Seymour Says... Seymour Says...
By Steve Rhodes
No reporter in America has been more penetrating, illuminating, and
controversial in reporting on the war in Afghanistan—and on the accompanying
foreign policy implications—than Seymour Hersh in the pages of The New
Yorker. (His work there made him a finalist in the reporting category of the
National Magazine Awards, whose winners were announced Wednesday; he lost to
The Atlantic Monthly's William Langewiesche.) So it was something of a coup
for the Chicago Headline Club, the local chapter of the Society of
Professional Journalists, to land Hersh, an alumnus of the famed City News
Bureau, as its keynote speaker for the 25th anniversary of its annual Peter
Lisagor Awards, held last week.
Hersh, known first and foremost for his Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of the
My Lai massacre, did not disappoint. Though his talk was often rambling — he
seemed to start far more sentences than he finished—Hersh delivered a
provocative analysis of the American government's response to 9/11. Hersh's
take: America has lost the war in Afghanistan, lost the war on terrorism,
and is going to war in Iraq with little more rationale than that the
president desires to go to war there. His harshest words, however, are
lavished on attorney general John Ashcroft, who — in Hersh's view — does not
seem to understand the law.
Here are the Hersh highlights, edited for space and clarity.
* * *
"I used to always joke to myself, I was convinced that Bill Clinton was
going to be the first president since World War II to actually bomb white
people. I mean, we went to war in Vietnam, Korea, Grenada (Ronald Reagan's
invasion of Grenada, an island of 100,000 people, 40,000 of which worked as
domestic workers in New York City). We bombed in the Middle East. So I
thought he'd do white people, and [Clinton] did, first time since World War
II: Kosovo.
"So racism is part of what we deal with. It's part of why we don't care much
about what's going on really in Afghanistan. If the president says it's a
victory, it's okay. It's just another part of the world, and we don't care
that much about what's going on in Pakistan. We don't care."
* * *
"I was thinking of telling you when I got here that you all missed a great
story because, actually it's a fact that John Ashcroft is outside, in
Chicago today. He was announcing the arrest of three jaywalkers on Michigan
boulevard. We have an attorney general that is, I don't know, how would you
describe him, demented? We have an attorney general who doesn't seem to
understand the law. He's talking about John Walker Lindh, a young boy. John
Walker Lindh has made a confession that hasn't been made public. And
[Ashcroft] is using parts of the confession to attack him, in public, and
that's against every code of every U.S. attorney; it's one of the first
things in the rule book. You can't take material that's privileged and use
it publicly against anybody.
"I don't know about you, but I think one of the great costs of 9/11 has been
this tremendous attack on the Constitution. We walked away from the
Constitution because it's easy to walk away from. Some of the cases they
want to push make very bad law. I'll tell you just about one that interests
me: Zacarias Moussaoui, the famous twentieth man, arrested just about a
month before 9/11. He was accused by the federal government [of conspiring
in the attacks] and now they've pronounced they're gonna set him up with the
death penalty. He's been incarcerated under 24-hour surveillance in
Washington.
He's in a six-by-six cell with two lights that are on all the time, and has
no window. He has no rights. Nobody can see him. His lawyers have to be
vetted. "There's a federal bar that works on capital cases. The goal is to
get the very best — it's a pro-bono bar. It's the kind of stuff where you want
the very best lawyer possible. Well, in the case of Zacarias, in the Eastern
District of Virginia, the judge there doesn't allow outsiders. So the man
initially assigned — and he's a decent man — to defend him was one of the
judge's former law clerks, a Republican who has never tried a capital case,
a murder case. And so that does pose problems.
"The Bush Administration, after a lot of thought, told us that they wouldn't
use the law that he declared unilaterally: the president's right to have
military tribunals, to try people like Moussaoui under the military code of
law, in which the standards are much more lax. But [Bush] decided not to,
and I can tell you right now that the closest place to an aircraft carrier
is the Eastern District of Virginia, where [Moussaoui] is being tried. It's
an old-boy place . . . . The juries are notoriously conservative, so
Moussaoui is kind of a walking dead man.
"The way they see it, there's no longer an unfettered right of counsel in
cases like Moussaoui's. The justification is he could pass a message. Though
he's not been convicted.
"In the indictment of Moussaoui, they don't allege one specific act that
means anything. He flew. He was interested in crop dusting, as most
professional young pilots are, because crop dusting is the way, once you get
a license, you can keep on flying for free. It's sort of a great first job.
It's very common. They advertise crop dusting all over.
"The justification for this extraordinary procedure of not letting his
lawyers have unfettered access to him is because, the government says again
and again he is capable of passing a message — 'By God, if we let him have an
unfettered exchange that we don't monitor, even with a lawyer, the Sears
Tower will go down tomorrow.' You have to understand what's driving this.
What's driving this is fear.
Underneath all of this bluster, this administration
is in tremendous fear because we really know nothing
about what happened on 9/11.
They're telling us that they've stopped all sorts of things. They tell us,
'Don't worry, we're stopping things.' You know, you can believe it. I don't.
I think we know nothing, because we're not very good at it. It might get
better in five years, but we know nothing. We're the kind of society in
which terrorism, frankly, if you wanna do it, you can do it, and all the
after-the-fact gesturing doesn't make much difference. The real issue is to
try and deal with the real world, and not make more terrorists. But that's
another story, and go tell that to the Israelis. But you know, the bottom
line is that we're making more terrorists.
"So his pro bono lawyers made a motion in court to alleviate his conditions.
