First, Hersh brought the audience of nearly 2,000 up to date on conditions in Iraq. He torpedoed Bush’s rosy assessment of the recent elections. “Everything came to a stop for this election. Satellites were moved over the country. All assets were dragged over. In Afghanistan, where we really have a war going on…those guys stood down for three weeks because the drones which pick up signals were all dragged to Iraq. Nobody knew who they were voting for. If this had happened in Russia during the Cold War, it would have been laughed at.”

Assessing the current situation, Hersh remarked that the Iraqis “can’t agree on what language to speak--it’s zoo time. We’re nowhere, we’re probably not going to win the war; probably, it will be a Balkanized country. The Turks want Kirkuk, the city with oil, and they may invade, they may not. Here it’s spin city. In the European and Mideastern press, there’s a reality that you don’t get over here.”

Hersh described how he thought Bush treats Americans by retelling an old Richard Pryor story in which a man comes home to find his wife in bed with another man. “What you’re seeing isn’t happening,” the husband is told. “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”

Hersh charged that the American people are not getting a true picture of the status of the war. He reflected on the fact that “there are no embedded reporters now and the bombing continues” even though there are no air defenses. “We don’t know how many sorties are being flown or the tonnage involved because there are no reporters. We do know that Navy pilots are doing most of the flying.” Hersh made a point of saying that many in the military, FBI, and CIA have as much integrity as most academics, and within these institutions “there are people who respect the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody.” The Marine Corps personnel are the most skeptical even as they continue to do most of the heavy lifting. Hersh reports that many are very bitter, but they are loyal to the principle of civilian control and are continuing to do their job, but “they are going through hard times now.”

The bombing of Fallujah, according to Hersh, marked a major escalation of the “very careful urban bombing” campaign. Fallujah is “an incredibly important city in Iraq. It led the resistance against the British, it has mosques, it is a fabled place.” When Fallujah was bombed, an urban bombing planner told Hersh, “Welcome to Stalingrad, we took it block by block.” Hersh said that it was amazing that Fallujah was largely not on the table in America for discussion.”

“The Thinness of the Fabric of Democracy”

How have we as a nation gotten to where we are today? Since the ‘80’s Wolfowitz, Feith, Gingrich and others have been pushing the neo-con idea that by spreading democracy, we can make the world safer for US interests. “It’s as if we’ve been taken over by a cult of 8 or 9 people who decided the road to stop international terrorism led to Baghdad,” according to Hersh. Hersh recalled how General Shinseki, who testified in February 2003 that we would need upwards of 250,000 troops to control Iraq, was denounced by Wolfowitz, because Shinseki’s answers didn’t conform to the neo-con mantra.

“That 8 or 9 people can change so much...Where was the military, the Congress, the press? What has happened raises the question about the thinness of the fabric of democracy.”

These days, said Hersh, we hear about the “insurgency” when in truth, “we’re fighting the Ba’athists, the Sunni, the tribal people. They decided to let us have Baghdad and fight the war on their terms. It’s not an insurgency—that implies that we’ve put in a government and they’re fighting against that government. We haven’t accomplished our objective on that score,” according to Hersh.

The US is fighting cells of 10-15 people and can’t find them because it has no intelligence. So the goal now is to make the people who protect the resistance more afraid of US/Iraqi forces than they are of the resistance so they will turn and provide information. Fallujah had too much press coverage, so now everything is being done “off camera.” Hersh describes the situation once one leaves Baghdad as “cowboys and Indians” since “we control very little.” Hersh noted that Shia cleric Sistani did nothing as Shia Iraqi Guards and Americans took down the Sunni in Fallujah. The same thing is now going on in Ramadi. This long-standing enmity between Shia and Sunni is why, Hersh believes, civil war is probably in Iraq’s future.

“The Chronology”

Hersh then launched into his chronology of how we went from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Post-9/11, there were voices in the U.S. government that were not pushing the policy of “payback” since some Taliban had been dealing with U.S. oil companies, were largely mercantile and many were not happy with bin Laden. These voices in the government wanted a more nuanced approach. There was also disagreement with Bush’s plans to go into Iraq, but these people were deemed “traitors.” He described how the Bush Administration pressured people to come around to their view. Basically, they exploited human nature. People with experience who disagreed noticed that junior officials supporting the White House got the face time with the President, the meetings, and the big end of the year bonuses. So it was only a matter of time before those who did not favor Bush’s policies, people with kids and mortgages, decided they had to “join the team” to survive. (See the section on the Q & A below for more insights on what people in the government and military have been thinking.)

Bush elected to rout the Taliban, but pulled out the most elite units in early 2002 for redeployment to the Mideast for the coming war in Iraq. Although Bush says we’ve “won” in Afghanistan, “the ‘bad guys’ are still there, the elections have been delayed for a second time, crime is up, they are the largest producers of heroin in the world, and at one point, 700 kids were dying of hypothermia and malnutrition every day” during the hard winter.

