The US's foremost investigative journalist, Seymour M Hersh, spoke to Andrew Burgin of the Stop the War Coalition and Matthew Cookson from Socialist Worker about George Bush, US foreign policy and the "war on terror"
In 1968 you exposed the US massacre at My Lai in Vietnam. Last year you exposed the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. How can things like this happen when those prosecuting the war talk about bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to the world?
Unfortunately, this is what happens in warfare. We were censored during the Second World War — we never saw photographs of dead soldiers in the US. We never got a sense of how the war was.
For us, the war was about our boys fooling around with scarves, no helmets and sticking up their thumbs. The "nips" had their cockpits closed — they had these helmets. We had this amazing Hollywood version of war.
My Lai told us that the we don't fight wars any better than the "nips" and the "krauts". Nobody fights wars well — it's always brutal and it always involves a lot of abuses. These things happen in war, and to think otherwise is madness.
So we in the US are always naive. We thought we could do it better. And what's pernicious about !
Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan is that, as bad as we think it is, the whole story isn't out yet. It's even worse.
The American people are gradually getting into this. But John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, refused or wasn't willing to deal with the war.
When people ask me what I think of Kerry not bringing up Abu Ghraib, I always have a pat answer, "You've got to admire his brilliance in not dealing with the war, because now he's president, which shows he was right!" The only shot Kerry had was to make the war an issue — and he didn't do it.
Tell us about US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's decision to introduce a "special access programme" involving US forces snatching or assassinating suspected Al Qaida operatives.
That was an early decision, and it's still going on. We still don't understand the extent in the US of what we call "rendition". This is the process of getting the name of someone, going in illegally, grabbing him illegally, taking him some place where the sun don't shine, beating him up — and if he dies, so what?
It used to be called "disappearing" in Argentina and Brazil, where it caused an enormous outcry.
The real shock in the US is the weakness and the failure of congress. Yes, the president's been awful, dubious and craven — but that's a given.
Congress has been much worse. The Democrats have no power at all. The Republicans control everything. There has been no serious investigation into Abu Ghraib.
Insane legal papers that came out after the Abu Ghraib story said that the Geneva Conv!
entions didn't apply. It's very troubling for me as an American, because it's so profoundly against what the whole constitution says.
Although the prisoner abuse scandals in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have been big news, the British have had their own abuse scandals. Iraqi civilians have been kicked to death at Camp Breadbasket.
You've had the same problems here, although your press has been much better. The anti-war movement has been very intense here.
The marches that the novelist Ian McEwan was writing about, we don't see them in the US. If anything, it's backed down a little bit now after the election. People feel a little bit defeated.
I can't decide whether our congress is supine or prone, but it doesn't make much difference. In the US it's the absolute failure of the constitution.
The Times in London published documents about when Bush made his decision to go to war on Iraq. We should be dealing with the issue that the president of the US might have made the decision up to one year before going into Iraq, and had been misleading us.
These are documents showing that the decision to go to war was taken in April 2002. In Britain we have families of servicemen killed in Iraq who are calling for a full public investigation into the decision to go to war.
I watched the British election and I saw Reg Keys, one of the fathers, make an amazing speech in Tony Blair's home district. This got no attention in the US press.
But I think the worst times are ahead. The next few months are going to be very disturbing for all of us because Bush has got a real problem in Iraq, and he's not aware of it.
I don't see how you can avoid a civil war in Iraq. When that happens I don't know what they're going to do. I would guess the number of potential terrorists has gone up exponentially because of the war in Iraq. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese