Seymour Hersh sat down with Amy Goodman of
Democracy Now! this morning to talk about his new book,
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. As usual, Amy does an excellent job of asking the hard and good questions and actually giving her guest a chance to tell there story. A Partial
transcript is now available, or you can listen to the whole thing, and Amy introduces the piece with the following:
In his book, Hersh writes that at the height of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in May 2004, a Republican operative received the reassuring word that Vice President Dick Cheney had taken control of the situation. The operative "learned that Cheney had telephoned Rumsfeld with a simple message: No resignations. We're going to hunker down and tough it out." Hersh writes "Cheney's concern was not national security. This was a political call - a reminder that the White House would seize control of every crisis that could affect the re-election of George Bush."
Some of my other favorite parts are below the fold.
Who knew and when did they know it?
I did a bunch of articles for The New Yorker in May... sort of posing the problem of Abu Ghraib and suggesting that there were higher officials involved. After that, those articles, somebody who worked for Condoleezza Rice -- I'm talking about the people in the White House -- got in touch with me and told me that, in fact, there had been a lot of concern about prisoner abuse much earlier, that in the fall of 2002, this issue had had come up into the White House and gotten to the level of National Security Council meetings.
I am sure Fox will point out that since we all know Bush doesn't attend/pay attention to National Security Council meetings, he didn't know. Stupidity seems to be such a convenient excuse for them.
So we were torturing these people, at least we were getting good information from them, right? Right?
It came about because the C.I.A. has an expert on Islam on its staff, somebody who was born in Palestine, and who ... was troubled because he was seeing all of the intelligence reports from Guantanamo. ... Nothing was coming from there. Nothing. No good intel. So, he does the rational thing. He goes to the base, goes and takes a look. He talks to about 30 -- he speaks idiomatic Arabic -- he talks to 30 of the prisoners. Among the first things he sees, as he tells colleagues ... he sees two men easily 80 years old, living in their own excrement bound in a jail, in a pen. He, in talking to people, there's absolutely no differentiation among those who are people who wanted to do something, conspired against America or were al Qaeda members, and those who are simply people just caught up in the American sweeps. There's no differentiation. His report basically says if they weren't al Qaeda by the time we captured them, by the time we release them, they sure will be.
Okay, no intel and we are creating new terrorist. At least our Soldiers are safer because some of these people are off the streets.
a wonderful general named John Gordon, a retired Air Force general, four-star general, full general, who worked as a deputy director of the C.I.A., and military men understand something, which is you don't treat prisoners any differently than you want your own soldiers to be treated if they're captured.
Okay, but the people in Iraq who oversaw Abu Ghraib were just kids, blowing off steam who happened to bring hoods, dog collars, etc, when shipped of to Iraq, and not part of some plan. Right?
We had -- the idea was get some of the guys in captivity who had nothing to do with the insurgency, get them photographed, get a dossier of them looking like they were committing homosexual acts, blackmail them and send them home into the community, and have them become our agents inside the insurgency. Tell them to join the insurgency. That was the intellectual idea, so I've been told.
Unfortunately I can't watch/listen to the second part at work where they get into the really sad stuff:
When we come back, I'll ask about the secret unit and also about videotape he has said he has seen of Iraqi boys, prisoners, being raped at the Abu Ghraib prison, hearing the screams of the boys. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back with the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, in a minute.
And the transcript end there. So please check out the video, audio feed online and post more if you can. I have an Act meeting this evening so I won't be able to get to it till much later.