Following Bush’s victory show on the carrier in May 2003, the reality of Iraq became clearer. During the invasion, “6,000-12,000 people disappeared overnight. Most elite units had been ready to fight; sandbags and armed soldiers were on every corner.” All the people who ran the bureaucracy of running the country were gone...the people who ran the water, oil ministry and hospitals. Some of the looting was done randomly by Shiites, but most of the government records—real estate, marriage licenses, etc.—were looted and burned systematically. Saddam’s plan was to dismantle the operating units of government and to fight later. To this day, according to Hersh, the “people who didn’t fight are now fighting.”

The August 2003 bombing of the U.N. headquarters and the subsequent attack on the Jordanian Embassy, which Hersh describes as the psyops center for CIA and other espionage, sent a key message: “that the resistance was hitting facilities that would take out other facilities”—in other words, the hitting of key facilities would create a ripple effect, undermining other functions down the line.

At this point, about a year before the Presidential election, Karl Rove got involved. With a desperate need for intelligence, the push was on to squeeze prisoners for information. Hersh said that most of the prisoners “had nothing to do with anything.” Most were caught at roadblocks or any male under 30 was grabbed if he was in the area after an ambush.

At Abu Ghraib, many of the guards were simply traffic police who had been give two weeks of training before being sent to the prison. In September 2003 the abuse of prisoners had begun. The attempts to gain intelligence were based on what Hersh called a “most acute form of torture,” the shaming of prisoners by using pictures of frontal nudity of males and posing prisoners as if they were performing homosexual acts, knowing that if photographs were shown in their communities, this would be death for them. This threat of distribution didn’t get very far because the situation we have today is that we still have no intelligence from inside the resistance or as Hersh puts it, “We don’t know jack.”

From September to December 2003, torture was going on at night and all the top generals were coming in and out of Abu Ghraib. With the release of the Darby CD in January 2004, Rumsfeld appeared before Congress admitting things were “bad” but the extent of the abuse was still secret until Hersh and CBS broke the story open.

“How does Abu Ghraib play out in the real world?”

For the first and only time during his talk, Hersh raised his voice and boomed this question into the mike: “The President, what did he do between January and May? They prosecuted a few low-level kids when these pictures came out. These pictures were a shock to their (Arab) culture, they viewed America as being sexually perverse. When it hits the paper, Bush says ‘I’m against torture.’” But instead of a real investigation, Hersh says all we got were hearings and inquiries about “rules and regulations.” Hersh, in talking to a lot of GIs involved in the abuse, has concluded that soldiers were told “Just don’t kill ‘em, do what you want.”

Hersh recalled how after the My Lai incident in Viet Nam, the mother of a soldier who took part in the massacre told him that “I gave them a good boy, they sent me back a murderer.” Hersh believes the military has a responsibility to the young people they send off to war. He is concerned about the psychic damage of our troops and told one story about a woman back from Iraq who is getting big black tattoos everywhere on her body. Her mother believes that she wants to be in someone else’s skin. Hersh believes that when this is all over, we’ll be hearing things about the war that we won’t want to hear.

Touching on the situation at Guantanamo Bay, Hersh said that of the 600 people there, about half have had nothing to do with terrorism. But, he warns, if they aren’t Al-Qaeda already, they will be. And the government now faces the difficulty that many detainees can’t even be released because they’ve now become more of a threat as a result of their imprisonment than they were before they were sent to Gitmo.

According to his contacts in military/intelligence circles, the debate over whether 9/11 was part of a deep-seated Al-Qaeda presence in the US or was the equivalent of a “pick-up team” has been largely resolved. Most experts have come down on the side of the latter. So, the US will have to come to terms with what we’ve done eventually, and in Hersh’s view, “there’s no good news in this, folks.”

Q & A: Oil and How Our Military/Government Feels about Bush’s Policies

Most of the Q & A was spent on oil and what people in our military and government are thinking about Bush’s policies.

1) A question about oil as Bush’s real reason for the Iraq war was raised:

Hersh said that his best guess is that oil was not “the real thing he wanted to do.” The neo-con mantra, ‘all roads lead to Baghdad’ and ‘democratization,’ the latter concept which goes all the way back to Jean Kirkpatrick, were the major ideas behind the war. Bush couldn’t have sold “democratization” on it’s own, so WMD’s were used as the reason. “If we had known there was no WMD, there would have been no vote.”

Hersh warned that when the price of oil reaches $68-$69 a barrel, this will be the crunch point in terms of real economic decline. If Bush wants to move against Iran, which is pumping about 3.9 barrels a day, he’s heading for trouble. According to Hersh, Iran will scuttle every ship in the Straights of Hormuz and the Malaca Straits in Indonesia. It will take months of dredging and salvaging to approach normalcy.

