On July 8, Seymour Hersh addressed the ACLU's 2004 Membership
Conference.
So here we are. The bottom line is, by the way, I'm in a tough
position because I'm not done reporting on all of this. … It's
a tough position because there is more to the story. …
Standards for Government
Ethics [1:10:25]
I guess the way to describe how you look at things is, I
don’t know about you, but I have a wife and children, and one
of the things that makes life livable is trusting in my partner,
never lying to my children and never wanting my children —
with the exception of teenage girls [laughter] — to lie to me
about anything. …
But basically you know what I’m talking about, the core of
how we exist. The way we live — not us, there’s nothing
special about us, everybody in the world — we all live, the
most important thing in our life is our family structure and the
integrity with which we live, and the honesty with which we
conduct our life, and the trust with which we have people [sic].
And if you think about it, you begin to understand the bad
bargain we have [now]. It’s, it's, it's a condition, a
requirement, one that we so desperately live with our own
families with that we don’t even begin to levy on the
President of the United States and the National Security
Advisor. It’s not even a requirement [for them]. We
don’t even have any expectation that they’re going
to have the same trust and integrity in conducting their affairs
as we do in our own personal life.
It’s a bad bargain for us in the commonweal. We don’t
even begin — we understand what they are. You heard talking
about Henry Kissinger, who, for all of his genius, lied like
most of us breathe. And when you’re in a situation like that
— is that partisan or non-partisan, I don't know [referring to
the ACLU's need to remain non-partisan].
But it’s really a bad bargain. And we live with it pretty
happily, we go along, ok another President, another National
Security Advisor, Condi Rice in this case — and we know
we don’t get the story, and what do they have the
right to do? They have the right to send our children, men and
women now, in the name of democracy to go kill people and be
killed and torture and perhaps be tortured in return, which is
always going to be the end result of torture. And so, I think
there’s nothing wrong with holding these people to the highest
possible standards. It doesn’t happen enough. But
that’s what we have to do.
Scope of the Crimes of
Torture [1:12:50]
We don’t know — I’ll tell you right now, the reason
I’m saying all that — is what happened at Abu Ghraib, I can
just tell you this, and I have to do the reporting on this and
you have to wait for me to do it — but it’s not about an
academic debate in long essays between the Justice Department
and the White House, legal essays about where the Geneva
Convention ends and the Presidential prerogative begins.
What we had was a series of massive crimes,
criminal activity by the President and the Vice President, by
this administration anyway, I can say that, I can’t
say who did it.
The only way to look at this is as war crimes. What
happened are war crimes. I’m not saying it’s there
yet. It’s not there yet. But that’s where it has to go. We
have to stop looking at it as some sort of academic debate about
Geneva Conventions and really begin to look at it in terms of:
Who did what? Who died? Why did he die? Are there people
missing? Are we doing what the Brazilians and Argentineans did
back two or three decades ago and actually into this decade? Are
we disappearing people? Are there people being tortured
knowingly in advance that the torture was going to put their
lives in peril and is nothing being done to relieve their
suffering to the point that they die?
Is there mens rea? Is there guilty knowledge? Is it
a crime? And we’re going to get there, because I think
that’s where it’s sort of ineluctably going, you can just
see on and on and on, and we’re not there yet. I’m not
telling you I can take it there, I’m just telling you that
that’s the way you have to look at it.
Repercussions in the Arab
World [1:14:25]
I’ll tell you what an Israeli told me. And
the Israelis as you know — a very tough, hard-nosed Israeli
told me at one point, about all this — he said, you know, we
hate the Arabs. This is a guy who spent his career in the
intelligence service and, you know, his hands are bloody. He
said, we hate the Arabs, and the Arabs hate us, and before 1948,
we’ve been killing Arabs, and they’ve been killing us. But I
have to tell you something, he said. We know somewhere down the
line, we’re going to have to live with these people, much as
we can’t stand them, they’re going to have to be our
neighbors. And if we had done in our prisons to the
Arabs what you have done to the Arabs in your prisons, we
couldn’t live that way.
