JANUARY 22, 2011
I don't know how to describe Obama, as somebody who's now in office for two years. Justwhen we needed an angry black man, we didn't get one. He has a nice dog.Let's just do a checklist of what... We know a lot about Bush-Cheney. I've been doing abook for the last couple years about Cheney, basically based on people I knew that wereinside... I've learned the truth that if people... You know, it's inevitable in abureaucracy: You're a one-star general and you get assigned to the vice president'soffice... [cross talk] ... and maybe you knew him when he was secretary of defense underGeorge Bush I in the first Gulf War when he was rational, so it seems, didn't want to,easily abandoned... and defended George Bush's decision not to go into Baghdad, if youremember, when we had that slaughter that we had that we called Gulf War I. But he was adifferent person after 9/11, as I think most of you have some sense of.And so, I did know people in that process, and I couldn't write much about it. How todescribe the Bush-Cheney years would be... I was telling a group of faculty people earlier-- and the book I'm doing isn't published, I don't want to talk too much about it -- butjust to give you an idea of how differently they thought... As many dark thoughts as youmay have about what America did after 9/11, whatever the justification was... I would arguethat, what I'm really writing about is, about how eight or nine neoconservative whackos, ifyou will, overthrew the American government. Took it over. And it's not only that. It's notonly that the neocons took it over, it's how easily they did it -- how Congressdisappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced. And all of us, Iguess, in the sense of payback and rage and fear, tremendous amount of fear in America, andwe all sort of signed on to what we call now the global GWOT, the global war on terrorwhich, for this government, [inaudible] still exists.I talked to somebody the other day in the... [inaudible] ... I'm ruminating here, but Italked to somebody Saturday before I came about Ben Ali -- a man in the intelligencecommunity, a very decent... Believe me, as you can under... it makes total sense. Manypeople, the overwhelming percentage of people, want to do their job right, whether in theCIA, or the Joint Special Operations Command etc., etc. Around the world, that's just thenatural instinct. Everybody wants to do their job right. But I'll just tell you, thethinking that goes on... I mentioned what happened in Tunisia, the implications of which Ithink will be felt, my guess is, we're talking about, there are a lot of countries in NorthAfrica where there's economic distress as there was in Tunisia -- Morocco, Algeria, etc. --where we could see a lot of trouble. But, my American friend -- this is somebody in thejoint special operations business -- his first remark was, "Oh my God, he was such a goodally."You know, he was. He was an ally in the Global War on Terror. That's the way we do look atthings. Never mind that... maybe he did chase down terrorists, al Qaeda if you will, forus. But you have to wonder (which I did not say to my friend, being reasonably polite atthat moment, I did not say that), but for every terrorist we capture, how many more do wemake? I mean, how many more... We complain bitterly when Iran captures three Americanstudents, they released the woman but the other two men are kept there, we complainbitterly in America about the lack of their jurisprudence and the lack of a good legalsystem. And how many people are still in GITMO, Guantánamo, suffering away? Over 200 still.
