January 27, 2005
The Military is Nowhere; the Press is Nowhere; the Congress is Nowhere...
We've Been Taken Over By a Cult
By SEYMOUR HERSH
Editors' Note: This is a transcript of remarks by Seymour Hersh at the Stephen
Wise Free Synagogue in New York.
About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel,
you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of
what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous
in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he
thinks he's doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some
mandate from -- you know, I just don't know, but George Bush thinks this is the
right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's
going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags
that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It
makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to
put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way
to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway
to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me,
though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren't voting
for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.
It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is:
How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him
off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate?
All of us -- you have to -- I can't begin to exaggerate how frightening the
position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because
the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the
new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a
little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it
really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by
statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has
been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before
they kill us, as Peter said. "They did it to us. We've got to do it to them."
That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so,
I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know,
there's not much more to go on with.
I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all
forget this word "insurgency". It's one of the most misleading words of all.
Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of
disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do
counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the
people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus
nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose
to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We
took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they
pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been
pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it
is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no
intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against
two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two
and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know
what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific
communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer --
and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to
somebody like me.
There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and
our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a
tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of
the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over
basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the
government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to
wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but
they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with
the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is.
You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the
Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done
is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal
of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the
intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree
with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House,
and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month
has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's
happening. The real target has been "diminish the agency." I'm writing about all
of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea
change in the government. A concentration of power.
On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can't win this war. We
can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other
horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we
installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the
Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is
basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on
June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing
happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of
tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically
bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force
base I think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft
carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of
the operational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They
come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We
know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an
election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it,
which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you
remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone" right in front of
us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a
Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning
urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it
was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at
home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home,
and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said,
"Welcome to Stalingrad." We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's
being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.
We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper --
when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked
about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets
up and says, "Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do
it," as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing --
nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can
say again and again, "well, we don't do torture." We know what happened. We know
about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some
profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C.
The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what's happened
with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into
the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you
know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our
children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in
the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being
blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a
weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these
people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only
stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to
know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you
all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In
May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At
that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although
Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it
and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became
public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute
seven "bad seeds", enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit
they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were
basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put
in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb
things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They've gotten away
with it.
So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell
you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington
Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in
Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the
Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name was Hodak. His father
was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern
Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it
was like after his son died. He said, "Today everything seems strange. Laundry
is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing
and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away."
There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot.
When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so
almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they
had -- for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American
soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't
see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by
snipers, because it's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you
dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're
"rag-heads". They're less than human. The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally
as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's -- in
this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had
been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or
15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they
would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they
executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch.
One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers,
about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and
Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected
people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics
shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join
the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind
of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an
awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things
that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the
bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her
stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting having the K
rations -- that's what they called them -- MRE's now -- the kid somehow crawled
up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the
famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill
him, "Plug him," he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I
say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his
carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the
head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off.
He was being medevac'd out. As he was being medevac'd out, he cursed and
everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, "God has punished me,
and he's going to punish you, too."
So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I
called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, "I'm coming to
see you. I don't remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew
over there and to get there, you had to go to - I think Indianapolis and then to
Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little
farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman
Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80.
Gristled, old. Way old - hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to
see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then
she said, one of these great -- she said to me, "I gave them a good boy. And
they sent me back a murderer." So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New
Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of
you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of
this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class,
lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to
you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply
this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu
Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they
get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the
January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter
is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person.
She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was
the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these --
some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia.
This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her
husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of
the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment
in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from
everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this
daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black
tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the
legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she
reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, "Were you
there?" She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then
goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother
had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it,
with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know,
while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea.
Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when
the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then
said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about
depression. She doesn't know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was
just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't
say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up,
and sure enough there was a file marked "Iraq". She hit the button. Out came 100
photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We
published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is
something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man
leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on
each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What
we didn't publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty
hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's
another story.
For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we
all deal in "macro" in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere.
The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every
four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no
clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld
anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack
of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual
integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists.
Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these
stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost,
as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that
you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible
catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward
after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you
maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that
the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their
better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme
injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to
see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a
bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened
with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not
suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going
to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another
salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you
have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick.
And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer.
The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could
see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's
going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and
everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion
a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians,
everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going
to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another
year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're
going to have some very bad months ahead.
Seymour Hersh's latest book is Chain of Command: The Road to Abu Ghraib.
http://www.counterpunch.org/hersh01272005.html
.
|
