Fw: Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh Spills the Secrets of the Iraq Quagmire and the War on Terror

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Tuesday, October 12, 2004 8:18 PM

Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh Spills the Secrets of the Iraq

Quagmire and the War on Terror

 

 

Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh Spills the Secrets of the Iraq

Quagmire and the War on Terror Published on Tuesday, October 12, 2004 by the

University of California-Berkeley

 

 

 

by Bonnie Azab Powell

 

 

 

BERKELEY - The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has

been " disappearing " people since December 2001, and America has no idea how

irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in

the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour " Sy " Hersh to KQED host

Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).

 

The past two years will " go down as one of the classic sort of failures "

in history, said the man who has been called the " greatest muckraker of all

time " and (paradoxically) the " enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30

years. " While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq

quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all

happened. " How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this

government? " he asked. " They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress,

they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself,

How fragile is this democracy? "

 

From My Lai to Abu Ghraib

 

That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as " to

hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and

of honesty.to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is

wrong. " He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he

embodies the statement that " a patriot must always be ready to defend his

country against his government, " a belief defined by the conservationist Edward

Abbey.

 

 

 

Hersh was working the phone with sources up until the minute the

presidential debate began, which he watched with a crowd in North Gate Hall.

 

 

His country has not always thanked him for it - neocon Pentagon adviser

Richard Perle has called Hersh " the closest thing we have to a terrorist, " while

his 1998 book on John F. Kennedy's administration, " The Dark Side of Camelot, "

cost him many friends on the left. But Hersh's reputation remains more

bulletproof than most. The author of eight books, he first received worldwide

recognition (and the Pulitzer) in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its

cover-up during the Vietnam War. 1982's " The Price of Power: Kissinger in the

Nixon White House, " painted Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and won Hersh the

National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in

biography.

 

Most recently, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Hersh has

relentlessly ferreted out the behind-the-scenes deals, trickery, and blunders

associated with the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in May 2003, he

was the first American reporter to state unequivocally that we would not find

weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (A mea culpa from a Slate journalist who

doubted Hersh on WMDs also inadvertently confirms his prescient track record.)

And in April of this year, he broke the story of how U.S. soldiers had digitally

documented their torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqis at the notorious Abu

Ghraib prison in Iraq. The several articles he wrote for the New Yorker about

Abu Ghraib have been updated and edited into his latest book, " Chain of Command:

The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. "

 

" Bush scares the hell of me "

 

Hersh came to Berkeley at the invitation of UC Berkeley's Graduate School

of Journalism and the California First Amendment Coalition. His appearance in

the packed ballroom of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union was the fitting

end to a week of high-profile events in honor of the 40th anniversary of the

Free Speech Movement.

 

The Hersh event began only minutes after the second debate between

President George W. Bush and John Kerry concluded. Krasny naturally asked Hersh

- who had watched the debate at North Gate Hall stone-faced in the middle of a

rowdy crowd - what he thought of the match.

 

" It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell of me, " Hersh answered. " What

matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in

Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community.

They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and

what [bush] thinks. "

 

With that, he was off and running. One could safely say that for the next

hour, Hersh proceeded to scare the hell out of most of the audience by detailing

the gaps between what they knew and what he hears is actually going on in Iraq.

 

While his writing is dense but digestible, in person Hersh speaks with the

rambling urgency of a street-corner doomsayer, leaping from point to point and

anecdote to anecdote and frequently failing to finish his clauses, let alone his

sentences. His train of thought can be difficult to catch a ride on. This

evening, it was a challenge for Krasny to slow him down long enough to get a

word or question in edgewise. For example, here's a slice of raw Hersh on the

current situation in Iraq:

 

I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because

people, right after 9/11, because people inside - and there are a lot of good

people inside - are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think

should be, because [bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's

going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that

place - and here's what really irritates me again, about the press - since he

set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 - the bombing,

the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no

public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordinance is dropped,

we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're

basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find,

that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.

 

And yet - despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the

horrific number of Iraqi casualties - Bush continues to believe we are doing the

right thing, according to Hersh. " He thinks he's wearing the white hat, " he

said, adding that is what makes this administration different from previous ones

whose hypocrisy Hersh has exposed. Bush and the neocons " are not hypocrites. "

 

Enter the utopians

 

" I think it's real simple to say [bush] is a liar. But that would also

suggest there was a reality that he understood, " explained Hersh. " I'm serious.