If oil is Bush’s top priority, “Bush is just not behaving as someone who is managing an oil crisis” and has already been “mismanaging oil in Iraq.”

Hersh passed along a comment he had picked up that illustrates the level of Bush’s awareness. “You could call Wolfowitz a ‘Trotskyite,’ a permanent revolutionary. Wolfowitz would know what you are talking about. But Bush wouldn’t.”

2) A couple of questions touched on opinions in the military/government toward Bush’s policies:

According to Hersh, elite intel groups are troubled by the missions they are being ordered to carry out and they are questioning what they are doing. Hersh said that he is not a “pacifist” because there are people want to hurt us and we need to be able to protect ourselves. But, in Afghanistan, things could have been done differently. Hersh said he wants us to know that those who know the Constitution are very concerned. In particular, Navy Seals are suffering “massive resignations over disillusionment” over Bush’s policies. “Our President chose not to do things in ways that could have avoided this...he had other options available.” Hersh concluded by reiterating that “vast parts of government didn’t believe there were WMD’s” and that Bush’s neo-con policies are “a product of paranoid thinking and the Cold War.”

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Copyright 2005, Gloria R. Lalumia"

posted by JBOC @ 10:45 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

GP > Mideast & Southeast Asia > ANALYSIS: Hersh's Report Largely Accurate

GP > Mideast & Southeast Asia > ANALYSIS: Hersh's Report Largely Accurate: "ANALYSIS: Hersh's Report Largely Accurate

1/19/2005

By David Storobin, Esq.
In response to a report about a U.S. strike against Iran reported in the New Yorker, the Pentagon responded that it is "so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed." Reading between the lines, the government response attacked “credibility” and challenged some facts, but did not assert the overall point of the story to be false.

George Bush also replied that a military strike is an option. Adding this to the preponderance of people identified as “neo-conservatives” – e.g., those who believe in pre-emptive strikes against gathering, but not immediate threats – the report is probably accurate.

There may be only two possible caveats. One, the American government may be purposely leaking the story to scare Iran into submitting to European diplomatic efforts. However, many say that while Washington may create an appearance of support for Europe’s actions to avoid further raptures with its allies, privately Americans are very unhappy about the diplomacy conducted by their allies and feel that this would serve as a precedent where countries would benefit from “bad behavior”. The United States have refused to contribute to the benefits package being offered to Iran. In fact, many in the U.S. feel that any benefits gained by Iran will then be used to pay for the furtherance of the nuclear program, worsening the problem, rather than ending it.

Another possible issue is a potential over-exaggeration by Hersh who may have presumed that a potential plan of attack against Iran is an actual attempt to invade the country, or that intelligence missions are a preparation for war. In reality, it is the job of the Generals and the Department of Defense to be ready for a fight, so many battle plans are created on the off-chance a war may be fought, even if such war is extremely unlikely.

That, however, does not look to be the case with Hersch’s report where he is quoted officials being very direct about striking Iran. One official was quoted as saying, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone…Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah-we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism." This, and other quotes, makes it very clear that Americans are preparing for action, not merely building a battle plan for a battle not expected to be fought.

What remains to be seen is whether Washington will engage in a full-fledged war similar to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, or whether it chooses to bomb Iranian targets without an all-out invasion. Americans may also choose the “Serbian Option” (similar to what was done to the regime of Slobodan Milosevic) where Iran’s Ayatollahs will be pounded into submission through continuous Air Force bombings until they lose their power. This option is thought to be favored by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.

It any event, it looks very likely that the United States will use military force against Iran before the end of George Bush’s second term."

posted by JBOC @ 3:10 PM 0 comments

Monday, January 17, 2005

Masood Khan strongly denied the report and said it was pure conjecture

World News Article | Reuters.co.uk: "Pakistan denies Iran nukes report
Mon Jan 17, 2005 04:17 PM GMT
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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan has denied a U.S. magazine report that it is providing information to help the United States conduct secret reconnaissance missions in Iran to identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets.
The New Yorker magazine, in an article on Sunday by award-winning reporter Seymour Hersh, said the secret missions had been going on since at least last summer to identify target information for three dozen or more suspected sites.

The report said an American commando task force in South Asia was working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.

Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman Masood Khan strongly denied the report and said it was pure conjecture.

"There is no such collaboration," Khan told a weekly news conference.

"We do not have much information about Iran's nuclear programme, so I think this report is far-fetched and it exaggerates facts which do not exist in the first place."

The New Yorker reported that the task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.

In exchange for this cooperation, an intelligence official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf received assurances that his government would not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Masood Khan said Pakistan was not providing any information on Iran's nuclear facilities to Washington, or to any international agency, because Islamabad was not privy to such information.

"Our contacts in the past were between some individuals and some shady characters. There has been no government-to-government contact in the field of nuclear energy," he said.