And so the bottom line is we have started something that we
don’t know [what] the end, the bottom line, is of this
treatment, as more details come out.
And I can tell you it was much worse, and the
government knows it's much worse, than they’ve even told you.
There are worse photos, worse videotapes, worse events.
To The New Yorker’s credit we decided, not for
censorship, but just how much can you, how much can you levy on
Arab manhood, in public?
But Arabs, I will tell you, it’s not just the radicals —
and we all know how this policy, this administration’s
policies, in Afghanistan, too, and also of course in Iraq, has
really done exactly the contrary of what they said they were
going to do. They haven't ended the war of terrorism —
they’ve expanded it — that’s nothing obvious [sic],
that’s totally clear.
But Arabs now, moderate Arabs,
Arabs that normally would be doing the kind of — as you know,
the overwhelming, the vastly overwhelming percentage of moderate
Arabs deplored what happened to this country on 9/11, as much as
anybody here — but those Arabs we’ve lost. They see
us as a sexually perverse society. The sexual stuff we did to
them is seen as just perversion. And I think we’re going to
have consequences for a long time to come. There’s an
awful lot of respect in the Arab world for Americans, I travel
there all the time, and American Jews even, it’s not,
nobody’s going to — I wouldn’t walk around Baghdad — but
most of the world is very safe. We have a lot of problems.
The Neocon Cult
[1:16:47]
So, rather than deal with the obvious stuff about Bush and
this election and what it means, I think the real question we
have to answer, and this is the question I'm inchoate about, I
don't have an answer …
The question we have to say to ourselves is, ok, so here’s
what happens, a bunch of guys, 8 or 9 neoconservatives,
cultists — not Charles Manson cultists, but cultists
— get in and it's not, with all due respect to Michael Moore,
and you’ll read it, his movie’s fine, but it’s not about
oil, it’s not even about protecting Israel, it’s about a
Utopia they have, it’s about an idea they have. Not only about
— democracy can be spread — in a sense, I would say Paul
Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our time, he believes in
permanent revolution, and in the Middle East to begin, needless
to say.
And so you have a bunch of people who've been for 10, 12
years have been fantasizing since the 1991 Gulf War on the way
to resolve problems. And of course Israel will be a beneficiary
and etc. etc., but the world in their eyes — this was
Utopia. And so they got together, this small group of cultists,
and how did they do it? They did do it. They’ve
taken the government over. And what’s amazing to me,
and what really is troubling, is how fragile our democracy is.
Look what happened to us.
[In the press, there is] self-censorship, which is the beacon
word for me, you know I always think it comes more, you know
there is a corporate mentality out there, but there’s
also a tremendous amount of self-censorship among the press.
It’s like a disease.
But also — they not only — they took away the
edge from the press, they also muzzled the bureaucracy, they
muzzled the military, they muzzled the Congress, and it’s an
amazing feat. We’re supposed to be a democratic society, and
all of those areas of our democracy bowed and scraped to this
group of neocons who advocated a policy.
General Shinseki
[1:19:05]
You know, we all know the story of how mad they got at
General Shinseki, who I think is going to run for the Senate in
Hawaii and should, for Inouye’s seat, he’s a great general.
The important thing about Shinseki for me, and this is just
heuristic, I don’t know this, the important thing
about Shinseki is this. He testifies before the Gulf War we’re
going to need a couple hundred thousand troops and everybody,
Wolfowitz and the others — I count Wolfowitz, I lead with him,
because he’s sort of the, he’s the genius in the background,
he’s the man, very articulate, very persuasive — and so
Shinseki testifies we need a couple hundred thousand and
everybody’s mad at him, it's about two weeks before the war,
and it made sense, everybody said, they were mad because he's
talking about numbers these guys say you won’t need. They're
going to go invade Iraq and you know the story, they were going
to be greeted with flowers and all that stuff, we all know that
story.