We claim we can't get rid of them, nobody wants them, but the truth that if they weren't alQaeda when we captured them -- and most of them were not, as many of you probablyunderstand -- they are now after 7, 8, 9 years of being incarcerated without any hearingsor any rights. So we don't always look at ourselves in ways we should.In any case, the Cheney-Bush years, I can just describe this scene that I was talking aboutearlier today, which is that in early April of 2003 after we won, quote-unquote, the war,before the insurgents -- the dead-enders, as Mr. Rumsfeld called it initially -- beforethey took, before the other war began, the war of attrition, there was looting of theartifacts. There was a big, sort of, it was a huge story in the United States and I'm surearound the world, the various gangs that were looting -- there is a lot of looting inTunisia right now, it's one of the byproducts of unrest -- the various gangs looted themuseums, etc. There was a big hue and cry, and Rumsfeld was asked about it and his basicattitude was sort of: "Boys will be boys," you know, "This is the price of freedom."So, but in the Cheney shop -- I can write about it in ways I could not then, because Ididn't want expose anybody who was there -- in the Cheney shop the attitude was, "What'sthis? What? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're allworried about some looting? And wait a second, Sunnis don't like Shia? And there's no WMD?And there's no democracy? Don't they
get it
? We're going to change mosques into cathedrals.And when we get hold of all the oil, nobody' s going to give a damn." That's the attitude:"We're going to change mosques into cathedrals."That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the SpecialOperations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command and Stanley McChrystal, the onewho got in trouble because of the article in
Rolling Stone
, and his follow-on, a Navyadmiral named McRaven, Bill McRaven -- all are members or at least supporters of Knights ofMalta. McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the Knights ofMalta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They're all believers -- many ofthem are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they are doing -- and this is not anatypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves asthe protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims in the 13thcentury. And this is their function. They have little insignias, they have coins they passamong each other, which are crusader coins, and they have insignia that reflect that, thewhole notion that this is a war, it's culture war.Look, Knights of Malta does great stuff. They do a lot of charity work; so does Opus Dei.It's a very extreme, extremely religious, Roman Catholic sect, if you will. But for me,it's always, when I think of them, I always think of the line we used about Werner vonBraun. Werner Von Braun was the German rocket scientist who invented the V-2. And afterWWII we had a secret program of bringing and sort of de-Nazifying some of the Germanscientists who were valuable to our own energy, our own missile program. And we brought himhere -- I think it was called PAPERCLIP, the secret program -- and we brought him here tosort of recreate his life. You know, he was this nuclear... he was this scientist, he was arocket scientist. So there was a wonderful satirist named Tom Lehrer [Mort Sahl
-Ed.
] --some of you old-timers might remember him, he wrote ditties. And one of his ditties aboutWerner von Braun was, oh yes, "Werner von Braun, he aimed for the moon but often hitLondon." With his rockets. So the trouble with some of these religious groups is they mayhave good things, but right now there is a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslimfeeling in the military community.So, what is Obama doing? Obama has turned over, I think his first year, basically, heturned over the conduct of the war to the men who are prosecuting it: to Gates, to Mullen,who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And in early March, as I recreate it -- andnothing is written in stone, but I'm just telling you what I've found in my talking and myworking on this over the years -- we have a general running the war in Afghanistan namedMcKiernan. McKiernan, unlike McChrystal, his deputy at the time Rodriguez, unlike Petraeus,unlike Eikenberry... They were all together at West Point class of 74, 75, 76 -- what theycall, we always call the sort of West Point Protective Association. McKiernan was Williamand Mary, not West Point. And Gates went to see him in March of ‘09, sort of the first bigexploration on behalf of the new Obama administration. What do you need to win the war?Well, the correct answer was, he said, "300,000" -- of course, he knew he wouldn't get it,he was just saying to win that's what it's going to take.There was a Russian study, the Russians did some wonderful studies after they were sort ofbeaten to death in Afghanistan (that we called a great victory of America versus thecommunists, the surrogate war there we fought in the 80s). When the Russians left they dida number of studies that have since been put back in the archives by the Politburo. Butwhen they were out, they showed that, the Russians estimated, just to seal off Pakistanfrom Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush, 180,000 troops alone just to seal it off so you couldn'tget the cross-border stuff that we are so worried about in terms of fighting the war inAfghanistan with the ability of the Taliban to retreat into Pakistan.
