Seymour Hersh: Man On Fire

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet. Posted October 27, 2004.

An interview with Seymour Hersh is never dull – to put it mildly. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist can be contentious, just as willing to challenge a question as answer it. He can be unpredictable, ever able to throw a hapless reporter off-balance with the unexpected. "Did you ever take a stewardess' course?" he might inquire just as you're trying to get him to discuss the role of the media.

When Hersh does answer the question – which he will, with eloquence and at great length – he is likely to make your head reel as he follows four separate lines of thought – at the same time. In other words, it's a bit like being on a roller-coaster: often disorienting and a little daunting, but always a hell of a ride.

For when Seymour Hersh speaks, he does so with unparalleled insight, passion, and candor. He is willing to say what most other star journalists rarely permit themselves to even think in this era of celebrity journalism, when image is king. When Hersh speaks, it's for two simple reasons: it's important and he cares. It's why we care to listen.

Be it his coverage of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War or his recent work exposing the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, Hersh has been a dedicated watchdog for democracy. His latest book, ""Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," builds on his reporting as a staff writer at The New Yorker. The book – among other things – reveals how National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was made aware of human rights abuses in Guantanamo Bay two years before the torture in Iraq took place. It is a searing indictment of the Bush administration for its willful ignorance, ideological agenda, and above all, a profound failure of leadership.

He spoke to AlterNet from his office in Washington D.C.

So what does the Abu Ghraib scandal say – the fact that it happened and the way it was handled by the Bush administration ...

Oh, c'mon. You can ask a better question than that.

No, no, no, does it reveal a deeper truth ...

OK, fine. Abu Ghraib is a symptom, a terrible symptom of a system that went bad from the beginning. From the first days of the war, the attitude was 'We can do anything we want.' When John Walker Lindh – that young boy who was captured with al Qaeda, that lost kid from California – was first captured, the mistreatment was astonishing. He was stripped, thrown around. There was a bullet they didn't take out for days. The soldiers spit on him. There were people at the time who thought it was just madness what we were doing and that it would stop soon. But the American public liked it.

So in a funny way, we got what we wanted. We wanted payback, we wanted revenge. And we saw everybody in al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Muslim world as our enemy.

So you're describing a blood-lust on the part of the American people.

No, what I said was what happened is ... OK, one of the amazing things is the first report [on Abu Ghraib] that was done by Antonio Taguba, a wonderful, highly motivated, brilliant officer. And he traced the tracks of Abu Ghraib back to Afghanistan. The prisoner abuse began then.

And here's my complaint about Bush, and Cheney and Rumsfeld. Of course, none of these people knew about Abu Ghraib – all that madness, piling up naked people. But at no time did the people at the top of the chain of command say, "You will not mistreat people."

In an article in the New Yorker, you included the testimony of one of the soldiers who was one of the whistleblowers that exposed the abuses in Abu Ghraib. Yet in the bit that you quoted, he referred to the prisoner as an "it." And this is someone who was appalled by what he saw around him. Doesn't that reflect the larger environment within the prison – where these prisoners were simply not seen as human beings?

Ah, I think you may be over-intellectualizing. You can't begin to know what's in their head. Look, America is a very racist country and war brings out the worst in it. I have said – several times, publicly – that the one thing I've always liked about Bill Clinton is that he was the first American president since World War II to bomb white people.

There's a lot of racism. And when you fight a war, you dehumanize the other side – that's inevitable. And that's why you need leadership from the president. That's why you need clear guidelines to be established.

The reality is that anybody could do what they goddamn wanted in that prison. They couldn't kill them, but they could do anything else they wanted. And that's exactly what happened. It was just awful.

Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of AlterNet.

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