[News] Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib

[News at freedomarchives.org]

http://www.democracynow.org/static/hersh_trans.shtml
Tuesday, September 14th, 2004
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib


AMY GOODMAN: We're joined today by Seymour Hersh. He exposed 35 years ago 
the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, has written a number of books since, and 
now, his latest book has just been published. It's called Chain of Command: 
The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Welcome to Democracy Now!

SEYMOUR HERSH: Glad to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It's great to have you with us. Let's just start off with that 
"chain of command" and how you came to understand what was happening at Abu 
Ghraib?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, of course, nobody fully understands how you got to 
where we got. What's interesting about the Cheney call is that it isn't a 
call saying, "Oh, my god! What are we doing here? We've got to stop this. 
Let's clean it up. This is a terrible outrage. In the name of America, how 
can we behave this way, et cetera, et cetera." We're not getting that from 
him. We're getting, "Let's hunker down. Let's seal everything up." So, what 
happened is in this particular book, this sort of came out of the fact that 
I did a bunch of articles for The New Yorker in May, that I have talked to 
you about on-air, sort of posing the problem of Abu Ghraib and suggesting 
that there were higher officials involved.

After that, those articles, somebody who worked for Condoleezza Rice -- I'm 
talking about the people in the White House -- got in touch with me and 
told me that, in fact, there had been a lot of concern about prisoner abuse 
much earlier, that in the fall of 2002, this issue had had come up into the 
White House and gotten to the level of National Security Council meetings. 
It came about because the C.I.A. has an expert on Islam on its staff, 
somebody who was born in Palestine, and who -- I can't name him for obvious 
reasons, because I'm glad there's somebody with that knowledge in the 
government. I'm delighted to not -- not to do anything to expose him. But 
in any case, he was troubled because he was seeing all of the intelligence 
reports from Guantanamo. Guantanamo was the police prison that was set up 
in the wake of our invasion of Afghanistan. I think it started in January 
2002, and by the middle of the year, there were 600 people there. Nothing 
was coming from there. Nothing. No good intel. So, he does the rational 
thing. He goes to the base, goes and takes a look. He talks to about 30 -- 
he speaks idiomatic Arabic -- he talks to 30 of the prisoners. Among the 
first things he sees, as he tells colleagues -- I haven't seen the report, 
I just know what he told colleagues about it, people who worked with him in 
the C.I.A. and in the White House -- he sees two men easily 80 years old, 
living in their own excrement bound in a jail, in a pen. He, in talking to 
people, there's absolutely no differentiation among those who are people 
who wanted to do something, conspired against America or were al Qaeda 
members, and those who are simply people just caught up in the American 
sweeps. There's no differentiation. His report basically says if they 
weren't al Qaeda by the time we captured them, by the time we release them, 
they sure will be.

Also, obviously, there's the total violation of the Geneva Convention, not 
processing people, and also in conversation with people, he described it as 
war crimes, the way we treated people. His report was done, a wonderful 
general named John Gordon, a retired Air Force general, four-star general, 
full general, who worked as a deputy director of the C.I.A., and military 
men understand something, which is you don't treat prisoners any 
differently than you want your own soldiers to be treated if they're 
captured. He was troubled by it. He began to lobby inside the White House 
to deal with this report. Of course, in the Bush administration, like I 
assume in all administrations, no bad news is wanted. So he lobbies people. 
He gets his pal, the C.I.A. analyst who did the report, to come brief some 
people. Of course, the vice president's office is against this. They don't 
want to talk about it. Everybody in Guantanamo is a bad guy. To hell with 
them. The general counsel, the counsel to the president, Gonzalez, also is 
very hostile, but he finds enough people who said, let's do something. So 
Condoleezza Rice has a meeting. Don Rumsfeld comes over to the meeting. 
There's a moment of epiphany when she says, please look into it. He says, I 
will. He goes off and assigns a 31-year-old aide who has had nothing to do 
with prisons in his life, is an arms control guy, to look into it. Nothing 
happens. As the general tells -- is known to have said later, he was really 
distressed that nobody would take it seriously.

So, what you have, if you want it talk about how Abu Ghraib began, what you 
have is a attitude that these people are not humans. Dehumanization. We do 
that more all the time, but you also have an attitude that it doesn't 
matter what you do. So, I proffer this -- that all of -- we have had what, 
nine or seven or eight investigations and reports, some of them very good 
about what happened in the field, but in terms of how this attitude began, 
how we began, how Abu Ghraib really came to be it's -- from the very 
beginning, nobody in the chain of command, nobody from the White House on 
down made it clear that we will treat these people decently. I'll tell you 
why it's important to do so. Anybody who knows anything about interrogation 
says the following -- you cannot get good information from coercion. This 
is just a given. You establish rapport. Particularly if you are dealing 
with jihadist people, who are willing to die for what they believe in, 
you're not going to get information by torturing them. It's just not going 
to work. So it's dumb and dumber to begin with. Secondly, it exposes our 
people to the same kind of retaliation, and also it's a total war crime. 
It's a crime against humanity, it's a crime against the Geneva Convention, 
and of course, it's also dangerous in a rational world to the presidency 
itself. Because if you don't inflict values at the very beginning, you do 
end up down the road with the kind of abuses we had. That's, I think, the 
story in a nutshell.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh is our guest this hour. His series of pieces in 
The New Yorker and more are now a book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 
to Abu Ghraib. We'll be back with him in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Seymour 
Hersh. Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib is his new book. 
You have a pretty remarkable quote in here of J. Bibby, head of the Justice 
Department's Office of Legal Counsel. He wrote to Alberto Gonzalez, the 
White House counsel, quote: "We conclude that for an act to constitute 
torture, it must inflict pain that is difficult to endure. Physical pain 
amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain 
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of 
bodily function or even death."

SEYMOUR HERSH: What can I say? That's what he wrote. It was in a memo to 
the White House, and I generally characterize the legal memos written early 
-- this is a memo written in early 2002, as being a sort of internal 
competition to see who can be the hardest line guy there was. I think the 
gist of what he says in effect, he also in one of the memos described 
intent, that you cannot inflict torture if - it's not torture if your 
intent in abusing somebody or hurting somebody to get information was to 
protect the national security. In other words, what your intent is when you 
are hurting people, it's very important, and to what -- as important as the 
act. So, it's very hard for a journalist because if you use the word -- 
since the White House has its own definition of torture and the White House 
has its own definition of abuse, it's very hard to write about it, because 
the White House denies, you know.

One of the lawyers for the White House in a meeting I write about with a 
human rights official, somebody from Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, said, he 
describes the act of pulling a hood over somebody, goggles first and then a 
hood, he said, "People complain if we blindfold people." That's 
blindfolding, putting a hood over somebody's head and over goggles. And so, 
if you define things your own way -- Anthony Lewis, the former New York 
Times columnist who knows a great deal about law, writes on legal issues, 
described these memos that were written by the White House as sounding like 
lawyers for the mafia writing memos to the capo about how to handle a 
problem. It's really sort of -- that this stuff came at the top of the 
government is -- again you have to say, 9/11 happened. America was stunned, 
upset, people were trying to hurt our innocence. There was fear involved. 
There was a tremendous fear on the part of the government that we knew 
nothing about these people very much. We didn't know much. Would they 
strike again? I'm giving you their arguments. So, therefore, extraordinary 
measures had to be taken.

AMY GOODMAN: With just this one case, Bibby, he ended up being promoted.

SEYMOUR HERSH: He's now a federal judge, I think in the Circuit Court of 
Appeals. Again, was he promoted because he wrote that memo? I would guess 
not, but still, it's not something I want on my resume, let's put it that way.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan?

SEYMOUR HERSH: This is -- it's interesting. I have been doing interviews, 
and you're the first person to ask me about it. This is a story that I 
didn't write. I was doing a lot of work, as you know, since 9/11. I have 
been sort of writing the alternative history of the war, with the help of 
people on the inside. I'm not -- you know, people -- there are people all 
along very high levels who don't approve of what's going on. It's very hard 
for people in certain positions in the military and the intelligence to 
come forward. Anaconda was an operation to take place March 1, 2002, where 
we were going to attack in the mountains, in the eastern mountains of 
Afghanistan.