Let him have some sunlight, let him have at least a room so he can look at
some of the evidence against him. He's got a master's degree in
international relations; he's lived in England; he's quite an articulate
man; he's not at all dumb. He doesn't look at all like the picture you see,
where he looks like a sort of football linebacker . . . . People who work
with him describe him as almost effeminate, sort of intellectual . . . .
There's no evidence of any threats he's made, outside his outbursts this week.
"So there was a hearing that you all read about. When the hearing began, he
raised his hand and the judge let him speak, and for 50 minutes he buried
himself. This is what's interesting to me about it.
This is a man who the federal government says cannot be allowed to
communicate with anybody unfettered in any way, because he's gonna pass the
message . . . . He spoke for 50 minutes. It was live on the Internet.
Hundreds of reporters were listening. The court reporter had the transcript.
And not once did the government jump up and say, 'Your Honor, clear the
court!' Not once did it say, 'Your Honor, let's go into chambers with this.
He has a right to speak but we can't have him speak publicly because we
think he's capable of doing something.' "Which means to me, of course, it's
cheating. They're just doing it because they can do it. They truly aren't
worried about it, because they would have stopped him. Here he had his big
chance, and for 50 minutes they let him go on.
"And did his lawyers, by the way, jump up and say, 'Your Honor, Your Honor,
stop this right now. This man is burying himself.' He's talking about death
to the Israelis, death to Americans. The tone was a little more subdued than
you might think, but he said what he said, and it was devastating for his
case. Did his lawyers get up and stop him?
"[The government] doesn't really mean what it says.
They would've stopped him in a minute."
* * *
"We didn't win the war in Afghanistan; I don't care what George Bush says. I
don't care that George Bush doesn't know much, but the people around him
should know more who don't seem to know more. That bothers me. We didn't win
the war in Afghanistan. Right now, we're not being told very much. We're
sort of pacified, because we're all scared, too, and we don't know what's
going to happen, and we don't like what happened to us.
"We have men, our Delta Force, who are seeing combat every day.
They're engaged every day. They're going into Pakistan. They've been engaged
for two or three months, in heavy combat, hand-to-hand sometimes.
"We've had many more casualties than they've told you about. We've had no
discussion of the casualties among our special forces, where we have as many
as 1,800 people operating there. And the Brits have people there, the
Australians have people there, the Canadians have people there, the New
Zealanders have teams there. All of them have suffered casualties that you
don't know about.
"Al Qaeda was not destroyed in the war. Afghanistan was. Is our country
doing anything significant to rebuild the country, nation-building, all
those things? Anything that would suggest that when we move on to Iraq it
might do some good? Iraq might emerge better? If the model of going into
Iraq is Afghanistan, boy, you can understand why people might be very worried.
"We have a man in Pakistan, Musharraf, who has seized power. We now have
changed the game. We have a new Cold War. In the old days, the way it worked
was, anybody, any despot, any fingernail-puller, that was against the
Communists was our man. If you were against the Communists, you were our boy.
"Now we've got the same standard. If you are willing to join the fight
against terrorism, why, you're our boy. So we're now in business with
Musharraf, who not only deposed the government and became the military
leader; now he's trying to be elected as the civilian leader. And God knows
what he's gonna do with Kashmir once he gets us where he wants us . . . . We
have completely dropped the notion that democracy is of great interest to us.
"We're really going the wrong way. I think we're in real trouble. I'm sure
this is the most serious threat we've ever faced since the Third Reich. We
have people that are committed that hate us, and that want to destroy us,
and instead of dealing with the underlying issues that get people that way,
we make it worse."
* * *
"Where are the Democrats?
Where are the Republicans who know better?
The people that talk the most to me . . . are the dedicated military people.
I've known them forever, and they're terrified. They think we've lost the
war on terror. "We're gonna go into Iraq because George Bush wants to. And
what does he know differently? This is not a government that's being run by
any great consensus. It's a government run by three, four, five people.
We've got a secretary of defense who thinks he's Woody Allen. We've got the
only man—Powell—who has some sort of moderate instincts, and he's completely
being attacked, being sent off on a suicide mission. This trip was basically
a getcha, this trip to Israel. He's under tremendous attack not only by the
Republicans in Congress but also by the Republicans—by the far-right—in his
own administration . . . . This is a government that doesn't work together."
* * *
"I really think it's circa 1967 again, in a funny way. We were fighting a
terrible war in Vietnam and everybody knew there was something wrong, and
you couldn't see anybody coming out leading. "I keep on telling the Chris
Dodds of the world, 'The next guy who comes out swinging has a chance to be
president.' But they all think it's political suicide. That 'I can't go
after George Bush.' "And I'm telling you right now, it's gonna get much
worse. They're gonna do Iraq. It doesn't matter what the reality is. It's
what he wants to do. He's the president; he's gonna get it.
And they're gonna tell themselves it's gonna work. And it doesn't matter how
many more terrorists we're gonna make, and it doesn't matter that the Iraqis
have made it clear to us, if we ever do invade Iraq, whatever [Saddam
Hussein] has left in the way of missiles . . . .where's he gonna go, folks?
He's gonna send everything he has to downtown Tel Aviv. And I don't think
we're gonna be able to convince the Israelis to restrain themselves. So we
have a possibility of some sort of horrible Armageddon.
"And you look at how we don't go after Ashcroft because he is attorney
general. And we know it reeks, but we don't do much about it. And I think we
will still survive. America's not gonna go down. We're a very powerful
country. But I think it's gonna be much harder. I'm skeptical. These people
who don't like us are different, and we're not adjusting very well."
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