Sy Hersh, the author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, spoke at Iowa State last night. He's not on the Bush/Cheney bandwagon to say the least. His talk was apropos, coming as it did on the day that Bush nominated Alberto "The Geneva Conventions are quaint" Gonzales as AG.
He started his talk with, "I've got some good news and some bad news...The good news is that Gonzales is not going to be nominated for the Supreme Court. You can guess what the bad news is..."
Much more below the fold...
Here are some of his other talking points:
- Our democracy is fragile and easily tilted in another direction. He didn't mention the "F" word, instead referencing an "-ism."
- We are dropping more bombs in Iraq since 6/28 (the installation of Allawi) than before. This is a bad sign that things are not moving in the right direction.
- The same false logic that operated during Vietnam, that we have to destroy the village in order to save it is motivating the current drive on Fallujah.
- It is Kurdish Army units fighting alongside U.S. troops in Iraq, not trained Iraqi Army troops, as the media has reported.
- We are not fighting an insurgency, we are fighting the Baathist elements who melted away during the early phase of the invasion and are now operating in cells of 5-15 all over the country.
- Guantanamo is going to be a stain on U.S. history, like the Andersonville prison from the Civil War era.
- The terrorist bad seeds from Fallujah are now back in Samarra, which we "secured" weeks ago. And so the game will continue...
- Putin is playing games in the region, probably helping Iran nuclearize. Now that Bush has been "re-elected," the EU may take collective action. And whether they do or don't, expect European citizens, who really hate Bush, to take it out on U.S. companies like Ford, EuroDisney, etc. Hersh thinks the EU might attempt to become an interlocuter in the Israel-Palestine conflict because the U.S. has failed in this role under Bush.
- Nobody in the military believes they can speak out for fear of retribution. There is wide agreement among the branches of the service that Iraq is a lost cause, but no one wants to tell the President.
- The press corps has totally turned into Bush bootlickers. Start reading the Financial Times of London and Israeli daily Haaretz to get your news about what is really going on in the Middle East.
- There is wide agreement among the military that you don't use torture against hardened terrorists because they are quite willing to die for their cause, and it doesn't work--you just get disinformation. You also don't do to them what we don't want done to us.
Following on the previous point, the good news I took from Hersh's talk is that he doesn't think Gonzales will be confirmed, and it's going to turn on the testimony of as many as eight retired 1 and 2-star generals from the JAG Corps who are prepared to testify during the confirmation hearings that Gonzales torture memo was a complete cluster-fuck.
One of Hersh's closing points was that BushCo is deleterious to the soul of America in a way that is much worse than the aftereffects of Vietnam. We have ceded our moral high ground, which will have disastrous foreign policy implications for decades to come. Of course, everyone here at DailyKos knew that long ago...