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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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Now!
Seymour Hersh versus
the Bush Administration (and the DC Press Corps)
By ROBERT FISK The
Independent
Sy Hersh is an ornery, cussed sort of
guy, not one to suffer fools gladly. As the man who broke the
My Lai story and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, I reckon he has
a right to be ornery from time to time--and cussed.
He's dealing with powerful
folk in Washington, including one--George W Bush--who would like
to cut him down. And when Hersh wrote--as he did in The New Yorker
this month--that "current and former American military and
intelligence officials" have said Bush has a target list
to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and that Bush's "ultimate
goal" in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change--again!--you
can see why Bush was worried. "Wild," he called the
Hersh story. Which must mean it has some claim to veracity.
So when I cornered Hersh at
Columbia University in New York and dropped him a note during
a Charles Glass presentation asking for an interview, I expected
a stiff reply. "Anything you ask," he scribbled obligingly
on a piece of paper.
His own lecture was frightening.
Bush has a messianic vision--and intends to go down in history
(probably he has chosen the right direction) as the man who will
have "saved" Iran. "So we're in a real American
crisis ... we've had a collapse of congress ... we have had a
collapse of the military ... the good news is that when we wake
up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day (of Bush). But
that is the only good news."
Hersh might have said that
we'd also had a "collapse" of the media in the United
States, a total disintegration of the Ed Murrow/Howard K Smith/
Daniel Elsworth/Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward school of journalism.
The greying, bespectacled, obscenity-swearing Hersh is about
all we have left to frighten the most powerful man in the world
(save for the jibes of Maureen Dowd in The New York Times).
So it's good to know he's still
doing some fighting, including other journalists on his target
list. "I know some serious generals," he says. "I
can't urge them to go public. They'd be attacked by Fox (TV),
and the (New York) Times and The Washington Post would wring
their hands. It's a mechanism. You don't get rewarded in the
newsroom for being a malcontent." Journalists on the mainstream
papers are largely middle-class college graduates--not reporters
who came up the hard way like Hersh's street reporting in Chicago
in his early days. They have largely no connection to the immigrants'
society. "They don't know what it's like to be on social
welfare. Their families weren't in Vietnam and their families
are not in Iraq." The BBC, too, has "fallen off the
way".
So what is the Hersh school
of journalism? "In my business, I get information I check
it out and I find it's not true--that's what my business is.
Now there is (also) stuff in the military from people I don't
know--I don't touch it ... I was seeing (President) Bashar (Assad
of Syria) at the time of the assassination of (former Lebanese
Prime Minister Rafiq) Hariri. There was obviously bad blood between
Bashar and Hariri. Bashar was saying that Hariri wanted to take
over the cell-phone business in Damascus. To this day I don't
know what happened. I saw Bashar from 11am until 1pm (on February
14, 2005). He talked about what a thief Hariri was. I didn't
write it."
And there goes a scoop about
bad blood, I said to myself. But on Iran, it was something different
for Hersh. He was talking to a contact. "I brought up Iran.
'It's really bad,' he said. 'You ought to get into it. You can
go to Vienna and find out how far away (from nuclear weapons
production) they are.' Then he told me they were having trouble
walking back the nuclear option with Bush. People don't want
to speak out--they want the shit on my head."
As Hersh said in his New Yorker
report, nuclear planners routinely go through options--"we're
talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and
contamination over years," he quotes one of them as saying--but
once the planners try to argue against all this, they are shouted
down. According to another intelligence officer quoted by Hersh,
"The White House said, 'Why are you challenging this? The
option came from you'." In other words, once the planners
routinely put options on the table, the options become possibilities
to be considered rather than technical reports.
"That whole Johns Hopkins
speech," Hersh goes on, referring to the address in which
Bush attacked Hersh's own article, "he talked about the
wonderful progress in Iraq. This is hallucinatory--and there
are people on a high level in the Pentagon and they can't get
the President to give this up. Because it's crazy.
"In the UK, you might
have some crazy view--but you knew it was. But these guys (in
Washington) are talking in revelations. Bush is a revelatory
at bedtime--he has to take a nap. It's so childish and simplistic.
And don't think he's diminished. He's still got two years ...
he's not diminished. We've still got a Congress that can't articulate
opposition. This is a story where I profoundly hope, at every
major point, that I'm wrong."
Hersh has also been casting
his wizened eye on the Brits. "Your country is very worried
about what Bush is going to do--your people"--Hersh means
the British Foreign Office--"are really worried. There are
no clearances ... no consultations."
In Washington, "advocating
humanity, peace, integrity is not a value in the power structure
... my government is incapable of leaving (Iraq). They don't
know how to get out of Baghdad. We can't get out. In this war,
the end is going to be very, very messy--because we don't know
how to get out. We're going to get out body by body. I think
that scares the hell out of me."
It's all put neatly by one
of Hersh's sources in the Pentagon: "The problem is that
the Iranians realise that only by becoming a nuclear state can
they defend themselves against the US. Something bad is going
to happen." What was that line from Bogart as Rick Blaine
in Casablanca, when he asked Sam, his pianist, what time it is
in New York? Sam replies that his watch has stopped, and Bogart
says, "I bet they're asleep in New York. I'll bet they're
asleep all over America."
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