Seymore Hersh on Democracy Now

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He'll be in the studio w/ Amy Goodman this morning. It's on LinkTV right now.

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1. Thanks al

Seymour Hersh: Iraq "Moving Towards Open Civil War"

We spend the hour with Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Hersh won the Pulitzer prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year, he broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He is author of the book "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." We hear an address he delivered at an event sponsored by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entitled "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" And he joins us in the studio to talk about the resistance in Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, the state of the media and much more.
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We are broadcasting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from the studios of PBS and NPR station WILL.
Urbana is a hub of independent media activity. The local Independent Media Center here is one of the most active in the country and has just bought the Post office. In a few weeks, the low-power FM station - WRFU Radio Free Urbana - will begin broadcasting. And the city is working on offering free wireless internet broadband access. Meanwhile, community radio station WEFT is going strong as is public access TV Channel 6.

This week, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hosting a conference focusing on the state of the media in this country. Entitled "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" the conference is the first of its kind to be sponsored by the Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research, established last fall by the College of Communications to study media policy issues.

Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine delivered the keynote address last night. Hersh won the Pulitzer prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year, he broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He is author of "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." This is an excerpt of what he had to say last night.


Seymour Hersh, speaking at the University of Illinois conference "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" on May 10, 2005.
Seymour Hersh, live in studio

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/142250

Pulitzer Prize winner to head UI conference


By JODI HECKEL
© 2005 THE NEWS-GAZETTE
Published Online May 7, 2005


URBANA – A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter heads a list of journalists and media executives who will talk about media consolidation and freedom of the press next week at the University of Illinois.
Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New Yorker magazine, will give the keynote address at the conference, "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" Hersh broke the story of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The conference is Tuesday and Wednesday. It is the first conference to be sponsored by the Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research, established last fall by the College of Communications to study media policy issues.
The conference's aim is to bring together people to talk about the state of the U.S. media.
Conference participants include talk show host Phil Donahue; Amy Goodman, host of the "Democracy Now!" news program; Naomi Klein and John Nichols of The Nation magazine; and Roberta Baskin, an investigative journalist and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity.
Hersh's keynote address – "The Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" – will be at 5 p.m. Tuesday at Foellinger Auditorium, 709 S. Mathews Ave., U.
The conference will include a panel discussion at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Foellinger Auditorium, and four panel discussions Wednesday at the Festival Theater, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Goodwin Ave., U.
For a list of times and participants, see the Web site for the Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research at www.iimpr.org.
The conference is free and open to the public.
The discussions will be aimed at a general audience rather than at communications scholars.
http://www.news-gazette.com/localnews/story.cfm?Number=18189

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2. Currently broadcasting excepts from his speach last night

You're welcome for the heads up.

C'est du rien, mon amie.

[babylonsister]

5. Mr. Hersh is wonderful! So refreshing to hear

the truth!

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3. Another Day in the War

According to Hersh's speach, one day the guards heard what sounded like gun fire, went outside the Abu Grhaib (sp?) prison to find a group of young teens playing soccer. They proceeded to kill them, then place them in a pile w/ captured RPGs planted around the bodies. This is all on film.

[welshTerrier2]

10. so much for the right trying to appeal to "soccer moms" n/t

[G_j]

4. kick

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6. Now he's being interviewed in the studio

Talking about Cheney & Rumsfield authorizing a break-in into his house looking for incriminating documents.

Sheesh.

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7. Measuring Progress In Iraq

The strange coincidence of these events begs the question: What have we gained and what have we lost in this war of choice? Was the loss of life, treasure and our international reputation worth the purported—although not officially acknowledged—strategic gains of invading Iraq?

I won’t waste pixels here dignifying the WMD rationale for war—which by now has been widely dismissed and which the cowardly members of Congress who voted for war would have known was a ruse if they’d bothered to pay attention and risk looking "unpatriotic."

About that whole Iraq-is-a-front-in-the-war-on-terror argument, where to start? If actual incidents of terrorist acts are any guide for how this so-called war on terror is progressing, then the Bush administration can’t claim success. Its own State Department reports a record number of terrorist attacks in 2004 —three times the count for 2003.

Which brings us to spreading freedom and liberty. The tyrant who today celebrates his 68th birthday has indeed been toppled. But I—like other opponents of the war—will continue to ask: Was war the best way to get rid of Hussein and promote Iraqis’ desires for freedom and self-determination? Conservative bloggers and talk show hosts will no doubt get a lot of mileage from the fact that liberals are talking more today about the stain of Abu Ghraib than they are about the nonviolent assumption of power by Iraq’s transitional government. For more eloquent arguments on why Abu Ghraib deserves our attention, alarm and more investigation, see Human Rights Watch’s Reed Brody or Operation Truth’s Perry Jefferies published today on TomPaine.com. And Seymour Hersh's original article here .

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050428/measuring_progress_in_iraq.php

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8. Bush ask the king to Pardon

The crook, kick, transcripts will be good, he has so much information.