The idea was to attack what we believed were a group of embedded al Qaeda 
living in redoubts, in caves, et cetera. And the army wanted to do it. 
There had been -- the war had been going on for months. It had been largely 
a special forces war and air force war. The army and the commander at this 
time was General Franks. Little did I know then that this Tommy Franks 
would end up running the war and be described as sort of a hero, because 
this was Katzenjammer Kids stuff what he did. It was really sort of really 
dumb. The plan was to recruit some Afghans and with the American soldiers, 
they initially wanted the marines, they were going to drive -- there was 
going to be no advanced bombing of the area or artillery, because we did 
not want to tip off the al Qaeda we were coming. Never mind we were dealing 
with all of the local Afghan tribes, all of whom we know, history shows, 
who pays the most determines their loyalty. The idea that you could run a 
covert operation, particularly the way we move, like General Motors, but 
that was the idea, so we could have no -- the air force wasn't allowed to 
do preparatory bombing. We're going to send boys from the Tenth Mountain 
Division out of Ft. Drum, New York. They're going to paratroop land by 
helicopter into an area. There's going to be no advance bombing and there's 
going to be no artillery. And the first wave is going to be a group of 
Afghans going up a mountain with the marines. The marines said, "Are you 
kidding?" I quote an ex-- a wonderful marine officer saying -- that's why I 
love the marines - "We said 'Are you nuts? F*** you. We're not going. We'll 
go, fight and kill anybody, but we're not stupid. We don't go up a mountain 
without artillery and without intelligence.'" They wouldn't go, so they 
send the Afghans up, they get wiped out in what they call registered mortar 
fire.

In other words, the opposition had mortars aimed at the various 
congregation sites they had already planned in advance. They were going to 
be points where they rendezvous. And the fire was already registered. 
Clearly they knew what the points were going to be. When the Ft. Drum 
soldiers landed by chopper, up higher in the mountains, their landing zones 
were also the target of registered mortar fire. In other words, the enemy 
knew. I think they suffered 28% casualties, not deaths, mostly wounded from 
shrapnel and other shells in the first thee minutes. Then they ran down the 
mountain, 100 people, literally, some didn't, perhaps, but many did, 
including the junior officers, ran from an ambush, not irrational, leaving 
behind night vision gear, weapons, radios, they just shed themselves and 
went down the mountain, because otherwise they were in real trouble. They 
would have been wiped out. It's a nightmare. It was just a nightmare. Then, 
of course, the press is down below in Bagram near a base. After the first 
day was over, that's my favorite quote of the war, a lieutenant colonel 
from the Tenth Mountain Division briefs the American press corps that's 
down below about what a victory it was. And he said, "The best thing about 
it is we found and engaged the enemy right away." Which is -- I have to 
think I said it was a very strange way to describe an ambush. And an air 
force officer -- the air force went crazy about this. I got there after 
action started, which was just devastating, I mean, brutal. There's always 
interesting warfare, but this was extraordinary. They just said, this was 
the worst they have ever seen. One air force colonel, who is a wonderful, 
bright young air force colonel said to me, "Well, the army demonstrated 
that they were able to send a bunch of boys up a mountain to their death." 
That's what they showed in this mission. Complete disaster. They tried to 
tell the press as many as 700 al Qaeda were killed. Newsweek reported ten 
bodies were found. Shades of Vietnam again. But I didn't write it.

