Seymour and the Circle Jerk

http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine05082004.html

What Hersh omits from his description of Phoenix, is that the CIA officers who managed the program relied for their information not on "South Vietnamese Army officers and village chiefs," but on their own unilateral assassination squads, and a gulag archipelago of secret interrogation centers manned by members of the South Vietnamese secret police and contract CIA officers, like the individual who supplied the blacklist for the village of My Lai. Had Hersh included this most important piece of information, the public's attention would have been directed towards the CIA's interrogation practices, and the location and operations of its existing secret interrogation centers in Iraq. But the scandal at Abu Ghoryab, although then well known to insiders, would not have been a sensational scoop.

Taking care of business in Iraq is Harris Inc., "a Florida-based communications company that won a $96 million Pentagon contract in January to develop the media" in Iraq, according to Lee Keath of the Associated Press (5/3/2004). Until recently, Harris ran the Al-Iraqiya newspaper and a number of radio stations. The CIA made sure to take over all media outlets in Iraq during the invasion, and when it thought that the dust had settled, it allowed American corporations to take over the management of what was left, with one notable exception. That exception was a newspaper run by the "radical cleric" Muqtada Al-Sadr, who had the balls to vehemently opposed the American occupation of his homeland ­ most likely as a result of the US policy of illegal detention and torture of Iraqi civilians in Abu Ghoryab prison, and the disappearances (unsolved murders) of several hundred if not thousand more. So US Proconsul Paul Bremer shut down his presses, thus inciting Muqtada and the Mehdi Fedayeen into open rebellion.

http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine05082004.html