An Evening with Seymour Hersh

I spent last evening (3/3/05) with Seymour Hersh the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for his coverage of the My Lie Massacre in Vietnam. His more recent work exposed the U.S. torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, most notably Abu Ghraib. They had to move the lecture from the campus’s (Bellarmine, a small Louisville Catholic college, not my school but only 2 miles from where we live) largest lecture hall to the gymnasium to handle the crowd that was between 1,200 and 1,500. This morning paper (Louisville Courier Journal) reported 1,000 but there were 1,020 (34 rows by 30 chairs) chairs on the floor, with nearly every seat occupied, and several hundred of us in the balcony.

Hersh is a good but not great speaker - that is he “drifts” a bit and there are a few “ahs.” However, what he had to say was very interesting coming from someone who has been right so often and seems to have many informants in high places. I’ll summarize what I took away as his key points:

• He summarized his recent book, Chain of Command : The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. According to Hersh, the serious abuse at Iraq prisons started a couple of months after the famous “Mission Accomplished” speech. The attacks on our troops were increasing in both frequency and severity. Shortly after two incidents (one was UN bombing and I don’t remember the other), U.S. commanders decided our problem was that we had no spies in the insurgency and they seemed to have spies everywhere and knew exactly what we were doing at all times. Our attempt to recruit spies had been a total failure so we came up with a plan. The plan was to pick out citizens from the regular “sweeps.” We were going into neighborhoods and taking many of the people to prison for questioning. The idea was to take photos of men naked and in homosexual poses - Muslims are even more homophobic than fundamentalist Christians. We would then send these people back home telling them they were to join the insurgency and act as spies for us. If they refused we would post the photos and videos in their neighborhoods to embarrass them and their families. Of course, the whole plan fell apart when some soldiers with a conscience exposed the scheme and the press got the story.

Hersh said this incident was the worst thing that we could have done. The Iraqis are virtually 100% against us now. Some are using us to settle old scores with other groups (Shia verses Sunni) but he claims that virtually everyone, including those working with us now, say that this will not heal and Americans will be targets in Iraq for decades to come and no American corporation will be safe to operate in Iraq even after/if the hostilities die down. Of course, the Arab world covered these atrocities in much more detail than the U.S. press so the entire region is very skeptical of anything American and our army has a reputation of being run by sexual perverts.

According to Hersh, the war is “lost” and the civil war has already started. He claims the destruction of Fallujah guaranteed that outcome. The mass bombings and killings didn’t win any friends with the Sunni but more important, and not really understood by Americans, is that the Iraqi army that helped us destroy Fallujah were Shia. Iraqis interpret this as Shia killing Sunni. While U.S. depict the terrorist attacks as bad Iraqis killing innocent Iraqis, it is Sunni and Shia killing each other. For example, the army, guard, and police recruits are Shia being killed by Sunni. And a report this week put out by our own government claims torture and abuse in Iraqi prison is rampant. What they fail to mention is that it is Shia torturing Sunni. If you think it is nasty now just wait a few months or years. In fact, one report in this morning’s paper says Saudi family money is flowing to the Sunni rebels because the Saudis are Sunni and not real happy about the Shia coming into power.

• Hersh believes Bush is sincere about “Spreading Democracy” and believes he has been selected by God to reshape the Iraq/Iran/Syria area. Hersh read a news clip from a Bush speech at a small college the night before where Bush again said he was doing god’s work. Hersh did point out that Bush has never mentioned bringing democracy to Pakistan which is ruled by a military dictatorship that overthrew their democratic government, but he didn’t dwell on these contractions.

Hersh claims he is getting reports that we are likely to bomb Iran his summer. Military personnel are reporting that we are already training for the attack and some claim Bush has already signed off on it. Hersh is hoping his leaks will stop the attack. The plan is not to invade with ground forces like we did in Iran but to bomb a number of key military sites. They are then hoping that this will give the people in Iran who disagree with their conservative religious government to overthrow it. Guess we will have to wait to see if Hersh is right once again. This is consistent with claims by former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter that George W. Bush has “signed off” on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005.

• You might recall that the Iraq elections were over 5 weeks ago and yet there is no government. While we have put on the “happy face” about the elections and claimed a victory, apparently we are very worried about the results. Half the seats went to the party supported by religious fundamentalists and the last thing we want is another government like Iran. Hersh claims the U.S. is holding up replacing our appointed government with the elected government because our guy, Allawi, the ex-CIA agent we appointed to head the interim government, did not win. Apparently, we are insisting that Allawi be given a very high position in the new government. According to Hersh, we want to make sure there is someone in the government we can point to that is requesting that our troop stay in Iraq. Currently, we are building numerous permanent bases and our generals are saying we will be there for at least another 7 to 12 years. According to reports in this morning’s Courier Journal, the hold-up in seating the elected government is giving strength to the insurgency.

• Hersh claims that there are many people in the government - Pentagon, CIA, and even Republicans in congress that think Bush has gone over the edge but are scared to do anything about it. Hersh seemed to be saying that things are likely to get much worse before the truth of what we have done comes out. He does have faith that eventually it will all come out.