Seymour Hersh spoke tonight at the University of Chicago to a packed (and sweltering) hall at International House. I took some scattered notes. The remaks will be disjoined--as will be the notes--but chilling. He asserted several things that he says he didn't have nailed down enough to write, but that he was confident of.
He comments on the introduction by U of C president Don Randel: "It's nice to hear a president who can speak without getting boos and catcalls."
Then, to Bush: "If we get him for four more years, we deserve what we get....I haven't bought land in Canada yet, but I'm looking."
He then turned to the 40th president, referring obliquely to 138 names, then began to list them, saying those with long memories will catch on: they were the Reagan administration figures accused, indicted, or convicted of wrongdoing.
On Iran/Contra: "He was--I don't think there's another word for it--lying....should have been indicted, shouldn've been impeached...racist [a slight gasp from the crowd]...ignored AIDS....It's trouble that so much pablum comes, even with all the horrible stuff that's out there."
On the neo-cons, "a cult," he said they were as bad as Charlie Manson's, then immediately regretted the joke and took it back. Of their takeover of foreign policy he marvelled, "it was so easy, it was so smooth."
He talked about the strangeness of reading the papers, which report outrages with such bland equanimity: "I like to read the papers. It's sort of fun."
He is a blunt man.
He talked about Carl Levin (though he didn't use his name) telling him about high officials lying to him in closed hearings, and how frustrating it was to be lied to, in classified settings, when the liars know the senators know they are lying. Levin said he'd never seen such brazenness in Washington.
"Kerry's an unfortunate candidate in his way. I guess his mother liked him." Though he made no mistake that Kerry was the man for the job.
He talked about his recollections of watching World War II propaganda films as a boy, growing up not far from the U of C, with the heroic, dashing American pilots and the treacherous "Nips"--and said what was so startling about My Lai for so many Americans who also grew up on these films was the realization, "Hey, we fight just like the Nips do!"
He waits after the My Lai story broke mid November 1969, one week, two weeks--then, by Thanksgiving 1969, other correspondents finally write about the atrocities THEY had seen in Vietnam: an outpouring that made him feel strange that it took little old him, the police reporter who had flunked out of law school, 11 years after winning his B.A. in English, to unleash this outpouring of truth. I want to interview him about what that felt like.
To me, one of the most searing things in the talk was his discussion of one of those stories, a Sunday AP dispatch, in which the wire man wrote about Marines throwing grenades into holes hiding women and children in the first few weeks after the 1965 landing.
>From My Lai, the transition to the current scandals was seemless. He
>connected the dots, and spoke of the CIA secret prisons we haven't
>heard about yet: "We're basically in the disappearing business."
He made the first of several criticisms of our humble profession: "there's no learning curve in America. There's no learning curve in the press corps."
He offered his assessment of the future of the civil government we are setting up in Iraq: "it's over. There's no chance we can hold this government up."
He said something I didn't quite catch about Allawi's former job (I think) as a hit man for Saddam, noted the law that Sunni perpetrators weren't supposed to be able to hold office, and concluded, "he has about as much standing as I do to be president of Iraq."
Then back to the press: "I get my news now from Jon Stewart's comedy hour."
Unsurprisingly, he flagged the extraordinary importance of the WSJ memo revealing the government's plans to torture, including its assertion that it's not against the law if the president approves it, and mocked the New York Times headline "9 Militias Are Said to Approve a Deal to Disband," suggesting in its stead, "Bush Administration Offers Hoax in Hopes of Convincing U.S. There's Some Peace." His assessment of the postwar settlement: "ti's going to come down to who has the biggest militia will win."
Danny will be interested in his assessment of the encouraging moves within Iran towards liberal Democracy: "we've set it back quite a bit."
On the American Sheeple: "We still 'take the feed. 'We take the feed on reagan...I don't know why we don't accept the truth about Reagan."
