THE MUCKRAKER Seymour Hersh warns of more dark times BY IAN DONNIS

As the self-described author of an alternative history of the American response to 9/11, the legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh speaks in an almost stream-of-consciousness pastiche in which the desire to go public of sources with knowledge of dark doings extends across the generations.

This common link — the willingness of those with knowledge of the slaughter of Vietnamese peasants at My Lai and the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, both at the hands of American soldiers — seemed the one bright spot in a lengthy lecture offered by Hersh at Brown University on Tuesday, March 8. That a capacity crowd was willing to pack a large auditorium on a snowy night marked by freezing temperatures and blustery winds speaks to the Pulitzer-winning journalist’s star power.

Tracing the US role in the so-called global war on terror to the neo-conservative orthodoxy of President George W. Bush and his acolytes, Hersh warned that their sincerity is not in question. While the reporter thinks of himself as one of the guys with the white hats, "George Bush thinks exactly the same thing about his role in the world. Because of this belief, it doesn’t matter how many body bags are coming back [from Iraq]," Hersh says, since the president believes he will eventually be remembered as someone who changed history. This certitude is a fundamental problem, he says, since it distances the White House from reality, causing others in the administration to reluctantly drink "the Kool-Aid."

Although "it’s hard to know where they’re really going," Hersh says, the US military is doing the prep work to attack Iran. Meanwhile, while protests in Lebanon and glimmers of openness in Egypt have stirred discussion of a possible spread of democracy in the Middle East, the White House has remained highly arbitrary, he says, expressing little concern about undemocratic practices in such countries as Tunisia, Kyrgyzstan, and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, civil war in Iraq remains possible this summer, and the US continues to export terror war detainees to countries with miserable human rights records, he says, making the US support for torture little different from the repressive regimes that ruled Argentina and Brazil in the ’80s.

The fear of Americans following 9/11 was rational since there was anxiety about the possibility of other hidden terrorist cells, Hersh says, but intelligence experts knew within a year that the 9/11 hijackers more closely resembled a quickly assembled group. After the Bush administration pressed ahead with a predetermined plan to attack Iraq, the increasing sophistication of attacks against American soldiers by remnants of Saddam’s supporters increased the pressure to get intelligence from detainees. In effect, he says, interrogators were told, "Don’t kill ’em, but do whatever you want," although the vast majority of prisoners had no worthwhile information to offer.

Hersh, who broke the story of the abuse at Abu Ghraib as part of his ongoing reporting for the New Yorker (some of it collected in his latest book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib), says it has badly damaged America’s image abroad.

The soldiers who gunned down Vietnamese peasants in the massacre at My Lai and those who abused terror war detainees, he says, have been victimized by American policy. Nonetheless, referring to the Bush administration’s use of power, he says, "We’re in a real deep hole here, folks."

Noting that he is better at pointing out problems than finding solutions, the journalist was hard-pressed, in response to questions from the audience, to point to a better path. Still, he says, there is something strange in a culture where certain values — trust, love, honesty, and integrity — are the glue for everyday relations between many people, but are not expected from the nation’s leaders.