Nuclear-armed Pakistan has been under the international spotlight since early 2004 when a scandal broke that some of its scientists, led by Khan, were involved in nuclear proliferation to Iran, Libya and North Korea."

posted by JBOC @ 7:56 PM 0 comments

BBC NEWS | Americas | US rebuts 'Iran covert op' claim

BBC NEWS | Americas | US rebuts 'Iran covert op' claim: "US rebuts 'Iran covert op' claim

US special forces have been operating inside Iran, Hersh says
The Pentagon has hit back at claims by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that US commandos have been carrying out covert operations inside Iran.
A spokesman said Hersh's New Yorker magazine article was based on rumour, innuendo and conspiracy theories.

But correspondents say he did not clearly deny that US troops have been on the ground in Iran.

Hersh insists that for six months US forces there had been identifying military targets for future strikes.

Hersh, an award-winning reporter who last year revealed abusive practises at the US military's Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, quotes unnamed intelligence officials as saying Iran is the Bush administration's "next strategic target". [The article] is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed

The issue could be raised later on Tuesday when the President George W Bush's choice for his new Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, faces a confirmation hearing before a Senate committee.

The BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says that while Hersh could be wrong, he has a series of scoops to his name, including the details of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal last year.

His track record suggests that he should be taken seriously, our correspondent says.

'Intelligence coup'

Hersch says reliable sources told him that the political masters in the Pentagon - Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz - wanted to destroy Iran's military infrastructure.

Pentagon spokesman Laurence DiRita said on Monday that Hersh's article did not do justice to the "global challenge" posed by the "Iranian regime's apparent nuclear ambitions and its demonstrated support for terrorist organisations".
There is plausible deniability - of course they [the Bush administration] don't want it known

Mr DiRita said the article was "so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed".

"Views and policies" ascribed by Hersh to several top US defence department officials were not accurate, he said.

Hersh has told the BBC the White House is trying to make a plausible case that Tehran is cheating UN nuclear inspectors in order to justify possible future military action against it.

"There is plausible deniability - of course they [the Bush administration] don't want it known," he said.

"But it's very simple. This administration has won a new election, and the president if pretty clear about what he says - he has a mandate to carry out, to democratise the Middle East, and Iran is next."

He says the Pentagon is taking over much of the responsibility for covert "deniable" military operations from the CIA, in what amounts to an "intelligence coup" within the US.

In his article he said the US commandoes were aided by intelligence from Pakistan, but a Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman has described the reports of collaboration with the US over Iran as "far-fetched"."

posted by JBOC @ 7:53 PM 0 comments

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Secret U.S. commando nuclear-finding missions inside Iran -

Secret U.S. commando nuclear-finding missions inside Iran -: "Secret U.S. commando nuclear-finding missions inside Iran
1/16/2005 10:00:00 PM GMT

According to a Seymour Hersh article in a leading American news magazine, the U.S. has been conducting secret investigative missions inside Iran in order to identify potential nuclear, chemical and missile targets.

Hersh is the journalist who exposed the flagrant abuses carried out by American soldiers on Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghuraib prison scandal.

The secret missions have been carried out since last summer with the main goal being to identify target information for more than 24 suspected sites.

A government consultant with close connections to the Pentagon has stated, "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible."

A former high-level intelligence official is also quoted as saying "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign."

The White House has continuously stated that Iran is a major concern and threat that should be taken seriously. But the report on the clandestine missions into Iran have been denied by the Bush administration.

A top aide to President Bush, Dan Bartlett, told a tv news broadcaster "We obviously have a concern about Iran. The whole world has a concern about Iran." However, he derided Hersh's recent expose saying "I think it's riddled with inaccuracies, and I don't believe that some of the conclusions he's drawing are based on fact."

Bartlett maintained that the Bush administration will continue to use and exhaust all diplomatic means in order to convince Iran, one of President Bush's "axis of evil" not to pursue nuclear use, however he did not rule out military might.

"No president, at any juncture in history, has ever taken military options off the table," Bartlett stated. "But what President Bush has shown is that he believes we can emphasize the diplomatic initiatives that are underway right now."

According to Seymour Hersh the former intelligence officer has informed him that an American commando task force in South Asia has been working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had had past dealing with their Iranian counterparts. With the information provided for by the Pakistani scientists, this task force has already penetrated into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.

The official adds that in exchange for the assistance provided by the scientists, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has been assured by Washington that his government would not have to hand them over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, in order to face questioning about his alleged role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Hersh further adds in his report that President Bush has already gone and signed " a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia."

By defining these operations as military and not intelligence one, Hersh states it helps the U.S. administration to get around the legal restrictions imposed on the CIA'd covert activities overseas."

posted by JBOC @ 4:10 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 19, 2004

New York Daily News - Entertainment - Not-so-innocent abroad

New York Daily News - Entertainment - Not-so-innocent abroad: "Not-so-innocent abroad

Journalist Seymour Hersh tears
into the Bush team's foreign policy

BY BILL BELL


Hersh lays blame for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal directly at the feet of President Bush and his top advisers.




