Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
"Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad [...]
"The women were passing messages saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened'. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.
It's impossible not to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?"
dailykos.com
includes a link to the video of Hersh speaking...starting at 1:07 in.
He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes."
The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."
Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.
"The disaffecion inside the Pentagon is extremeley accute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear."
The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information.”
He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government.
The war, he says, has escalated to "fullscale, increasingly intense military activity."
Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is."
He ripped the supine US press, pledged to bring home all the facts he could, said he was not sure he could deliver all the daming info he suspects about Bush administration responsibility for Abu Ghraib.
radio.weblogs.com
I listened to it last night. "Numbingly unreal" as a description and the severe reality of what he relates produce a massive cognitive collision which will certainly wipe out shrub and the neocon cultists when it progresses into public awareness.
Hersh's only caveat as to the progress of the info into public awareness is that the cultists may be too far removed from reality and too insulated from consequences of their actions. I don't agree that they're too insulated.......at least I hope they haven't become so. |
