The Disappeared

Famed Journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker, Seymour "Sy" Hersh, the man who broke the original My Lai is releasing a book on the background military action of the Iraq war that led to the human rights abuses of Abu Ghraib.

According to Hersh's upcoming book "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." which documents the influence of a secret "special access" group of coverts soldiers, who peform missing to illegal enter foreign soil to detain and capture terroist subjects as authorized by Secretary Rumsfield, were critical in formetting the "anything goes" attitude that pervaded at Abu Ghraib.

"I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside — and there are a lot of good people inside — are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place — and here's what really irritates me again, about the press — since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 — the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordnance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.

My government has a secret unit that since December of 2001 has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and the Argentineans did. Rumsfeld decided after 9/11 that he could not wait. The president signed a secret document…There's a team of people, they fly in unmarked planes, they fly in Gulfstreams, they have their own choppers, they don't carry American passports, and they just grab people. And maybe in the beginning I can understand there was some rationale. Right after 9/11 we were frightened, we didn't know what to do …"

The original idea behind the sexually humiliating photos taken at Abu Ghraib, Hersh said he had heard, was to use them as blackmail so that the newly released prisoners — many of whom were ordinary Iraqi thieves or even civilian bystanders rounded up in dragnets — would act as informants. "We operate on guilt, [Muslims] operate on shame," Hersh explained. "The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes."

Hersh recent spoke at UC Berkeley - you can read a report on his comments from the UC Berkeley News, as well as watch a webcast of the event.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/10/11_hersh.shtml

Vyan