Seymour sees more than most
There is so much in the news that is immensely more important than the sentencing of Martha Stewart (who, yes, did lie in a federal investigation about insider trading, but was dragged through the media mud because she’s a liberal female). So let’s get on with the story that stands out the most to me:
Seymour Hersh is the journalist behind the amazing series of New Yorker articles on Abu Ghraib a few months ago. He also exposed the My Lai massacre and cover up in 1969. This is a person who knows how to go behind the scenes and get it right.
Hersh spoke a few days ago at the ACLU convention. He says there was “a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.” The U.S. government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison (by American soldiers) - ordered from the top.
Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.
“The disaffection inside the Pentagon is extremely accute,” Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, “The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear.”
Watch his whole speech here (he’s not the whole hour). Hersh goes into the rape and sodomy carried out by Americans in Iraq, the Washington neocons, the Islamic view of Americans, the gutless corporate media, a U.S. administration so steeped in violence, corruption, and ineptitude, how Bush’s policies further terrorism, on and on. Listen to it in the background while you work - we all NEED to know this stuff.