i'm fortunate enough to attend Washington University, which offers free, public lectures from a broad array of important figures, from nearly any field you can imagine, from politics to humor to physics. Today Seymour Hersh inaugurated this semester's lecture series. (Bill Nye the Science Guy is next week.) The title of today's lecture was "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib and Beyond." A great public speaker he isn't, but what he shared with our overstuffed chapel was damning enough that one didn't mind the numerous asides and parenthetical comments.
Summarizing his speech would be silly, because i imagine that most of you have already either read Hersh's recent articles (some can be found
here and
here) or know the basic themes of his body of work. A few illustrative points really stuck with me about the entire event, though, that i want to share with y'all.
This specific lecture is part of my university's ethics center, and the professor who introduced Hersh drew an interesting comparison between the journalist and a sixteenth-century Spanish priest. Francisco de Vitoria wrote about the concept of just war, criticizing the Catholic Church's support of the wars of conquest in the Americas. He said that the stated goal, conversion of the heathens, was not a valid reason, as the Native Americans' religion did not harm Spanish interests. Rather, he posited that the Church's interest in the conquest was actually in obtaining the continents' material wealth for the crown, the nation, and the Church's own use. i find it amusing and sad that, after several years of study of Spanish and Spanish history, none of my professors ever mentioned this thinker (indeed, his Wikipedia article seems to imply that he was just a moderate supporter of Church policy). It makes me wonder how the justifications of the Iraq war will be presented in a few hundred years, when we're all dead and someone else with his own agenda is summarizing American history. Are the figures and thinkers that today oppose our war of conquest going to be marginalized for straying from the official line? Hell, the job is already half done, given the stellar job the traditional media have done in suppressing anything resembling higher-level brain activity in recent years.
In Hersh's prelude, he used the phrase "fear up" to describe what the Bush Administration has done and is doing to Americans and the world to quash dissent. The etymology he gave for this phrase stems from a term used in interrogation manuals used by the American special operations and intelligence communities, which were used in Camp X-Ray Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and other prisons across Iraq. Its partner phrase is "fear down," and it's used to describe the process by which interrogators amp up pressure on and fear in a prisoner, followed by a decompression period. The entire process is used to break the prisoner's will to resist. Bush and his administration, Hersh charged, have tried effectively to "fear us up" when the time was appropriate for us to feel in danger and to ramp back down when some level of comfort was beneficial to political expediency. This is nothing new to anyone who's ever seen the way the Bush machine works, but i find it highly symbolic and useful to describe this process of holding a nation's emotions hostage using the terms of those who instigated the brutal interrogations and torture in prisons across the hemispheres.
Hersh drew many comparisons between his discoveries about My Lai nearly forty years ago and his more recent work on Abu Ghraib. Again, you may read the articles and books for yourself for a more in-depth representation of Hersh's words. However, he told an anecdote about a rank-and-file soldier involved each atrocity. One, Paul Meadlo, was a private in Vietnam who initially took part in the massacre. He then refused to shoot a child who'd survived the initial onslaught, only to see his lieutenant shoot the child in the skull at close range. Meadlo's mother told Hersh months later, when the journalist travelled to Indiana to interview him, that "I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer." Another mother, this time of a reservist from Appalachia who had served as a guard at Abu Ghraib, told Hersh that her daughter had left her husband and family, moved to a large city, and taken a trivial night job to avoid dealing with anyone she'd known from home. The mother told him that the girl had been a beautiful woman before her service, but that after she returned "she began to get tattooed on weekends, filling her body with black tattoos, as if she was trying to change her skin." Hersh then noted the increasing problem of seeing Iraq veterans facing extreme mental trauma and readjustment problems after returning to the United States, saying that the military is prescribing "Ambien like aspirin" just to get the vets to sleep at night. His implication was clear: that we have only begun to see the beginning of the atrocities that the American war of conquest has wrought, and that we will soon face another generation of mindless, traumatized, and forgotten veterans of a war without reason.
Hersh touched on one Abu Ghraib image in particular, which i assume to be this picture, based on his description. He said it was part of a series of photos the New Yorker obtained from a former Abu Ghraib guard and that it wasn't the final photo in the progression. That man, who cowers from the dogs but cannot protect his groin, is bitten on his genitalia at the end of the series; the blood is clear in the photos, Hersh said. He went on to say that the regular military had adopted the extreme interrogation techniques that the CIA uses, based on the principle that "one size fits all."
Before the event began, i chatted briefly with my neighbor, a woman who appeared to be in her late 60s. In our conversation, it came out that i study modern Middle Eastern history with a focus on Iran. She laughed and said, "You must be a Democrat, then, if you're here to see Seymour Hersh." i told her i was, and she responded that she was "from the other side of the aisle," and that her husband had been in Senate for several years. i have a good idea whose wife she is, and i observed her closely during the lecture, in between scribbling notes frantically, to see her reaction. She sat tight-lipped and unmoving during the first half of the lecture, which was a strong and pointed criticism of just about everything Bush has done, does, and will do in the next 861 days (Hersh's count). However, when it came to the end of the lecture, after we had heard the vivid evocations of the torture that American soldiers carried out and the administration that fiddled while prisoners died, even this Republican senatorial wife stood up to applaud one of the few journalists who has loudly and repeatedly cried that the emperor - along with his Iraqi victims - is naked.