CHAIN OF COMMAND
By Seymour M. Hersh
HarperCollins, $25.95


This is a perp walk for the Bush administration.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the rest of the gang aren't cuffed, but here they are, defiantly swaggering past the pop, pop, pop of photographers' flashbulbs.

Their defenders will call the charges a bum rap, but the case against them has been made by Seymour Hersh, a relentless, resourceful investigative reporter, and he sounds like he's got the goods.

His charges, many first filed in investigative reports in the New Yorker magazine, where he has worked since 1998, include dereliction of duty, conspiracy, conflict of interest, perjury, torture and war crimes. Other charges, not punishable in court, include wishful thinking.

Hersh hammers home point after point after point in a dispassionate style, producing a scathing critique of the Bush administration's handling not only of Iraq but of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and, above all, Pakistan, which sold nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, Libya and other countries as the White House, relying on Pakistan in its war on terror, looked the other way.

One diplomat in Vienna, who, like many of Hersh's most sensitive sources, is not identified by name, sums it up. "Iraq is laughable in comparison with this issue [the globalization of technology to produce nuclear weapons]," he told Hersh. "The Bush administration was hunting the shadows instead of the prey."

Rumsfeld is a major figure in the case against the administration, and not only for disregarding the Constitution, the Geneva Convention and other safeguards against unlawful behavior. He also is faulted for a dangerous arrogance and his inability to anticipate the fallout from his actions.

But, in the revelations that most shocked Americans and the world, Hersh writes, Rumsfeld was far from alone. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Hersh says, was not rooted in the criminal inclinations of a handful of Army Reservists but in the secrecy, coercion and twisted legal justifications concocted by Bush, White House lawyers, high-ranking military officers and senior advisers.

Bush relies heavily on advisers, which is no secret, but Hersh makes an interesting point about the way they measure their influence.

For example, Wolfowitz and several other key conservatives driving the Bush foreign-policy agenda are admirers of Leo Strauss, a University of Chicago political philosopher who taught that statesmen must rely on an inner circle. By this thinking, according to a Strauss critic, "The person who whispers in the ear of the king is more important than the king."

There were good guys. Several military lawyers went public with claims that the administration endorsed torture, and many intelligence and diplomatic analysts warned the Iraq adventure was doomed to failure - it was called "a Bay of Goats" by Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni. In the end, they were outnumbered or outflanked.

Still, the gang Hersh so skillfully and unsparingly indicts may well beat the rap; its fate is in the hands of a jury that will render a verdict Nov. 2."

posted by JBOC @ 3:48 PM 0 comments

Thursday, August 19, 2004

www.aljazeerah.info on Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh and the Missing Zionist-Israeli Connection

By James Petras
Al-Jazeerah, August 17, 2004
An Exposé of an Exposé:

As I read Hersh s highly publicized and influential reports in the New Yorker Magazine on torture in US occupied Iraq (1), it became increasingly apparent that this was not a thoroughly researched exposé of the higher ups responsible for the policy of torture. Hersh s reportage was a selective account guided by selected question about selected officials. As one reads through Hersh s version of events with increasing incredulity it is clear that Hersh hangs his whole argument and exposé of US officials involved in the use of torture on one person Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - (important to be sure) and not on the other top Defense officials who were extremely influential and responsible for war policy, establishing intelligence agencies and co-coordinating strategy and tactics during the occupation. Rumsfeld was part of an elite, which sanctioned and promoted torture. Throughout his exposé Hersh deliberately omits the role of the Zionists (Wolfowitz, Feith numbers 2 and 3 in the Pentagon) who supported and promoted the war, torture-interrogation and particularly Israeli experts who led seminars teaching the US Military Intelligence their torture-interrogation techniques of Arab prisoners based on their half-century of practice.

In looking for documentary sources of torture interrogation Hersh relies on academic texts and 20 year old CIA manuals, not Israeli practice widely disseminated by the Mossad and Shin Bet advisers presently involved in torture in neighboring Palestine and Iraq today.

Hersh is presented in the mass media as an iconoclastic, investigative journalist, a role which gives his reportages and exposés a great deal of credibility. Yet it was Seymour Hersh who publicly defended torture of suspects and their family members as a method of interrogation, citing the Israeli examples in the wake of September 11, justifying torture in the same way as the Pentagon now justifies the torture of Iraqi suspects. Instead of citing an obscure professor at the University of Chicago, Hersh should have cited the influential tract defending torture by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz (a fellow Zionist) widely read by the civilian militarists who run the Pentagon, and direct the chain of command leading to interrogation through torture.

