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>From http://www.chicagomag.com/pressbox/pressbox_story.htm
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May 2, 2002
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."
It's his money
The Tribune Company's John Madigan is the Chicago area's 15th highest-paid CEO
among the area's 100 largest public companies, according to the Chicago Tribune's
annual executive pay report. Madigan finished between Bank One's Jamie Dimon
and Sears Roebuck's Alan Lacy. According to the report, Madigan made $11.2
million last year.
Conrad Black, the CEO of Hollinger International, which owns the Chicago Sun-
Times, ranked 37th, at $4.4 million. That, however, doesn't include his compensation
from parent company Hollinger, Inc., as the Tribune noted.
Foreign reporting
The Tribune's Howard Witt, reporting from Baghdad on the front page of Sunday's
Tribune: "But hiding the truth is an old and practiced art in Iraq." As opposed to
America, where the truth flows freely out of the White House.
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