What makes it interesting, while doing reporting on it, I called Wesley 
Clark, the former NATO commander, who is sort of an interesting guy in this 
stuff, because early in the war, early in my reporting on the war, I had 
written critically about a Delta Force operation. Delta is the secret unit 
of the army. The commander unit. They had been ambushed. The Delta guys 
were enraged. I'm talking about the first month of the war because they had 
been sent on this stupid operation and they had gotten hurt very badly. And 
they don't like it. Delta guys, they like to crawl in little holes for a 
week and get to their target. They were ordered to do it in a different 
way. Everybody denied the story like crazy. And Wes Clark, to his credit, 
told a bunch of newspapers, "Look, I know this is right." I had said 13 
people were hurt and he said 12 was the number that he had. I saw in him 
somebody with a great streak of integrity, difficult he may be. In any 
case, I called him about this story while I was doing it. He encouraged me 
to write it. I didn't write it. About a year-and-a-half later, he's running 
for president. I mention this in the book, and I bump into him, and he 
jumped all over me. He said, "Why didn't you do that story?" I said, "Well, 
I just thought, it just would have been -- I just didn't do it." He said, 
"You should have done it. That was your job." Pretty scary. You know, he 
was right.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh. He has written a book Chain of 
Command, about what happened at Abu Ghraib, and well beyond that. So, let's 
talk about what happened at Abu Ghraib. How you learned of it, and then 
we'll talk about the chain of command right up into the White House.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, the honest answer to that question is I learned about 
it because CBS wouldn't do it. CBS did break the story eventually and 
published the photographs. But I learned very early that CBS had these 
extraordinary photographs. I was ecstatic about it in a way. I'm 
pro-reporting. I'm glad to see tough reporting on the war. I hadn't seen 
them, but I heard there was a really devastating story. And I love stories. 
That's what we do for a living. So, nothing happened. Nothing happened. 
Eventually somebody who had been interviewed by CBS, somebody in the 
intelligence community, told me that they were sitting on a great story. 
So, I found out what the story was. I found the photographs, and I also 
found more importantly the internal report written by a general named 
Taguba, General Taguba, born in the Philippines, enormous integrity, wrote 
a blistering report. It still is the most outstanding thing. It says an 
awful lot about us, that there are people like that that can produce things 
like that, even about the military. That report is devastating, because 
everything that you want to know, that I have even learned, that the whole 
responsibility goes higher, it's not explicit in his report, but it's 
written with an edge of anger. It's clear that he's really profoundly 
distressed that so much wrong could be done, and so many people clearly 
knew about it. In any case, so I have all of this stuff, and that's how I 
got into it. Eventually before we could do it in The New Yorker, CBS did 
produce the photographs to their credit. They did an excellent job when 
they did it, Dan Rather. I presume there were people in the news side that 
were fighting. There is a war that we can't begin. This is - if you 
remember, General Meyers called up CBS, that was, it became known and got 
them to hold off. So, the story I wrote --

AMY GOODMAN: The head of the joint chiefs of staff.

SEYMOUR HERSH: General Meyers, yes --

AMY GOODMAN: Called CBS and said, "Don't do the story."

SEYMOUR HERSH: And they didn't do it. He gave them something -- they held 
off another week or whatever. That's their business, but they did 
eventually do the story. And by the time they did it, I had not only 
actually more photographs or I think more, I had another set, two different 
sets of them, but I also had the report.

AMY GOODMAN: Where did you get them?

SEYMOUR HERSH: What do you mean?

AMY GOODMAN: The photos?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, from people who had them, of course. I'm not going to 
tell you that. I mean, you know, I honor your questioning, but -- I got 
them from people that had ever right to have them. And -- and the report -- 
it's never. It's always the cover-up. Although one thing I will say about 
the pictures, if we hadn't had the photographs or the Taguba report I could 
have written all week about abuses and nothing would have happened, because 
actually, as we know, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, International, various 
reporters had been producing extraordinary stuff. A lot of journalists, 
even some of the journalists from The New York Times and particularly The 
Washington Post, a reporter they had in Afghanistan had done a lot of very 
good stories interviewing people that had been in our custody in about them 
being exposed, the nakedness, et cetera, et cetera, but it didn't work. It 
didn't work because there wasn't any visual evidence. So, once -- and you 
know, my -- you know, The New Yorker, although it's a weekly, popping in on 
a Sunday and saying, we have to go next week with something, that's hard 
for them. And to the credit of The New Yorker people, I think I did three 
stories in three weeks, which you have to know what The New Yorker is like 
to know that's impossible, because of the fact checking and the editing. 
And you know, it's just -- it was amazing.

AMY GOODMAN: The famous picture on that first piece of a prisoner in a sort 
of Christ-like position, arms out, wires at the end of his fingers, the bag 
over his head. We actually just saw the kid in Boston at the Democratic 
National Convention, who had stood outside the army recruiting station in 
the same position to protest what had happened, and they originally charged 
him with being a terrorist. But you say you have even seen worse?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what you have seen?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I'll tell what you the judgment was of the editors at The 
New Yorker, they published some pretty horrible pictures. There's a sense 
of out of respect for the Arab -- Arab men you know, in Arab society, as 
you know, the Koran says Arab men cannot be photographed nude in the front. 
It's so hard for Americans to understand that. We are sort of the slapping 
each other with towels in the shower crowd. If you go into a sports club in 
Cairo, for example. Everybody has a private stall and a private shower. 
Privacy is incredibly important. Not only to women, but clearly to men, 
too. Photographing somebody nude, photographing somebody in a simulated 
homosexual position, photographing them with women having thumbs up or 
thumbs down next to them are the ultimate humiliation.