Hersch s account fails to provide a political context in the Pentagon and in the Middle East for the systematic use of torture. To understand the issue of the US practice of torture and violent abuse of Iraqi prisoners and civilians requires an examination of the ideological demonization of the Iraqi population the Arabs and the US unconditional political and military support for the state of Israel, the principal long-term large-scale practitioner of torture against Arabs. The most vitriolic systematic denigration of Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East is found in the writings an speeches of influential US-based Zionist ideologues, like the Pipes (father and son), the Kristols (senior and junior), the Kagans, Cohens, Goldhagens and others. The first step toward justifying torture is to dehumanize the victim, to label them as untermensch (congenitally violent savages). The Zionists in the US were merely following the pronouncements of their ideological mentors in Israel who not infrequently proclaimed that the only thing the Arab understands is force (Sharon, Golda Meier, Dayan, Rabin etc&). The Zionist ideologues in the Pentagon were influential in arousing hatred of Arabs in several ways. First in their defense of Israel they deliberately distorted the nature of Israel s colonial war, blaming the Palestinian victims for the systematic violence which Israel inflicted on them. The ideologues defended every Israeli violent action: the massacre in Jenin, new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the murderous assault on Rafah, the killing of UN aid workers and peace activists, the monstrous wall ghettoizing a whole people, the mass murder of hundreds of Palestinians and destructions of thousands of homes in Gaza. Israeli violence against Palestinians made a deep impression on US Zionists who generalized and deepened their animus to Arab Muslims throughout the Middle East, but particularly in Iraq where they were in a position to implement their policies.

The Zionists and Torture in Iraq

The Pentagon s main source of intelligence and propaganda for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was in part derived from the Office of Specials Plans (OSP) and Counter-terrorism Evaluation Group established by ultra-Zionist Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense (third in the Pentagon hierarchy) with strong support from Wolfowitz, Abrams and Rumsfeld. Feith put fellow Zionist, Abram Shulsky in charge of OSP. The Special Group bypassed normal CIA and military intelligence agencies and secured its own intelligence prior to the war and was involved in securing intelligence during the first stages of the occupation (before it was dismantled). As the Iraqi resistance increased its effectiveness and the US justification for the war (weapons of mass destruction) was proven to be a total fabrication of the Special Group, the top echelon of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and the Zionists grew desperate they collectively passed the orders to intensify and extend torture to all Iraqi suspects in all the prisons. It is a gross simplification to say that the line of command was limited to Rumsfeld, when Wolfowitz, Feith and Abrams were also intimately involved in everyday policies prosecuting the war, defending the occupation and controlling intelligence.

Even more than Rumsfeld, the Zionist zealots in the Pentagon were the most ardent promoters of introducing Israeli methods of torturing and humiliating Arab suspects, lauding Israeli successes in dealing with the Arabs . They, not military intelligence, promoted the use of Israeli experts in interrogation; they encouraged Israeli led seminars in urban warfare and interrogation techniques for the US military intelligence officers and private contractors.

Nothing about the responsibility of the Pentagon Zionists in the torture of Iraqis appears in Hersh s expose . The glaring omissions are deliberate as they are obvious form a systematic pattern and serve the purpose of exonerating the Pentagon Zionists and Israel and hanging the entire responsibility for war crimes on Rumsfeld.

A Close Look at Hersh s Method

A close reading of Hersh s series of articles in the New Yorker reveals his premises and political perspectives, none of which have anything to do with democratic values or concern with human rights.

Hersh s principal concern is that Rumsfeld s blanket order to use torture disrupted the operations of an elite group made up of professional commandos involved in a secret special access program designed to murder, kidnap, torture terror suspects throughout the world. In other words by involving thousands of everyday US soldiers (referred to by one of Hersh s sources as hillbillies ) as torturers in Iraq Rumsfeld was endangering the operation of professional killers throughout the world. Hersh s second major concern was that the discovery of the torture would hurt America s (sic) prospects in the war on terror in other words a tactic he attributed (solely and wrongfully) to Rumsfeld was endangering the US empire-building capacity. Hersh s empire-centric view refuses to recognize the elementary rights of self-determination and international law. Hersh s third apparent concern is with Rumsfeld s bypassing the CIA and other intelligence agencies and attempt to monopolize intelligence. This is a bit ingenuous. Wolfowitz and Feith set up the special intelluigence agency that fed Rumsfeld the fabricated intelligence, they promoted Chalabi (known throughout Washington intelligence circles as totally unreliable) as an impeccable source of inside information , in Saddams non-existent weapons of mass destruction knowing in advance that they were passing phony data . As Wolfowitz latter cynically admitted the decision to launch the US invasion over banned weapons was because it was the only issue they could agree upon.

Hersh is not stupid, he knows what everyone else in Washington and out of government knows: the Zionists in the Pentagon were pushing for war with Iraq before 9/11 (even before they took office in Washington and were working with the Israeli state) and were intent on having the US destroy Iraq, at any price including the loss of American lives, budget busting deficits, imperiling oil interests and jeopardizing US global imperial interests.