It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious

problem is, he believes what he's doing. " In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul

Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are " idealists, you can call them utopians. " As

Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global

terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation

of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.

 

" No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [bush], " said Hersh, despite

the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is " not winnable. It's over. "

As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking

as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there.

" This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency.

There is no 'win' anymore in this war, " he argued. " As somebody said, 'We're

playing chess, they're play Go.' "

 

Later, Hersh shared something he had yet to write about. Sources were

suggesting that the many acts of domestic terrorism in Iraq that U.S. officials

have been attributing to suspected Al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are

in fact a smokescreen set up by the insurgents. " They decided to wage war

against their own population, " he said. " It's a huge step, with enormous

consequences..The insurgency has simply deflected what they're doing onto this

man. And we fell for it. "

 

 

'We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame.The idea of

photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and

having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their

eyes.'

 

-Seymour Hersh

 

What is worse, he said impatiently, was that because U.S. forces had

" privatized " so many of Iraq's institutions, it had decimated the job market in

the country. " This is why Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work

in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do.

They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of

their family, " he said.

 

Hersh has been accused many times of sympathizing with " the enemy, " and

told that his publicizing of incidents like the My Lai massacre and the Abu

Ghraib torture only fan the flames of anti-American sentiment around the world.

He related that he's been asked if he feels guilty about the beheadings of two

Americans who were wearing uniforms like those worn at Abu Ghraib. " As if the

Iraqis needed me to tell them what's going on in that prison! " he responded. He

also repeated a question often posed to him: " Was it immoral to go in . [T]he

idea that Saddam was a torturer and a killer, doesn't that lend a patina of

morality to going after him? " The answer to that one, he said unsmilingly, " is

of course, Saddam tortured and killed his people. And now we're doing it. "

 

In addition to adding more details to the woeful chronology of the Abu

Ghraib scandal, in which the military stopped the abuse only after Hersh's story

brought it crashing down onto front pages around the world - four months after

it was first reported to the Department of Defense - Hersh speculated on why

those dehumanizing techniques had been used. He was sure that they were not, as

some have claimed, the " stress outlet " or other spontaneous recreational ideas

of young soldiers from West Virginia. Instead, he said, they were the outgrowth

of a massive manhunt for information, any information, about first Al Qaida, the

Taliban, and then the Iraqi insurgency:

 

My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been

disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld

decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret

document.There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in

Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports,

and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was

some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do .

 

The original idea behind the sexually humiliating photos taken at Abu

Ghraib, Hersh said he had heard, was to use them as blackmail so that the newly

released prisoners - many of whom were ordinary Iraqi thieves or even civilian

bystanders rounded up in dragnets - would act as informants. " We operate on

guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame, " Hersh explained. " The idea of photographing

an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an

American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes. "

 

And the fact that Americans had perpetrated such acts - and refused to

take responsibility for it - ended America's role as any kind of moral leader in

the eyes of not just the Middle East, but the world, Hersh railed. He talked

about an Israeli, a longtime veteran of the troubles between his country and the

Palestinians, who had emailed him to say, in essence, " We've been killing them

for 40 or 50 years, and they've been killing us for 40 or 50 years, but we know

that somewhere down the line we're going to have to live with those SOBs.If we

had treated our Arabs the way you treated them in Abu Ghraib, the sexual stuff,

the photographs, we couldn't live with them. You guys do not begin to understand

what you've done, where you have put yourself in the Arab world. "

 

" They just shot them one by one "

 

There was more - rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought

back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked

about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed

halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside

of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local

granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like

them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be " cleared. "

Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary

guards. All of them.

 

" He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the

villagers of course, went nuts, " Hersh said quietly. " He was hysterical, totally

hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand,

that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the

Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'

 

" It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts, " Hersh continued. " You

know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you

think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed

murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet

in the back.' And that's where we are in this war. "

 

The story seemed to leave Hersh sincerely, deeply saddened. While his

critics may call him a " muckraker " and unpatriotic, on Friday night it was

obvious that Hersh takes the crumbling of America's image, very, very

personally.

 

" My parents were immigrants, " Hersh said. " They came here because America

meant something.the Statue of Liberty and all that stuff, because America always

was this bastion of morality and integrity and a place for a fresh start. And

it's right in front of us, not hidden, that they've taken this away from us. "

 

Watch the Webcast: Seymour Hersh, 1 hour 22 minutes

 

© 2004 UC Regents

 

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