But it wasn’t that. Their complaint with Shinseki
was really much more interesting. It was: didn’t he get
it? Didn’t he know what we’ve been talking about,
in the tank with the JCS and the generals — didn’t he get
it? We could do it with five thousand troops, we have
to make these bargains with these crazy Clinton-ized generals
— I’m talking like Rummy, like Rumsfeld would talk — literally,
unfortunately — these soft generals, these Clinton-ized
generals — didn’t Shinseki get it? Didn’t he
understand what we’re doing here? We did it in Afghanistan,
we’re going to do it in Iraq. Some Special Forces, some
bombing, we’re going to take it over. It’s going to be like
this. He didn’t get it, that was the problem, that’s why
they had to read him out. He wasn’t on the team.
And so you have a government that basically has been
operating since 9/11 very successfully on the principle that if
you’re with us you’re a genius, if you’re against us
you’re not just somebody [in the] loyal opposition, you’re a
traitor. They can’t deal with you. I’m exaggerating
very slightly.
Pentagon in Disarray
[1:21:00]
So what does that mean? That means no dissent. Somebody I
know recently was working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a
budget issue. The budget’s in incredible chaos, the
Defense Department budget. Don’t hold me to this,
because, you know The New Yorker has this great
fact-checking system, this is just something I’ve heard, but
among the problems they have, they can’t find
something like one billion dollars in cash that was known
to be in Iraq, they just can’t find it. And you know
we’re talking with the b-word there, you known one billion.
And so they’ve got huge problems that they’re spending
and the Joint Chiefs, this was in big league meetings, and then
this gentleman has to go and brief his findings. He’s an
outside expert, he’s done an investigation, he has to brief
Rumsfeld, and one of the senior generals who happens to be a
very good guy — not General Myers, the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs, who’s know to many generals as “hear no evil,
see no evil”, you know we have that incredible sort
of problem — I wish, this is a digression, I wish
they had more guts, the two, three, and four stars. I
shouldn’t say that because I’m obviously a beneficiary, you
know, indirectly, I’m the beneficiary for their thoughts in
some cases, but it is sort of sad that none of them have come
forward and really blasted away, because I can tell you right
now, the disaffection inside the Pentagon is really extremely
acute, there’s never been anything like it, and they
feel that this government doesn’t care about — you know a good
officer, and I could tell you right now, don’t make the
mistake of thinking that they’re not good people, they are,
and in the intelligence service too, they’re people like
everybody else. They want to do their job right, they want to do
it with as much honor as they can. And this is something that I
feel — I know these guys, and they do care. But they
also, the good ones, also they’re in loco parentis.
One of the things they take very seriously, particularly, you
known I'm a Marine, you know what I’m talking about, you give
your children to them, they take of you. They can’t do that
now in Iraq. They really don’t think we care, and they don'
think, they certainly don’t think people in the White House
care. …
Rumsfeld Refuses to Listen
[1:23:10]
So one of the good generals, one of the good guys goes in for
a meeting with Rumsfeld, and the person I’m talking about is
describing the condition that he’s discovered of the budget
planning. We’re talking about lots of billions of
dollars, this war is going to probably end up being the
trillion dollar war that nobody — you can’t even
begin to estimate the cost.
When you see the Moore movie, and in [The] Control Room,
when you see those movies, the photographs that are the most
gripping are the photographs of Baghdad before the war.
And look, I know he's a bad guy, etc., etc., etc., Saddam, but
still, and the rebuilding —
Anyway, the point is that my friend, this person told
Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rumsfeld of course said, oh my
God, that’s absolutely wrong, he said, there’s nothing like
that, there’s no problem with the budget and he turned to this
ranking general and said, isn’t that right? And this general,
in front of this outsider, said yes sir, you’re right. And
that’s what happens, that’s what you have now, and to me,
there’s nothing more scary. That the Secretary of Defense is
simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear. And
he’s not the ideologue that Wolfowitz is. You couple that with
an ideologue, and I don’t know what we can do. I
don’t know what any of us can do to stop it.
Transfer of Iraqi
“Sovereignty” [1:24:50]
I think what’s going to happen is the President’s — my
guess is, first of all, again, the idea that three networks —
or at least two of them — I think all three sent their
anchormen through Baghdad on the 30th for this transfer of
sovereignty and I just wonder, I mean, how out of touch
are they? What sovereignty? What sovereignty do we have
to give? There’s no phones, there’s no
electricity [laughter] — no, this is a sad fact. There is no
sovereignty, there’s no army. It’s a Potemkin village maybe,
yes, so they’re going to go inside the CPA where the grass is
green and the air-conditioning works and they’re going to have
a change of command with the press monitoring it and they
had all three anchors there. I thought to myself, wow, it’s
really scary. We’re getting into — we’re making the
pictures and we’re believing them now, more than ever.
So it doesn’t have much reality.
So the President’s, I would guess the President’s policy
is — he’s got no, he doesn’t have a policy behind the new
government, the Allawi government, which is basically a bunch of
outsiders taking control, and everybody’s got their hands in
certain — there’s no way this government’s going to be
acceptable to anybody except a very small minority of people.
It’s not going to work, it’s not going to stop the
insurgency.
What’s Next in Iraq
[1:26:10]
I think you’re going to see a lot of efforts to try
to paint the insurgency in the next month as increasingly being
outsiders. I’ve seen already the first “showdown”
between al Qaeda and the United States. “Al Qaeda’s taken
over the insurgency” — I don’t think that’s true at all.
And I can tell you right now — this I'm telling you I know —
a year ago, a year and a half ago, there was total panic
inside, because the opposition, the insurgency, was operating in
1, 2, and 3 man cells and we knew nothing about them. I
can tell you right now, they're operating in 10 and 15 man cells
right now and we still know nothing about them.
The interrogations haven’t worked, no matter how much pressure
they put on people. We have no tactical information of
any use whatsoever.
And if you go to Europe and talk to some of the
intelligence people there and some of the people in the Middle
East who are our friends — we have many friends, who are very
sad about what’s happened to America, are praying for the next
election — they will tell you even the stuff you’re
hearing about Zarqawi — Zarqawi, excuse me,
Zarqawi is mister everybody, he’s never liked bin Laden, and
it’s not clear that the person that we claim responsible for
all those acts is he. Some of the people who know the Arab world
very well and very carefully and listen to his statements.
He’s a Jordanian, and many of the comments that have been
alleged to have been in his name are not made by him. In
other words, the suggestion is that he’s a composite figure.
He’s very convenient.
I don’t want to suggest to you that we’ve ever been
propagandized by our government [laughter], but it’s very
convenient. It’s very convenient to keep on telling the press
that Zarqawi’s — my favorite one is that nice kid that was
beheaded, remember. The guy that beheaded him had a hood over
him. He was described very confidently by the American
establishment government as Zarqawi. Well, if they can see
through hoods. Anyway —
So, I think the policy’s going to be, we’ve got
this guy Allawi and this government, let’s stand him up and
see if he can past the election, and let’s just escalate, and
bomb, and bomb, and bomb. And the only answer for these guys is
going to be more pressure, more military force. We
accept as commonplace, every day now, we’re emulating Israel
in [their] missile attacks, and it’s a daily occurrence. We
keep on bombing places in Fallujah, claiming we’ve gotten rid
of Zarqawi, who keeps on not showing up anyway, whoever he is.
We don’t have much intelligence, and we’re
escalating a war. Bombing, missile attacks, much more violence,
it’s come, crept up on us, you know little cat paw, and
we’re there. We’re there in a full-scale, increasingly
intense military activity, more bombing, more air force planes,
more ordnance, more shelling, what we call force protection —
that is, you’re not going to send troops somewhere where you
can just fire a lot of missiles [instead], which means of course
more collateral damage, more civilians, which means of course
more opposition, more insurgency.