They launched the invasion bypassing the military central command by deliberately falsifying the response of the conquered Iraqi people ( they will welcome us as liberators Wolfowitz and Perle) and intent on destroying civil and state structures (the so-called de-Baathification purges) in order to forever undermine Iraq s capacity to challenge Israel s domination of the Middle East.

None of Hersh s questions explore these well known facts about who is responsible for the atrocities against Iraqis. He didn t have to cite unnamed intelligence or Pentagon sources General Anthony Zinni and many non-Zionists insiders, as well as the CIA and Central Command knew about the Zionist promoters, plans and moreover knew the role Feith played in pushing for harsher interrogation techniques. But Hersh ignored these questions, those Zionists and their ideological supporters and advisers who did everything possible to undermine any Iraqi economic recovery and capacity to run their own education, health and electoral systems. De-Baathification was meant to turn Iraq into a backward tribal, divided desert country run by their protégé Chalabi, the only candidate who would recognize Israel, supply it with oil and support Mid-East integration under Israeli hegemony. The Zionist Pentagonistas succeeded in securing the war, they succeeded in destroying basic Iraqi social services, they destroyed the state (courts, military, civil services). However in their blind subservience to Israel they overlooked the fact that the disbanded professional soldiers and purged civil leaders and professionals would become part of an experienced armed resistance, that Iraq would become ungovernable, that US rule would crumble, that the US would become bogged down in a politically lost war, that its puppet regime would have neither legitimacy nor popular support. The Zionist did what they thought was best for Israel, even if it provoked greater opposition world-wide, including in the US, where a majority have turned against the occupation by May 2004. Only the Israeli transmission belt, AIPAC would cheer Bush and his continuation of the occupation and pledge allegiance to the Israeli war against Palestinians. When their self-serving prediction of an Iraqi welcoming committee turned into a valiant popular anti-colonial war, Feith and his underlings called for greater use of more forceful interrogation methods Rumsfeld and Feith encouraged Israeli type torture to humiliate the Arabs . Meanwhile Kagan s call to bomb the Arab street was tried and failed to intimidate the Iraqi resistance.

Hersh s exposé of Rumsfeld as the only top culprit turns up at a convenient moment: when US policy has failed and most knowledgeable officials are moving closer to identifying the role of the Pentagon Zionists. It was clever by half: Rumsfeld was universally despised in Congress, among the professional military and a host of others for his policies and arrogant public face. Even in exposing Rumsfeld however Hersh is careful to do so in a fashion that allows his Zionist colleagues to continue in office unscathed.

Hersh justifies some of Rumsfeld s acts of illegal terror by describing legalistic obstacles to eliminating terrorists. Hersh s support for Rumsfeld s resort to unaccountable commandos engaging in assassination, kidnapping and torture of suspects around the world is in effect a way to condone those tactics after Rumsfeld leaves office. If Rumsfeld resigns, torture will continue under colleagues Feith and Wolfowitz. Hersh drags in a fifth level functionary working under Feith, Stephan Cambone, who he tells us was deeply involved in the torture of prisoners more involved than his Zionist superiors? We might ask the peerless investigatory journalist: How is it that Hersh blames those above above (Rumsfeld) and those below (Cambone) but never focuses on Feith and Wolfowitz who designed and directed policy?

In setting up Cambone for the exposé, Hersh profiles Cambome in terms that fit with greater pertinence the Zionists: He advocated war with Iraq (following Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle and Abrams); he disdained the CIA who the Pentagon Zionists viewed as too cautious ; he attacked the CIA for not finding WMD. Since Cambone functioned under Wolfowitz and Feith he was simply repeating what his bosses wanted to hear and perhaps that s why they entrusted him with the relevant dirty tasks of extracting intelligence via torture.

Hersh tries to link Cambone with the extension of the torture practiced selectively by the Special Agency Program. SAP was already operative before Cambone took office and its operations were under the direction of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Abrams. Hersh s dating of the torture in August 2003 with Cambone and Major General Miller (from Guantanamo) assignment is false. It started earlier under the SAP and with Israeli trained interrogators. Moreover the Pentagon headed by the same three (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith) ordered Miller s use of torture on suspects at Guantanamo who moved him to Iraq as a reward for exemplary work. Hersh does not explore Miller s links with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith before going to Iraq. He simply aborts the analysis looks at the middle and lower levels of power: Cambone, Miller, interrogators, and enlisted soldiers. Out of this framework Hersh comes up with a detailed piece of selective investigatory journalism. Hersh exposes some but covers up for those most actively involved in invoking the war and directing it in a way that served Israeli interests. The cost in US lives and the degradation of young US servicemen forced to assume the role of torturers is of little concern to the Pentagon Zionists. Even after all the exposés of torture, killings and rapes, major Zionist ideologues like Kristol, Krauthammer, Rubin, Perle, Kagan and Frum have launched attacks on Bush for backing off from the war.

