|
<clips> SEYMOUR HERSH: The most importance thing I covered is that most of the people in the chain of command weren't really informed about what was going on. People that normally would have been alerted to the problems they had, at the prison in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison, were not clued in. It seems as if the administration simply -- it's not even a cover-up. It's so much more profound than that. What they do in this administration at the top is they simply are incapable of dealing with bad news. So here you have this disastrous event come forth. Somebody comes up with the photographs. It's clear that if this young man and one of the military policemen at the prison hadn't decided that this was wrong and had not gone into the authorities there I think January the 13th of this year with the photographs, if he had not had the videos or the disks, you know, everything would still be a exactly the way it was. Janice Karpinski, the general who ran that brigade would be doing it, and the abuses would probably still be going on. But he had the video. So, they had to act. And so, it gets briefed into Washington. And here you have this sort of amazing freight train coming down the road from January on, and the highest powers in this administration, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and the president, they are just running around rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, any cliché that you want. That is simply because it's something they couldn't deal with. And then in talking to officers and actually when I had known for a long time, some of the -- for example, the GCS and army planners have been trying to tell the -- Rumsfeld and others for a year how bad things were going and how much -- how wrong the estimates are about troops strengths and what's needed. And you can't get them to listen. They only listen to their own little voices, I guess. It's really amazing. And you can understand this sort of inability to hear, this self-deception they practice. They really -- I think some of them may really believe six or seven bad seeds, six or seven bad kids are responsible for what happened in the prison system and that the idea that there's something systematic and something they may have inadvertently or advertently, we don't know yet, started. ...AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Saul Williams, “Not in my name.”, the war and peace report. Looking at Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Seymour Hersh's article in today’s "New Yorker” magazine called “Chain of Command, How the Department of Defense Mishandled the Disaster at Abu Ghraib,” he writes one of the new photographs shows a young soldier wearing a dark jacket of his uniform, smiling into the camera in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two army dog handlers in full camouflage combat gear restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the cameras view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner is naked. We spoke to Seymour Hersh last night about the photo. SEYMOUR HERSH: There were two dogs. They there were about 20 that I saw altogether. They were taken by two different cameras over 12 minutes. And one was quite -- the one that the "New Yorker" published was quite graphic, but they show this -- what can I tell you, this terrified man, you know, we have seen pictures like that before in Mississippi during the civil war days -- the civil rights marches and in World War II, we have seen photographs like that. But American military policemen and intelligence officers doing that, I quote one general, retired major general, a man named Heinz that ran the military police, that was in police business for 28 years as an army officer. He said if he had ever done anything like that, he would have been kicked out of the army. This is six or seven years or more back. The progression shows that he's terrified and eventually we don't see the dogs biting him and we see him on the ground, a lot of blood around him and a large gash in his foot, in his thigh rather up the thigh. And so it's clear that the dog bit him, although we don't actually see it in the 20 or so shots I have, but you know, the thing that's amazing about it -- there are two interesting things about it. Well, actually, three, really. One, of course, is, it's just another day on the job for everybody. Nobody is stopping. There's for our five people around and some of the photos. There were two cameras, going, as I said, which means two people were filming, not just one. There's more than just casual photography business. I think it's part of the interrogation process. And three was really much more interesting in terms of the army's -- and the White House's insistence that this is just a few. It's a different group of men and women, the other -- the six or seven people that are undergoing investigation and possible criminal sanctions right now are all from a company known as the 372nd military police, MP company. These slides and snapshots came from someone in the 320th MP battalion, a different group, same prison. Same probably area of the prison, but nonetheless, a different organization, a different unit. So the idea that what was going on there was limited to one unit is wrong. And then elsewhere in the story I did, I quoted another -- I don't quote him by name, but another young captain who ran a military police company at yet another prison at roughly the same time this was last fall. These photographs were taken -- the ones in the photograph in the "New Yorker" this week was -- I think was taken the night or evening of December 2nd or late afternoon, December 12, rather, last year. But at that same time, and in a prison, you