[bpilgrim]

12. "the nonviolent assumption of power by Iraq’s transitional government."

that is a LIE as well as that was one of the most violent days of the occupation of course that wasn't reported and the elections came about at the tip of a bayonet and the rw wackos and M$MW are the only fools who can't see that.

peace

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9. THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME

Malcom Lagauche

Iraqi POWs were mistreated in 1991 as well as today


May 10, 2005

The scandal of Iraqi POW abuse at Abu Ghraib has the world in an uproar. However, there is a precedent that went unnoticed and underreported of brutal treatment of Iraqi POWs — the 1991 abuse of Iraqi POWs during and after Operation Desert Storm.

In June 1991, while the editor of the East County Weekly newspaper in Alpine, California, I received a call from a veteran of Desert Storm. He heard that I was compiling information about the Gulf War and said he had a story to tell me. I made an appointment for later that morning and he showed up and talked.

The former U.S. Army soldier told me that Iraqi POWs were rounded up and put in barbed wire pens. After a few days, they were shot and/or burned to death by soldiers without any reason or ways of defending themselves. According to the ex-GI, one soldier would shoot into the pen and another, in a seat would keep score. The following day, the roles were reversed and the scorekeeper became shooter.

I was shocked at the allegations. When I asked the informant how many "kills" he had, he said, "none." He refused to participate and was thrown in the brig for a few days.

Then, I asked him why he was telling me this. His answer was quite simple: "The war was wrong."

A few months later, I called the telephone number he gave me and his roommate said he had moved to northern California. I never spoke to him again. I was a little dubious, but I kept the information in the back of my head.

Three years later, I met an Iraqi Shi’ite Muslim who moved to the United States. He was an Iraqi POW and he told me harrowing tales of his detention. After the U.S. left the area in 1991, tens of thousands of Iraqi POWs were still in captivity, although, according to international law, they should have been allowed to return after the cessation of hostilities. They were transferred to Saudi Arabia, where some remained for almost a decade.
more
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m11653&l=i&size=1&hd=0

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11. Transcript is up now

In one case -- after I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of digital pictures emailed me, and – was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some general rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units -- soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.'s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they're called in as an insurgent kill. It's a kill of, you know, would-be insurgents or resistance and it goes into the computers, and I'm sure it's briefed. Everybody remembers how My Lai was briefed as a great victory, “128 Vietcong killed.” And so you have that pattern again. You know, ask me why I didn't do this story. Because I didn't think the kids did murder. I think it was another day in the war. And even to write about it in a professional way would name names and all that.

In any case, the paper also says -- this is the last one of these things that I found great interest -- that the Lummi tribe, one of the members – it’s a major tribe in the Sunni heartland of Baghdad, the four provinces that Saddam -- the center post of the resistance, the Lummi tribe probably had something to do with turning in Saddam. He had turned on some of those people. Anyway, the new Defense Minister is a Sunni, from the tribe, and he says he's going to continue the policies of Mr. Allawi, the former Defense Minister, which is what? What's the defense policies of Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister? Well, basically, what we have done since -- in the last year, is we have recreated the Iraqi Mukhabarat. This is the heavy-hitting secret police that Saddam ran. We have gone in and recreated many of the members, put them through a little acid test, made them vow that their allegiance – to what? – I guess, to America, or they're no longer Saddamites. In any case, this is our main force right now. This is the force that Allawi controls. This is a force, the former, you know, whatever the guys, whatever you want to call them, the former roughest guys that Saddam had are now working for us. They're our most prominent security force. And we have had really an amazing spectacle of the Secretary Of Defense, Rumsfeld, making at least two trips in the last five months, I think it’s three, but I know of two, I think it was three, though -- going in and basically -- once before the election was announced, and two more trips -- basically pleading on the inside for the two major factions, the Kurds and the Shia, I'm assuming some knowledge of -- I hope I'm not -- Iraq? -- you know, the country? and there's -- anyway, I don't want to kid you. But we're negotiating -- obviously the whole point of the election was to keep Allawi in play so that he could serve as a bridge, our man, between the Kurds and the Shia. And what he delivers is, of course, is the Mukhabarat.

And here you have Rumsfeld. We went to war to get rid of Saddam and all of that. Here you have Rumsfeld going at least twice in the last four months or so to beg, to beg for Allawi to stay in, and beg basically for the former Mukhabarat security forces to continue doing what they do, terrorizing. It was an amazing piece in The New York Times Magazine. I mean, amazing in its inability to go beyond the immediacy of what they were reporting about one of these militias that are former Mukhabarat, former Saddam people, that are now working for us, killing, (quote, unquote), “insurgents,” which means they're basically -- I don't know, when do you describe what's going on as a civil war? I don't know. When is somebody going to say that? But if it's not a civil war, it's very close. And I don't know -- I can’t see an end game. I'll give you a ticket out.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/142250#transcript

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13. He called Bush a Trotskyite-believes in permanent revolution

I think it was a speech Hersch made at the Illinois commencement. He said Wolfowitz would understand what a Trotskyite is but he doubted W would.