Torture: Worse Revelations
to Come [1:29:08]
What they did at Abu Ghraib and other places was, the people
they would get, they would torture. And sometimes, for an Arab
man, being photographed without clothes on — in the Koran,
you’re not allowed, this front [motioning to his body] cannot
be exposed — and to be exposed that way and to be forced to
simulate sexual activity with other males and have women give
the thumbs-up sign is the ultimate degradation. It’s literally
— any classic definition of — it’s torture. Torture
isn’t always physical. It’s a torturous process.
And the purpose of it, of course, is to generate information.
So what do you get? You get people that know nothing. The ICRC,
the international Red Cross, estimated in the prison population
at Abu Ghraib at the time of the worst abuses, they estimated
that upwards of 90% had no bearing at all on anthing
anti-American, or any activity that had anything to do with the
insurgency. This wonderful general, Antonio Taguba, the report
that I got, this guy Taguba's report estimated that 60% had
nothing to do [with it].
So you take these people, you expose them to the ridicule and
physical torture that you can, and they end up telling you. Yes,
they'll give you the names of people in their neighborhood that
are al Qaeda, or terrorists, insurgency, and they give you
names. And of course they're just names, they're just doing it,
and then you arrest those people, and bring them in, and you
start the process. And the circle gets bigger, and bigger, and
bigger.
And I would — debating about it [long pause]. Some
of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about.
OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read
that they were passing letters out, communications out to their
men. This is at [Abu Ghraib], which is about 30 miles from
Baghdad — 30 kilometers, maybe, just 20 miles, I'm not sure
whether it's — anyway. The women were passing messages out
saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And
basically what happened is that those women who were arrested
with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video]
recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and
the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys
shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in
total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible
to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are
these people that sent us there.
When I did My Lai, I was very troubled, like anybody in his
right mind would be about what happened, and I ended up in
something I wrote saying, in the end, I said, the people that
did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed,
because of the scars they had.
I can tell you some of the personal stories of some of the
people who were in these units who witnessed this. I can also
tell you written complaints were made to the highest
officers. And so we’re dealing with an enormous, massive
amount of criminal wrong-doing that was covered up at the
highest command out there and higher. And we have to
get to it, and we will. And we will, I mean, you know, there’s
enough out there, they can't — [applause]
So — so, it’s going to be an interesting election year,
it is. It’s going to be Bush vs. Bush, I think, largely, in my
view, not that the Democrats, or Ralph Nader, won’t have
something to do with it, but it’s really going to be, it’s
Bush running against Bush.
The Justice Department
[1:33:05]
And, I don’t know where we’re going to come out. And, I
guess, I guess the only thing I can say is that above and beyond
that, all of you know because all of you care about the
Constitutional rights and what’s going on in the government,
the issues that many in [the ACLU] are deeply involved in, one
of the other great shocking examples of
self-censorship, or just sheer cowardness, or what you will, is
just the inability of the press corps to deal with the Justice
Department and what’s happened there.
It’s one of the great failings — I can tell you the
degradation of that place has been so total, and there are
people, again, there are many people in those places that really
care about human rights. I was getting emails on
September the 12th, 2001, from people the inside the FBI saying
we are in real trouble with this guy Ashcroft. So there
are people there that care, they fight, as hard as they can.
It’s not as if — when you have the kind of leadership we
have, I don’t know where we go. I just wish I could tell you
— I am telling you — go back, do what you can, …
you’re going to say to yourself, as many people have said to
me, I’d better do more. But also be terribly aware, that we
are so disconnected with this leadership that it’s not
necessarily clear that what you do is going to impact on them.
Because these are people that are really out there.
We have really been — you know, as I say, it’s not the
Manson clan — but we really have been taken over, and we have
to do something to stop it, and let’s hope we can do it
electorally.
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