Seymour Hersh: Administration Committed War Crimes
By JOSH GERSTEIN Staff Reporter of the Sun
SAN FRANCISCO - Journalist Seymour Hersh yesterday accused President Bush and Vice President Cheney of committing war crimes in their prosecution of the war on terror before he backed off the charge somewhat, saying he was not certain the two leaders were culpable as individuals.
"What we had was a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president - hold on - by this administration anyway. I can say that.I can't say...I can't state who did it.The only way to look at this is as war crimes. What happened, there are war crimes," Mr. Hersh said during a speech to the national conference of the American Civil Liberties Union
As he unleashed the most inflammatory charge, Mr. Hersh was cheered by the crowd.
"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 kind of an academic debate about the Geneva Convention," Mr. Hersh said.
The veteran journalist, who exposed the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, said some of the most heinous actions by American soldiers had yet to be disclosed by the government. Mr. Hersh said the undisclosed evidence includes videos of young male prisoners being sodomized.
Mr. Hersh called top leaders at the White House and the Defense Department neo-conservative "cultists."
"It's not the Manson clan, but we really have been taken over," he said. Mr. Hersh singled out the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, for particular criticism,repeatedly comparing him to Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Mr. Hersh's comments followed a keynote address by the San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom, during the ACLU conference, which was expected to draw about 2,000 of the group's members to San Francisco.
Mr. Newsom declared yesterday that, contrary to expectations, his decision to marry thousands of same-sex couples is benefiting the likely Democratic nominee for president, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts."I think in a curious way, it's helped the Kerry campaign,"he said.
Mr. Newsom said his move in February and the ensuing onslaught of protest diminished interest in the issuing of marriage licenses to gay couples in Massachusetts several months later.
"A lot of the stress seems to have been taken out of this debate because a lot of rhetoric was taken out," he said. "It's taken the focus from Massachusetts."
"Kerry is no longer the Massachusetts liberal on this issue of same-sex marriage in many respects," Mr. Newsom said. He said his early actions were deliberately intended to prevent gay marriage opponents from heading off the unions in the courts. A month passed and about 4,000 same-sex couples were married before the California Supreme Court halted the practice.
Despite a near panic among many civil libertarians over the Patriot Act and other aspects of the government's response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the issue of gay marriage was at the top of the agenda as the ACLU meeting convened.
"The ACLU's goal is to end the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage everywhere as soon as possible," said the director of the group's lesbian and gay rights project, Matthew Coles.
Mr. Coles encouraged activists to describe the battle as one for "marriage equality" rather than "same-sex marriage."Next week,the Senate is expected to take up a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriages.
"It really is a kind of political game to embarrass Senators Kerry and Edwards," Mr. Anders said. He predicted that the amendment would not get the two-thirds margin needed to pass.
Mr. Anders and other activists said they were most concerned about marriage-related ballot measures going before voters in more than a dozen states this fall."A lot of our biggest fights and more serious problems are going to be at the state level," he said.
Mr. Anders said research showed that voters who are ambivalent about gay marriage do not believe it should be a major subject of political debate.
"People don't want to talk about this. The voters in the middle would rather be talking about anything under the sun other than marriage for gay couples," he said. "We can also use that to our advantage."
The ACLU and other groups opposed to the constitutional amendment argue that the measure is a waste of Congress's time. "There's a war in Iraq that gets worse every day. There's an economy that's bad. There's health care issues," Mr. Anders said.
Opponents of gay marriage have acknowledged that the issue has failed to produce the groundswell of public anger that some had anticipated.
Mr. Coles said suggestions that legalizing gay marriage would lead to the embrace of fringe behavior have fallen flat.
Mr. Newsom said San Francisco's action demonstrated that predictions of chaos by some critics of gay marriage were off the mark. "It's not a big deal. People are going back to their lives realizing that their marriage hasn't dissolved," he said. "In many respects, marriage is being affirmed."
The group also heard from a couple challenging New York's marriage law, Sylvia Samuels and Diane Gallagher of the Bronx. "We are your almost average American interracial lesbian couple with three grandchildren that can be found on almost any block or road in the good old United States of America," Ms. Samuels said.
Just yesterday, the ACLU filed suit in Baltimore in an effort to win gay marriage rights in Maryland.
The major terrorism-related cases decided by the Supreme Court were also discussed at the gathering.
The ACLU's legal director, Steven Shapiro, described the decisions as "worthy of celebration." He also said he believed that the court's rulings were influenced by the disclosure of abuses at the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib.
In the final days of its session, the high court used a technicality to avoid making a decision about whether the use of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Constitution. Mr. Shapiro said his group would support any similar case that made it to the high court, but he added that he was not optimistic about convincing the justices to strike the reference to God from the pledge.
"To be quite honest, I think the tea leaves here are pretty clear that when the Supreme Court is forced to confront the issue, we are going to lose this case," Mr. Shapiro said.