Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 27,
2005
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies
January 25,
2005
Brian Cloughley
Iraq
as Disneyland
Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot
Josh Frank
/ Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties
John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Party Without Virtue
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
The
Intolerance of Christian Conservatives
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
Read How the
Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
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.
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