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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (160020)	4/2/2005 1:31:58 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hersh Says U.S. Is 'Nowhere' With Iraq War ______________________________________ Albuquerque Journal (New Mexico) March 31, 2005 Thursday * Pulitzer-winning writer talked to NMSU students LAS CRUCES -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, delivered what he called a ''downer'' of a talk to hundreds of listeners at New Mexico State University's Pan Am Center on Tuesday night. Among the sobering comments made by Hersh: the Iraqi elections, boycotted by Sunnis and managed by a huge military presence, were not a triumph of democracy; the war against former Iraqi Baathists has not been won but continues in a guerrilla version long planned by the deposed Saddam Hussein; and the torture and mistreatment of suspected terrorists by American forces or proxies in other countries has deeply alienated many in the Muslim world. ''this is where we're at. We're nowhere. We haven't won the war,'' Hersh said. ''It's just not a happy picture.'' Hersh, who broke the story of the infamous 1968 My Lai massacre of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians by U.S. forces, achieved a journalistic highlight last year by breaking the story, along with CBS News, of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. In groundbreaking stories for The New Yorker, Hersh reported that the Abu Ghraib scandal was not the ''isolated'' misconduct of rogue American troops. Rather, according to Hersh, as insurgents in mid-2003 took a deadly toll on American troops and destabilized Iraq following the fall of Baghdad, Abu Ghraib became an organized attempt by the Bush administration to wring useful intelligence from Iraqi prisoners by circumventing the Geneva Conventions. Hersh's reporting on torture, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nuclear threats and the handling of intelligence form the basis for his latest book, ''Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib.'' President George W. Bush remains ''absolutely convinced he's as right as we think we are,'' despite committing post-9/11 gaffes such as not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Hersh said. That, he said, is particularly disturbing to him as a journalist. ''What it means is he's not reachable,'' Hersh said. ''He sees what he sees, he believes what he believes, he's in his own world. And frankly, it scares the hell out of me.'' Earlier in the day, following a discussion with a small group of NMSU students, Hersh said he was not surprised that more Americans had not been swayed against Bush during the 2004 presidential campaign by the revelations of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. American voters who did not support Democratic candidate John Kerry avoided delving into the details of the prison torture scandal, Hersh said. ''You just keep information from yourself,'' Hersh added. But Hersh said he was not disheartened that his reporting on the scandal did not make more of an impact on the nation. ''No, no, no,'' Hersh said. ''If I brought that home, I'd never be able to do my job. I wear my heart on my sleeve. Obviously, I have a point of view. But once I do the story, I'm not responsible for what happens. I can't be. If I started doing that, I'd go crazy. I'm a journalist.''