know, near Baghdad, yet at another facility, the same sort of pressure was being put on by the military intelligence people. So, what you are seeing is, you are beginning to see evidence -- the photographs are evidence, which I think they are -- of a much more systematic mistreatment of prisoners. AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about the connections between Iraq, Guantanamo and Afghanistan and talk about how John Walker Lindh was dealt with, the American prisoner who was captured in Afghanistan. SEYMOUR HERSH: Right, I included the 20 years. Well what is interesting, one of the things in this sort of -- I think in this article I described it, the , Antonio, the famous group of reports that everybody was talking about and writing about last week. One of the things that he said was very interesting. He had said that the problems in the prison system, as far he can tell, he was brought on to the scene, after the photographs came and he was ordered to do an investigation in late January, which he completed about a month or five or six weeks. But in his report, he said there were two previous studies. In one of them, in one of the studies, another army general had mentioned that this all came out of Afghanistan in project "Enduring Freedom" was the code word. You go back and you then think about that and you look at John Walker Lindh. I talked to his attorney, a man named James Brass in California, who sent me some of the filings on the case, some of the affidavits. You know how the press is when he was around it, was interesting. And once he got – you everybody sort of stopped paying attention to it after a little while. But in one of the affidavits it's very clear that what happened to him after he was arrested in December 2001, he was stripped and two times over the next few days, people were allowed into take snapshots of a number of photographs were taken of him. In fact, one of them nude ended up being given to one of the networks. So you had a pattern of people photographing you, and also the nudeness and the abusiveness and one of the people, There was I said, there were two investigations. One of the investigations last summer that was done in Iraq on the prison system was done by a man named Jeffrey, Major General Jeffrey Miller who was at that time running the prison in Guantanamo, which is strictly an interrogation facility. And the timeline is this, that by last fall, the American authorities were talking publicly, you know, the insurgency was going and they were talking publicly about 5,000 or so members of the insurgencies, and there's a tremendous pressure about who are the insurgents, let's find them and let's get them. And so, what happened is that -- the best guess you have is by late fall, there were as many as 40,000 detainees. They're not like the people that were taken out of Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo. Overwhelmingly, 60 or more percentage of them are civilians, people that have nothing -- they were just picked up randomly. There's not much intelligence they get out of them. And anyway there is a separate prison for the hard cases; that we're not talking about. They weren't at Abu Ghraib. They were at other places. And so what you were doing is you were trying to find the 5,000 magic guys, and Miller recommended, do so, that you put the military intelligence people last fall in charge of the prisons.
And Ricardo Sanchez -- all of this is I write in this article, promulgated an order, they call it a FRAGO, frag operation order, promulgated an order last November 19 putting military intelligence in charge of all the prisons. And that meant that the interrogators -- literally that meant you were going to end up with Guantanamos all over the place. Cause whole function of the prison system was getting information. And so the brutality seemed to connect directly with the recommendation of November, December. And so you had a system where -- by the way, every expert in interrogation, and anybody in the American government and elsewhere tells you that interrogations by coercion produce nothing because people only tell you what they think you want. They're the most useless thing. Nonetheless, that seems to have been a widespread decision made, a decision was made and it was decided to escalate the pressure on the people. One of the ways, you know if you are going to humiliate people as they did, as we did, as we know from the photographs, sexually and other ways, it's -- I could tell you right now, I don't know this empirically, but I have been told by many people that there was nothing -- nothing would be as threatening to an Arab men than the idea that you had photographs of him in this horrible position that you could show to friends, neighbors and family. It would be a shaming that would be, you know – a shaming, as shameful and his life would be over in a sense, in terms of his personal integrity in the community. So, out of this, the cameras seem to be much more important, much more systematic. We don't know the answers to all of these questions. But inevitably you're led to thinking that what's happening here is not just something random, but something not only just deliberately or just inadvertently deliberate you know, people come to the same thing at the same place, but there seems to be an overriding system or, you know, a gathering, some notion of how to do it. And therefore, you have some central authority and therefore, somebody like me you seeing it heuristically would say somewhere there's something going on that we have to find out. There's some central mechanism for this.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/10/1417253
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