The Pentagon s Zionists are under attack. In the face of the US debacle in Iraq, the anti-Zionist coalition found in the State Department, the Military, the CIA and elsewhere have launched a counter-offensive. Marine General Anthony Zinni, Senator Fritz Hollings and other prominent political, diplomatic and military leaders have openly identified the role of the Pentagon Zionists in launching and directing the war to favor Israel. The most recent and visible move was the marginalization of the pro-Israel Chalabi the protégé of Wolfowitz, Feith and Abrams. The raid on his house and the carting off of his records, ostensibly to investigate financial irregularities is a symbolic setback. So is the US abstention in the Security Council on Israel s rape of Rafah much to the chagrin of the Israel First crowd at the AIPAC convention. In response all the major Jewish organizations and publications from the Forward, Anti-Defamation League, AJC and others have denounced the critics of the Pentagon Zionists.

Hersh attempts to head off the anti-Zionist headhunting coalition by focusing on the two Goyim Rumsfeld and Cambone has been to no avail. The knives are drawn. Because of Zionist power in and out of the government, the anti-Zionist coalition and their supporters use code words, the most common of which is neo-conservative , which everyone now knows means Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and other Zionists in and out of the government. AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and other Israel Firsters sensing the danger to their co-thinkers have turned to labeling critics of the neo-conservative militarists anti-Semites and arousing Congress members, the media and their propaganda machine into silencing the coalition into submission..

But the Coalition is gaining influence Bush is insisting on handing over symbolic power to Iraqi Shias in a subtle game of cooption promoted by the State Department. Already the Zionists led by Kagan and Kristol have all but called Bush a traitor and coward for retreating.

The photos of torture, which have discredited the war policy, threaten to isolate the Zionist zealots. Faced with the indignation of the whole civilized world at the war crimes, the progressive Zionist apologists, like Hersh, take to isolating blame on Cambone and Rumsfeld and minimizing the responsibility to a few soldiers in a cell block , as did Senator Lieberman while the AIPAC elite cheer Bush on with the war ignoring the muck and blood of torture.

Rumsfeld has shrewdly tied his future to his Zionist partners in the Pentagon and outside, counting on riding on their coat tails and reaping the support of the powerful Jewish lobby and their leaders in the Israeli state, who stand behind them. He has few other influential allies.

Conclusion

In the final analysis even if Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Rubin, Libby and the current crop of Zionist Pentagonistas are forced to resign it will only be a temporary setback. The Zionist political organizations remain intact, their influence over Congress remains overwhelming and they have pledges from both major presidential candidates that Israel s cause is America s cause (Bush and Kerry). The Zionist juggernaut grinds on, securing sanctions against Syria and calling for the bombing of Iran s supposed nuclear facilities. If you can t find a real threat to the US maybe the next crop of Zionists in power will cook up another consensual pretext . Holbrooke and Sandy Berger can tutor the US on multi-lateral wars of aggression.

Meantime among those who still deny Zionist power in US foreign policy, one only has to read the accounts of the AIPAC conference in Washington in May 2004. At a time when Israel was killing children in the streets of Rafah and destroying hundreds of homes under the horrified eyes of the entire civilized world, when an indignant UN Security Council finally rose to its feet and unanimously condemned Israel, US Congressional leaders and the two major Presidential candidates pledged unconditional support to Israel, evoking the bloodthirsty cheers of investment brokers, dentists, doctors, lawyers the cream of the cream of American Jewish society. The cause of Israel is the cause of America rings out from the mouth of every candidate as the Israelis bulldoze homes and snipers shoot small girls on their way to buy candy. Its almost as if Sharon wanted to demonstrate the power of the Zionists in the US, timing the vile destruction of Rafah to coincide with the AIPAC convention and the disgusting appearance of the spineless American politicians supporting ongoing crimes against humanity. Not one voice was raised in even meek protest. To those who claim that the Zionist are just one of a number of influential lobbies try explaining the unconditional support for Israel s genocide of the Palestinian people by the most powerful politicians in the US.

It is almost a perverse pleasure to watch Sharon smear the muck and gore of Rafah on the groveling faces of US politicians they deserve each other. But for those of us who support a democratic anti-imperialist foreign policy this is one of the most humiliating moments in US history. Something we won t read in the exposés of Hersh or the erudite Zionist treatises in defense of endless wars.

(1) Seymour Hersh, Torture at Abu Ghraib: American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far does responsibility go?, New Yorker, May 10, 2004; The Gray Zone: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib, New Yorker, May 25, 2004, and Mixed Messages: Why the government didn t know what it knew, New Yorker, June 3, 2004.


posted by JBOC @ 8:45 PM 0 comments