Can they possibly explain away this Hersh Story?

Do you think it possibly can go ignored?:

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

It's already getting picked up:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/15/iraq.abuse.main/index.html

Rumsfeld may have actually authorized all of this at Abu Ghraib. How will the media handle this? Short-cycle, papering-over, etc.

is very respected by the REAL news. He is the guy that exposed all the horrid killings and more durning Vietnam. NOw this, the media will not let this just be swept away.

... and his sources are microscopically checked by his editors.

Sy Hersh is what American journalism oughta be.

Thanks to Kentuck for posting this link on another GD thread

http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pri&dt=040515&cat=news&st=news...

<snip>
The Defense Department strongly denied the claims made in the report, which cited unnamed current and former intelligence officials and was published on the magazine's Web site. Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture."


It's all just a Hersh-headed conspiracy. Nothing to see here, folks, move along. :eyes:

down, down down
I cannot wait to see the reaction at FreeRepublic, or the raving sanctimony of Hannity, Limbaugh and the other a-holes on Talk Radio

It's been happening to major news stories for decades, and probably since our founding fathers. Having said that, the conditions are better now that they have been in years.

And all that stuff about soldiers believing they had Mullah Omar or some other leading in their sights -- well, we have some idea of how poor their record is from the number of people in Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

The men in uniform have quite a few issues with Rumsfeld, and that is a major under reported issue. The hatred between him and many soldiers is intense.
I bet an Army Officer, sick of seeing soldiers getting blamed and court martialed for Rumsfeld's orders leaked this

And pointing fingers at the Pentagon. Beautiful. I especially loved this part:

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

Heh. "We were worried about this and tried to call attention to it. We were concerned about the legal and moral implications of what was going on. It was the Pentagon that screwed shit up."

This is one of the things I love about how the US government works. While large bureacracies (did I spell that right? I always forget) certainly have their drawbacks, the minute a scandal pops up there is essentially a battle for self-preservation that always seems to end up with agencies exposing each other in order to cover their own asses. It's an excellent little system of checks and balances.

Edited to say, it's an excellent little system of checks and balances, even if it does seem to kick in only after the fact.

who have moral and ethical standards, disgusted by what went on in Abu Ghraib, are now talking---showing how Rumsfeld and the senior DoD officials are letting a few grunts take the blame for their sins.
God Bless the people who work to hold Bushco accountable, and God bless Hersh for his excellent reporting

Storey is excellent. Rummy is toast