-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 17, 2007 10:23:22 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: Cheney's Nemesis
On May 29th, 1975, an aide to then-White House chief of staff
Donald Rumsfeld sat down with a yellow legal pad and msade a list
of possible responses to a damaging investigative report in The New
York Times. "Problem," the aide wrote. "Unauthorized disclosure of
classified national security information by Sy Hersh and the NYT."
He then laid out five options, the most ominous being an F.B.I.
investigation of the newspaper and a grand jury indictment and
number three on the list, "Search warrant: to go after Hersh papers
in his apt."
The note's author? A viper-mean Beltway apparatchik named Dick
Cheney, who was making his name doing damage control for [Richard
Nixon] after the Watergate disaster.
Coming so soon after Nixon was burned at the public stake for
targeting political his enemies, the Cheney memo was proof that the
next generation of GOP leaders had emerged from the Watergate
scandal regretting only one thing: getting caught.
*Cheney's Nemesis*
For forty years, Seymour Hersh has been America’s leading
investigative reporter. His latest scoop? The White House's secret
plan to bomb Iran
By Matt Taibbi
04/16/07
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17542.htm
"Rolling Stone" 04/02/07 -- On May 29th, 1975, an aide to then-
White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld sat down with a yellow
legal pad and in careful longhand sketched out a list of possible
responses to a damaging investigative report in The New York Times.
"Problem," the aide wrote. "Unauthorized disclosure of classified
national security information by Sy Hersh and the NYT." He then
laid out five options, ranging from the most ominous (an F.B.I.
investigation of the newspaper and a grand jury indictment) to the
least offensive ("Discuss informally with NYT" and "Do nothing").
Number three on the list, however, read, "Search warrant: to go
after Hersh papers in his apt."
The note's author? A viper-mean Beltway apparatchik named Dick
Cheney, who was making his name doing damage control for the
Republican White House after the Watergate disaster. Coming so soon
after Nixon was burned at the public stake for similar targeting of
political enemies, the Cheney memo was proof that the next
generation of G.O.P. leaders had emerged from the Watergate scandal
regretting only one thing: getting caught.
This year, an almost identical note in Cheney's same tight-looped,
anal script appeared as a key piece of evidence in the trial of
another powerful White House aide, Scooter Libby. The vice
president's handwritten ruminations on how best to dispose of an
Iraq War critic named Joe Wilson are an eerie reminder of how
little has changed in America in the past three decades. Then, as
now, we have been dragged into a bloody massacre in the Third
World, paying the bill for the operation with the souls and bodies
of the next generation of our young people. It is the same old
story, and many of the same people are once again in charge.
But some of the same people are on the other side, too. In the same
week that Libby was convicted in a Washington courthouse, Seymour
Hersh outlined the White House's secret plans for a possible
invasion of Iran in "The New Yorker." As amazing as it is that
Cheney is still walking among us, a living link to our dark
Nixonian past, it's even more amazing that Hersh is still the
biggest pain in his ass, publishing accounts of conversations that
seemingly only a person hiding in the veep's desk drawer would be
privy to. "The access I have -- I'm inside," Hersh says proudly.
"I'm there, even when he's talking to people in confidence."
America's pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-
century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam
and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves
staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib.
At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-
ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could
scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner
to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers
buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information
junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and
invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next
phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story
from Us -- and that still pisses Hersh off.
During the Watergate years, you devoted a great deal of time to
Henry Kissinger. If you were going to write a book about this
administration, is Dick Cheney the figure you would focus on?
Absolutely. If there's a Kissinger person today, it's Cheney. But
what I say about Kissinger is: Would that we had a Kissinger now!
If we did, we'd know that the madness of going into Iraq would have
been explained by something -- maybe a clandestine deal for oil --
that would make some kind of sense. Kissinger always had some back-
channel agenda. But in the case of Bush and this war, what you see
is what you get. We buy much of our fuel from the Middle East, and
yet we're at war with the Middle East. It doesn't make sense.
Kissinger's genius, if you will, was that he figured out a way to
get out. His problem was that, like this president, he had a
president who could only see victory ahead. With Kissinger, you
have to give him credit: He had such difficulties with Nixon
getting the whole peace package through, but he did it. Right now,
a lot of people on the inside know it's over in Iraq, but there are
no plans for how to get out. You're not even allowed to think that
way. So what we have now is a government that's in a terrible mess,
with no idea of how to get out. Except, as one of my friends said,
the "fail forward" idea of going into Iran. So we're really in big
trouble. Real big trouble here.
Is what's gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse
than what went on in the Nixon administration?
Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very
avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he's doing the
right thing. I think he's a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He's a
believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he's very dangerous,
because he's an unguided missile, he's a rocket with no ability to
be educated. You can't change what he wants to do. He can't deviate
from his policy, and that's frightening when somebody has as much
power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as
committed to democracy -- whatever that means -- as he is in the
Mideast. I really do believe that's what drives him. That doesn't
mean he's not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks
democracy is the answer.
A lot of people interpreted your last article in "The New Yorker"
as a prediction that we're going into Iran. But you also make clear
that the Saudis have reasons to keep us from attacking Iran.
I've never said we're going to go -- just that the planning is
under way. Planning is planning, of course. But in the last couple
of weeks, it has become non-stop. They're in a position right now
where the president could wake up and scratch his, uh --
His what?
