Home > Seymour Hersh : The US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized (...)

Seymour Hersh : The US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison.

by Open-Publishing - Friday 16 July 2004
7 comments

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

He called the prison scene "a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes."

The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society."

Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is "in incredible chaos," he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.

"The disaffecion inside the Pentagon is extremeley accute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear."

The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information."

He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government.

The war, he says, has escalated to "fullscale, increasingly intense military activity."

Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is."

He ripped the supine US press, pledged to bring home all the facts he could, said he was not sure he could deliver all the daming info he suspects about Bush administration responsibility for Abu Ghraib.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article6492.htm

Forum posts

  • Thank you for reporting this. As an American, I am sickened and horrified and this has not yet been reported in the US press. I hope Europeans and others understand that most Americans cannot and do not condone any of the actions that have been reported — from this recent report to minor abuses. We hope and pray that God delivers us from bush. If he needs to find an "evil one", he need only to look in the mirror. bush is NOT America.

    • Re; The last message... Bush is Amerika, but only a watered down version...the acceptable face of hate. Be afraid.

    • whatever the fuck this "amerika" you speak of is... Speak for yourself, not me, or any other american.

    • you (we) all need to take a long hard look in the mirror. These problems have existed in our society long before 9/11, long before the current war. I don’t single out the USA; instead I’d argue that this is the dark side of human nature, and that this sort of thing always happens in violently hierarchical systems (take a look at your county jail or the penal system at large).

      So no, whether you can accept it or not, Amerikkka is an accurate description of the state of the nation, and all citizens are guilty by association. I’m not so cynical or bleak that I say this is the ONLY picture that can be painted of this country, merely a single portrait whose accuracy is now visible to the entire world. We judge others by their actions, no reason to do otherwise for ourselves.

    • Truly an inflammatory article which I was not aware of until recently (0204 July 18). I live in Houston, Texas which is fairly conservative to say the least. The title, the allegations, the tone of Mr. Hersh’s statements would seem blasphemous in Houston. I would feel extremely uncomfortable discussing this article with certain colleagues at work; such language could prove detrimental to my duties. Can’t wait to see the spin from mainstream American media. Thanks for the report and allowing me to comment.

    • For another coverup of sexual abuse that is over eight years old, go to our documented website at

      www.amicusveritas.org/AMPLP/chronology.htm

  • the problem with the us government under bush’s power is that when something goes down it’s no ones faught especially not the president who started the mess to begin with!
    Jared M. Lewis