Sunday, May 16 2004
SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't pretend to be an expert on Sy Hersh. However, about a week into the war with Iraq I remember reading a Hersh piece in The New Yorker. I remember the article so vividly because it was at the height of the press hysteria that the war was turning into a disaster; sandstorms, not enough troops, Rumsfeld, Myers and Bush had no idea what they are doing, etc....
Here's a little sample from Hersh's appraisal on the Iraq War posted on March 31, 2003.
That, of course, was nine days before the fall of Saddam's statue in Baghdad and the collapse of Hussein's evil regime. The war plan was in fact "brilliant" and "on track" and Hersh's reporting and characterization of the war was about as wrong as you can get.
This brought back a memorable recollection from Bob Woodward's, Bush at War:
Musharraf said his deep fear was that the United States would in the end abandon Pakistan, and that other interests would crowd out the war on terrorism.
Bush fixed his gaze. "Tell the Pakistani people that the President of the United States looked you in the eye and told you we wouldn't do that."
Musharraf brought up an article in The New Yorker by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, alleging that the Pentagon, with the help of an Israeli special operations unit, had contingency plans to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons should the country become unstable.
"Seymour Hersh is a liar, " Bush replied.
To people who think President Bush is a liar, this opinion of the President's might not hold that much weight. But the directness of his answer to Woodward coupled with Hersh's article on the Iraqi War plan has made me extremely skeptical of anything Seymour Hersh has to say.
Which takes me to his latest from The New Yorker, with the heading:
FACT: The Gray Zone - Did secret Pentagon decisions trigger the Abu Ghraib scandal? by Seymour M. Hersh:
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.
That is the first paragraph from this week's article. Hersh lays out a plausible story of how Rumsfeld and Under-Secretary for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, are ultimately responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The big question is whether Hersh has this story as wrong he had the story from March 31, 2003 of the "faltering ground campaign against Saddam Hussein."
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture." Di Rita went on to say:
No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos. This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense.
There is no question that Rumsfeld and the Bush White House have made many mistakes as far as the postwar administration of Iraq. The biggest mistake may have been the idea that the war was over last spring. However, mistakes are an inevitable part of all wars, even successful wars. But the enemies of Bush and his policy in Iraq, which like it or not happens to also be America's policy, are willfully using those mistakes to misrepresent and exaggerate the reality of the overall war.
I suspect there is a good chance we have seen the peak of the Abu Ghraib hysteria, and people should read Hersh's latest "investigative report" with a good deal of skepticism and remember he has gotten a great deal very wrong in the past.
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