Hersh: Bush Scares the Hell out of Me

[wiggs]

I remember a couple of months ago when Seymour Hersh's book was released that I thought then that he was being cautious not to be too critical of the administration.

So last week in an interview he basically pulled the rug out from under the WH on Iraq, supporting many of the CIA's findings that Iraq is a bleak situation. He goes on to talk about scary ideology, misunderstanding the Muslim world, and covert operations to disappear people.

SNIP

– The Iraq war is not winnable, a secret U.S. military unit has been "disappearing" people since December 2001, and America has no idea how irreparably its torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has damaged its image in the Middle East. These were just a few of the grim pronouncements made by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Seymour "Sy" Hersh to KQED host Michael Krasny before a Berkeley audience on Friday night (Oct. 8).

The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"
...

"It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me," Hersh answered. "What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community. They know in ways that none of us know, the incredible gap between what is and what thinks."
...

"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade ," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win' anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're playing Go.'"

SNIP

I'm not watching any political shows tonight, anticipating it will all be about Mary Cheney. But what should be on is a discussion of Hersh's statements, reinforced by the recent CIA report that echoes Hersh's bleak outlook.

Hope this isn't a dupe, but a search on DU did not turn up a post....

www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/10/11_hersh.shtml

[Pirate Smile]

1. Cspan is a Kerry Rally in Des Moines.

[AndyTiedye]

2. They've got Boooosh Now (Bleah)