AMY GOODMAN: So that the photograph when people ask why did these soldiers 
take these pictures, especially with the soldiers themselves in the 
pictures, since it incriminates them, it was part of the torture?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. It's by the way, by every definition, this kind of 
psychological treatment of a prisoner is equivalent to torture. Every 
standard textbook and reference says this kind of excruciating humiliation 
is equivalent to torture. It's torture. You don't have to drive a nail into 
somebody's hand to torture them. Here's the important thing about the 
people in the photographs who are all being prosecuted and should be. They 
did wrong things. There's a couple of things to say about it. One, of 
course, is when we send our kids to war, we send them in the hands of 
officers in loco parentis.

The objective of the officers, the men in charge of the military, is not 
only to protect them from death, but also protect 18-19-year-old kids from 
themselves, from doing dumb things. There's a tremendous obligation on the 
part of the military to protect their soldiers. It's not only from 
casualties, as I said. It's a failing of such staggering proportions. In 
other words, is it really safe to send your child into the army, above and 
beyond getting wounded? The lack of sensibility, but more importantly, I 
write about a secret unit that I'm sure that you are going to ask me about 
in a minute, but one of the things, one of the intellectual underpinnings 
of what happened in Abu Ghraib, and you have to understand this, the people 
in the audience have to understand this, it's not just randomness, what 
happened. You can -- we in the fall of 2003, the United States of America 
was in huge trouble in Iraq, just like we still are. We know nothing about 
the insurgency then. We knew nothing then. We still know nothing about it. 
We don't know whether there's going to be another bomb like there was this 
morning tomorrow. We have no intelligence, zippo. We had no intelligence 
then. The insurgency by August of 2003, the U.N. had been hit, the 
Jordanian embassy where we really do a lot of operating, intelligence 
stuff, was hit. Lesser known, pipelines were hit again for oil. Water lines 
were hit, and electrical power stations were all hit anew in August. It was 
like a huge escalation.

So, there was panic in the White House because August is, what, almost a 
year from re-election time. So, it became a political issue, just as you 
noted in the beginning. Cheney and the White House moves together when 
there's politics involved. We have to do something. So, they not only -- 
they decided they had thousands, 10-20,000 Iraqis in detention. And they 
had been unlike in Afghanistan where they were picked up on a field, many 
of these people were picked up at traffic checkpoints or they were busted 
-- people broke into their homes and grabbed all of the men. We had -- the 
idea was get some of the guys in captivity who had nothing to do with the 
insurgency, get them photographed, get a dossier of them looking like they 
were committing homosexual acts, blackmail them and send them home into the 
community, and have them become our agents inside the insurgency. Tell them 
to join the insurgency. That was the intellectual idea, so I've been told. 
The idea was let's get some guys and turn them, because sexual humiliation 
does proffer enormous blackmail. You're ruined forever. Just like in the 
Arab world, they still kill the daughter that commits adultery, et cetera, 
et cetera. They try to. That's still a reality. And so, that was the 
intellectual idea. So, what the kids were doing, or the young men and 
women, they weren't all kids, some were in their 30's, the awful acts that 
we saw in the photographs were the playing out of a process that at the 
beginning had some sense but it simply deteriorated to the point where 
whatever the initial idea was, they began this in September of 2003, the 
idea was to get better intelligence and use the prison population to find 
some people that could do it for us. By October, the C.I.A., which is not 
adverse to being tough in certain interrogations, they pull their people 
out and send them home. Because the C.I.A. realized that this was a mess. 
If you are telling me that people in Washington weren't aware that there 
was real problems going on in the prison system, you have to be kidding.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh. We have to break. When we come 
back, I'll ask about the secret unit and also about videotape he has said 
he has seen of Iraqi boys, prisoners, being raped at the Abu Ghraib prison, 
hearing the screams of the boys. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back with 
the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. The War and Peace 
Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Our guest this hour is Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer 
Prize-winning reporter, exposed the My Lai massacre that changed history, 
the coverage of Vietnam. Now, 35 years later, though he's done many things 
in between, his latest book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu 
Ghraib. We're talking about the prison torture, how high up it goes. This 
issue of videotape, of boys in prison, Iraqi boys, being raped. Who's 
raping them?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I haven't seen or heard the videotape. What happens is in -- 
obviously, people with -- since I wrote those articles in The New Yorker, I 
was in contact with family members who have other materials; and 
essentially, some of the Iraqi -- some of the employees, the private 
contractors who were hired by the United States. As you know, there's 
20,000 private contractors. That's a number I have heard. I can't verify 
it. But we -- in the prison system in the United States military, since we 
know nobody speaks Arabic, we don't have enough translators, they hire 
locals. They hire -- they go to various companies, C.A.C.A. Is one.