And by the way, there were studies done, two large studies done, when we first... rightafter 9/11, about going into Afghanistan. One was done by [inaudible] one of the warcolleges, and they were both extremely critical of the prospects of victory. And there wasa drive made to formalize the studies; they were ad hoc studies, and the vice president,then Cheney, sort of stopped them. Nobody wanted to talk about history.We're sort of, anyway, we hate history in America. We're anti-history, as you know. Elsewhy would we make the same mistake we always do? I remain convinced that if Nguyen VanThieu -- the South Vietnamese premier in 1975 when South Vietnam fell -- that somehow if wehad built a high wall around his palace we would still be airlifting food and supplies andsupporting the Democratic Republic of South Vietnam. We don't like to lose, we don't knowhow to lose, which explains I think a lot of Afghanistan.In any case, Obama did abdicate, very quickly, any control, I think right away, to thepeople that are running the war, for what reason I don't know. I can tell you, there is ascorecard I always keep and I always look at. Torture? Yep, still going on. It's morecomplicated now the torture, and there's not as much of it. But one of the things we did,ostensibly to improve the conditions of prisoners, we demanded that the American soldiersoperating in Afghanistan could only hold a suspected Taliban for four days, 96 hours. Ifnot... after four days they could not be sure that this person was not a Taliban, he mustbe freed. Instead of just holding them and making them Taliban, you have to actually dosome, some work to make the determination in the field. Tactically, in the field. So whathappens of course, is after three or four days, "bang, bang" -- I'm just telling you --they turn them over to the Afghans and by the time they take three steps away the shots arefired. And that's going on. It hasn't stopped. It's not just me that's complaining aboutit. But the stuff that goes on in the field, is still going on in the field -- the secretprisons, absolutely, oh you bet they're still running secret prisons. Most of them are inNorth Africa, the guys running them are mostly out of Djibouto [sic]. We have stuff inKenya (doesn't mean they're in Kenya, but they're in that area).Assassinations? Let's see, Eikenberry [McKiernan
-Ed.
] gave the wrong number so he wasreplaced by McChrystal. Stanley McChrystal had been in charge of the Joint SpecialOperations Command from ‘03 to ‘07 under Cheney. In the beginning under Cheney -- what I'mtelling you is sort of hard to take because the vice... In the beginning they would gettheir orders, they would call up on satellite phones, from the field, to Cheney's office,and get authority, basically, to whack people. Sometimes names were given, sometimesgeneric authority was given. This was going on. There's still an enormous amount ofwhacking going on right now. What happened is after McChrystal ran into trouble and he wasreplaced, Petraeus took over the war, General Petraeus -- they call him King David, DavidPetraeus -- and he has done this in the last 6, 8 months; He has doubled up on thenightly , nightly assassinations. He's escalated the bombing. He's gotten much tougher. Hisargument is: Let's squeeze them, let's bomb ‘em, let's hit ‘em, and then of course they'llbe open to negotiation.And negotiation for us means that anybody who wants to negotiate has to fully renounce anyallegiance with the Taliban. [Inaudible] in the Pashtun world, they call this thing theKnesset. And of course, it's not going to happen. Of course, I don't know any serious,truly don't know any serious officer or special operator or civilian who's been in the warthat has any confidence about it. We're not going to prevail in that. There are some betterthings. There are some units that are doing... In some valleys, we are going from villagesand we are doing a little better in terms of supplying some security, but in general, theinsurgency has spread wherever we are and the Taliban have moved, they're moving north. Theinsurgency is much more widespread; it's much more violent. American boys are being chewedup.As some of you know who know the Pashtun world, revenge comes, can come in two generations.Revenge, particularly if a male is killed, a senior male, revenge must take place or youare dishonored. We have a legacy there that's going to be very hard to pay off. And it'sthere. It's not even hard to see. You could almost, you can get it, but the conflict in theincreasing areas that they make them go, the targeting is...You know, here's the way it works: We have reconnaissance missions... We have a group inWashington known as the Joint Reconnaissance Committee. And when we want missions, let'ssay off the coast of China, we have Boeing 707s that fly figure-eights doing electronicmonitoring off China (they used to be mostly off Russia -- they're off China, they're offNorth Korea now). We still do an awful lot of intelligence collection. These missions areall put into a book and they're approved by the president. So the president (or hisdesignate, but the president basically) is given these notions that you have to approvethis mission for the next three months or whatever because there's risks. And yet everytime American Predators are going off, controlled by the CIA or the Air Force, going off,hitting targets (more and more in Pakistan) that are undefined, that the intelligence isnot very clear on, often very bad, collateral damage is enormously high because we're goingafter a member of the, let's say the Pakistani Taliban, and in that society the women live
Search History:
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
p.
Seymour Hersh Transcript Speech GeorgeTown.edu Doha Qatar Jan17 2011
A Transcript (Part 1 of 2) of Seymour Hersh's speech for the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Doha, Qatar on January 17 2011
573
Reads
1
Readcasts
7
Embed Views
More From This User
Notes
Load more