His nose, and say, "Let's go." And they'd go. That's new. We've
made it closer. We've got carrier groups there. It's not about
going in on the ground. Although if we went in, we'd have to send
Marines into the coastal areas of Iran to knock out their Silkworm
missile sites.
So the notion that it would just be a bombing campaign isn't true
at all?
Oh, no. Don't forget, you'd have to take out a very sophisticated
radar system, and a guidance system for their missiles. You'd have
to knock out the ability of the Iranians to get our ships.
So this is the "fail forward" plan?
I think Bush wants to resolve the Iranian crisis. It may not be a
crisis, but he wants to resolve it.
The other implication of your piece is that we went into Iraq as a
response to Sunni extremism, and now we are realigning ourselves
with Sunni extremists to fight the Shiites. Is it really that
simple? Are we really that stupid?
From what I gather, there's no real mechanism in the administration
for looking at the downside of things. In the military, when they
do a major study, they say something like "We give it to you with
the pluses and minuses." They usually show it to you warts and all.
But these guys in the White House don't want the warts. They just
want the good side. I don't think they know all of the consequences.
This seems to be something that Bush has in common with Nixon: the
White House ignoring everyone and seeking to become a government
unto itself.
One of the things this administration has shown us is how fragile
democracy is. All of the institutions we thought would protect us
-- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy,
the Congress -- they have failed. The courts ... the jury's not in
yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally
carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the
press, because that's the most glaring.
In the Nixon years, you had the press turning against the Vietnam
War after the Tet Offensive, you had Watergate, you had all these
reasons why the press became involved in bringing the Nixon
administration to an end. But it hasn't performed that function in
Bush's case. Why do you think that is?
I don't know. It's very discouraging. I've had conversations with
senior people at my old newspaper, the Times, who know that there
are serious problems there. It's not that they shouldn't run the
stories that they run. They run stories that represent the
government's view, because there are people at the Times who have
access to senior people in the government. They see the national
security adviser, they see Condoleezza Rice, and they have to
reflect their view. That's their job. What doesn't get reported is
the other side. What I always loved about the Times when I worked
there is that I could write what the kiddies down the line said.
But that doesn't happen now. You're not getting broad, macro
coverage from the White House that represents anything like
opposition. And there is opposition -- the press just doesn't know
how to deal with it.
But why isn't there more of an uproar by the public at atrocities
committed by American troops? Have people become inured to those
stories over the years?
I just think it's because they are Iraqis. You have to give Bill
Clinton his due: When he bombed Kosovo in 1999, he became the first
president since World War II to bomb white people. Think about it.
Does that mean something? Is it just an accident, or is it an
inevitable byproduct of white supremacy? White man's burden? You
tell me what it is, I don't know.
You talk a lot about the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam: how
Lynndie England is the new Lt. Calley, how it's lower-middle-class
white kids from America killing nonwhite people overseas. Yes,
there's this similarity -- but why is this same kind of war
happening again? Is this a pattern that's built into the way our
government works?
I don't know. Why would you go to war when you don't have to go to
war? It takes very little courage to go to war. It takes a lot of
courage not to go to war.
I once had a friend -- this was thirty years ago -- from a major
university. He studied the scientific problem the government had of
detecting underground missile tests in Russia. It took him a couple
of years, but he solved the problem. At that point the Joint Chiefs
of Staff was against any treaty with the Russians on testing,
because we couldn't detect when they cheated. My friend attended a
meeting of the Joint Chiefs and demonstrated conclusively that
there was a technical way of monitoring missile explosions inside
Russia, even without being on-site. But when the meeting was over,
the Joint Chiefs just issued a sigh and said, "Well, we better go
back to a political objection to the treaty now." Where there had
been a scientific objection to a treaty, now there was a political
objection. So you begin to see that pushing for peace is very hard.
There is safety in bombing, rather than negotiating. It's very sad.
Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the
way that war ended that could have prevented this war from starting?
You mean learn from the past? America?
Yes.
No. We made the same dumb mistake. One of the arguments for going
into Vietnam was that we had to stop the communist Chinese. The
Chinese were behind everything -- we saw them and North Vietnam as
one and the same. In reality, of course, the Chinese and the
Vietnamese hated each other -- they had fought each other for 1,000
years. Four years after the war ended, in 1979, they got into a
nasty little war of their own. So we were totally wrong about the
entire premise of the war. And it's the same dumbness in this war,
with Saddam and the terrorists.
On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the
Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and
how to hide stuff over those years.
From the press?
Oh, come on, how hard is it to hide things from the press? They
don't care that much about the straight press. What these guys have
figured out is that as long as they have Fox and talk radio,
they're OK in the public opinion. They control that hard. It kept
the ball in Iraq in the air for a couple of years longer than it
should have, and it cost Kerry the presidency. But now it's over --
Iraq's done. A lot of the conservatives who promoted the war are
now very much against it. Some of the columnists in this town who
were beating the drums for that war really owe an apology. It's a
sad time for the American press.
What can be done to fix the situation?
[Long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the
editors and executives. You'd actually have to start promoting
people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn't think you
could control. And they're not going to do that.
What's the main lesson you take, looking back at America's history
the last forty years?
There's nothing to look back to. We're dealing with the same
problems now that we did then. We know from the Pentagon Papers --
and to me they were the most important documents ever written --
that from 1963 on, Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon lied to us
systematically about the war. I remember how shocked I was when I
read them. So . . . duh! Nothing's changed. They've just gotten
better at dealing with the press. Nothing's changed at all.
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