The audience having been informed that the talk was sponsored by the university's new Media and Society program, he then said, "What it is that you're starting, this media society thing? [ie, how would scholars explain this] I don't know--cultural anthropology? Maybe the herd instinct?" Then a story from one of his intelligence sources, whom Hersh says didn't find it an unflattering story: some time in 1986 or 1987, Reagan was given a long chart presentation of what actually happened with Iran/Contra and began sleeping five minutes in to it, then snoring on Nancy's shoulder. After twenty minutes it was over, the helicopter was fired up for the Friday trip to Camp David, Nancy aroused him, he awoke with a start, glanced at the charts, and asked, "What's that." Sy said something like "That's MY Ronald Reagan."
He asked--although he might have been referring to GWB--"What do you do with a guy who lives in a world that the rest of us don't inhabit--AND HE'S PRESIDENT?"
Of the Gaza/West Bank Deal he noted Bush's cryptic reference to "the '49 armistice line"--his reference to their never having been any formal armistice, thus Israel not formal occupiers: Bush's surrender to the Sharon worldview. He mentioned that his sources in Germany, as amazing as this would be historically, seem ready to step in as the honest brokers in Israel/Palestine, since America clearly can't handle the job.
It was then he said, "I don't know how you describe this government. but Democracy is not the word that comes to mind."
"NATO's falling apart in Afghanistan now."
And this was one of the most stunning parts. He had just returned from Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it.
He turned to the language by which the Times described the torture memo, its "tightly constructed" definition of torture--instead of calling it what he said it was, its "insane and criminal" definition of torture.
He lamented of his journalistic colleagues, "I don't know whey they don't just tell it like it is."
Q & A
An anthropologist asked about his uncovering of the Army's reliance on, and the neocon's promotion of, the racist ethnographic study "The Arab Mind" by the late Raphael Patai (see the amazing article from the Boston Globe I just sent the list), which basically served as a guidebook on how to humiliate Arabs, and recently came out in a new edition with a warm introduction by the head of the Army's special warfare school, a Boykin protege. Says, 'that's complicated, it get's into a source issue." But then he changed the subject to...Bernard Lewis, who he says "REALLY owes an extensive apology to the American people" for the bad advice he was constantly piping to Condoleezza Rice, who he called the worst National Security Advisor ever (the racist!). He said that when he contacted Lewis to interview him on his ties to the administration, the old fox said "I'm an 87 year-old man with a bad memory."
He singled out Fouad Ajami for playing a similar role.
Then, the money shot. In a general discussion about how hard it is to reveal some things in print while still protecting his sources, he said he said he knew "but can't write" that Cambone, "the man directly repsonsible" for Abu Ghraib, was planning "off-the-shelf assassination teams."
Someone mentioned the New Yorker (Hersh: "Ah!) and asked him if neocons had influence inside the magazine, and whether that wasn't why they had editorially supported the war. Hersh: "Do you happen to think I'm very interested in self-immolation?" Questioner: "Touché." Hersh: "next question."
He said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were the military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.
He noted a non-American source remarked that the Marines don't have sex, don't drink, etc. "All they know how to do is kill, kill, kill." He talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with their superiors).
Another stunning part. Apparently--you guys would know better than I--that there's a very tiny assassination team in Israel that goes undercover as Arabs. One of them told him, "Do you realize what you've [ie, the US] done? You've digged a whole SO DEEP for yourself"--ie, in Abu Ghraib, by creating a public relations situation that will turn off even the most Westernized Arabs from the United States government forever (though he said people still distinguish between their respect for the American people and their government).
He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor."
Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney.
"When these guys memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."
He noted that the Patai book wasn't a torture manual. Then he discussed actual U.S. torture manuals he had seen for Central America that made similar use of sexual taboos, around issues of "macho" identity. He noted instructions in one to strip the prisoner and tie his hands behind his back so he can't cover his generals to heighten the vulnerability. At this point he mentioned the phrase "the Great Gipper." He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff.
He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures.
He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off.
He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
He looked frightened.