Hersh comments on Pentagon's denial: When told the Pentagon spokesman's position, Hersh said, "I understand this is going to be the kind of response. ... I leaned over backwards to make sure in my own reporting. I met multiple sources. There was a lot of basis for this.
"It will come out eventually."
"I'm not saying that Rumsfeld or the president or anybody else had any idea of how this sort of transmogrified into what we saw in the photographs," he said, referring to the photos of naked Iraqi prisoners being forced to perform or simulate sexual acts by Americans at the prison.
"But the way it began was with a program, guys coming in -- very sophisticated guys, under aliases. We've all heard about the civilians running around those prisons. Some of them were people from this unit. I can tell you the intelligence community went batty about this."
Last fall, "when things began to go very bad in Iraq," the United States "brought in elements of this special unit into Baghdad" with certain instructions, Hersh said: "Get people -- go and grab some of the Sunni males, use coercion and also use sexual intimidation if you have to."
To accomplish that, Hersh wrote, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, head of U.S. forces in Iraq, had Abu Ghraib -- and its guards -- put under the command of a military intelligence brigade instead of the military police brigade that had been in charge, creating an atmosphere of conflict between the commanders of the two brigade.
Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his story on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, said he had fewer than half a dozen sources for his report but more than two. And "more than a few in the CIA" know about the the agency's pullout from Abu Ghraib, he said.
"Thank the gods for Seymour Hersh, that's all I can say."
Yes indeed. First of all, the author properly is thanking the gods (lower cap, plurality), none of that monotheistic nonsense. Furthermore, this article gives the administration and the country a black eye, and who cares what the effect is on the troops. Indeed who cares what is true, extremism in attacking Bush is a virtue. I found Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" more realistic and plausible.
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