Saturday, May 14, 2005

Seymour Hersh: Iraq "Moving Towards Open Civil War"

The good guy reporter who broke the My Lai massacre story back during the Vietnam War and the Abu Ghraib story about a year ago, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine, tells some tales from Iraq about which he hasn't written. From Democracy Now:

She sees a file marked “Iraq.” And she hits it, and out comes 60 or 80 digital photographs of the one that The New Yorker ran of the naked guy standing against a cell in terror, hands behind his back so he can’t protect his private parts, which is the instinct. And two snarling German dogs -- shepherds. Somebody said they're Belgian shepherds, perhaps, but two snarling shepherds, you know, on each side of him. And the sequence -- in the sequence, the dogs attack the man, blood all over. I was later told anecdotally, I could never prove it. I am telling you stuff that is not provable -- I mean, at least -- that there was an understanding at least in the prison corps population that the dogs were specially trained to hit the groin area, which is one of the reasons there was so much fear of the dogs.

Make no mistake about it: US forces are torturing prisoners. This is a sick stain on our nation which really calls into question all the values for which it supposedly stands--right now, I'd say our nation stands for evil, and I don't think I'm exaggerating at all. This is awful stuff, awful.

The military, as it did during the Vietnam era, is also lying about who they're killing:

You have some general rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units -- soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.'s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they're called in as an insurgent kill. It's a kill of, you know, would-be insurgents or resistance and it goes into the computers, and I'm sure it's briefed. Everybody remembers how My Lai was briefed as a great victory, “128 Vietcong killed.” And so you have that pattern again.

Click here to watch, listen to, or read the rest of the piece.

So we hear about all these insurgents being killed whenever the US goes on the offensive. Are we really killing any of them at all? It sounds like we're just terrorizing the Iraqi population. This is horrible, absolutely horrible. How can so many Americans support this shit? How can we be so fucking blind? What's going to happen to all these kids in the Army and the Marines when they come back home? This sounds worse than Vietnam, and if it's not now, it will be eventually, because the way things are going, this is going to last another twenty years. I really do fear that this is the end of America as we have known it. A culture that supports such brutality inevitably becomes a brutal culture. I know that America has always had an intensely brutal side, but it was somewhat balanced by its sense of idealism and morality: that balance seems to be coming to an end.

A photograph from the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$