AMY GOODMAN: Kaky?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't know what it stands for, but out of Virginia. They 
just got a huge new contract. These are people who do hundreds of millions 
of dollars worth of business. They provide interpreters, among other 
things; that's part of their business. The private companies were all over 
Abu Ghraib, and they had local -- one of the people, one of the men from 
the private companies was -- did have forcible sex with -- there's women in 
the prisons, which is also a big contentious problem for the Iraqi 
population. The women are held in a separate unit, but they have children; 
and one of the children and one of the women was raped by a boy. There are 
photographs. There is testimony --

AMY GOODMAN: Was raped by --

SEYMOUR HERSH: One of the guards, rather. And witnessed by Americans taking 
photographs. There is testimony that has not been made public about this. I 
know that there's been statements made in various military proceedings. And 
the government's been very chary about writing -- putting out any 
information. People witnessed it. They had cameras, and I believe they were 
video cameras. They could have been still cameras. There were cameras 
photographing it, and the boy was screaming. But I don't have a videotape 
of it. I haven't seen a videotape of it. I know that such testimony has 
been given. So, it's -- there is testimony that's been given for some 
reason that we can always guess about. Look, you know, I'm -- it's -- women 
were doing things -- I actually learned about Abu Ghraib. I went to 
Damascus in Christmas of 2003 to interview an Iraqi -- a high ranking Iraqi 
officer that somehow had escaped being imprisoned by us. We -- many of the 
Ba'ath party leadership are still in a prison --Camp Cropper, I think, in 
Baghdad. And he came out to Damascus to see me, and he told me -- we spent 
three days -- and in one afternoon he told me a great deal about Abu 
Ghraib. Again, without a video camera, without a photograph of it. And one 
of the things that was most compelling about it was the women were writing 
letters to their families -- women in jail -- saying, "Please come kill me. 
I have been abused. Come kill me." So, you know -- an Israeli I know said 
to me, he said, "You know, I hate Arabs." This is an old-time guy. Old-time 
military guy, old-time Mossad-type guy -- intelligence guy. "I hate Arabs. 
I've been killing them for 50 years and they've been killing us for 50 
years." And he said, you know, "Let me tell you something, Hersh. But one 
day we know with a wall, without a wall, we're going to have to live with 
those s.o.b.'s sometime. And let me say this to you: If we treated our 
prisoners the way you treated prisoners, we could never do that."

We have really dug a hole for ourselves on this Story, and that's why it's 
so profound. The book You're talking about, I think it's published this 
week. I finished this book in August, I mean, I'm jamming. And it was being 
translated -- as --page after page -- I think ten countries are publishing 
it -- all over England yesterday, and Germany, because there's -- you know 
--This is a bad thing for us.

AMY GOODMAN: The secret unit.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, three months after the war, we set up -- Look, the war 
takes place, as I said. They're panicked. We don't know what to do about 
it. We don't have intelligence. A lot of people in the world want to 
extradite people to us. We have a lot of friends, even in places -- Sudan, 
Yemen. Everybody responds to our America -- this terrible tragedy of the 
World Trade Center, etc. Getting people out of a country involve 
extradition, rendition they call it. Legal process. Not fast enough for 
Rummy -- Rumsfeld. So Rumsfeld sets up a secret unit known -- doesn't 
matter what the code name was, but it was - there's something known in the 
military as a S.A.P., Special Access Program. This is a very secret unit, 
often on the fifth floor (they call it the fifth deck) of the Pentagon in a 
secure area where all of our secret weapons -- the Predator aircraft, the 
Stealth bomber, were built in S.A.P.'s, because you can control access. 
There's something called an "unacknowledged S.A.P.‚" which is a really 
really secret unit, and you can run operations out of it. He set up an 
unacknowledged S.A.P. He needed a finding and they did tell the Congress. I 
can tell you right now I know, I write that I've talked to members of 
Congress who saw and signed the finding. It's a unit completely composed of 
men in undercover --probably Jordanian, Canadian passports, who knows? -- 
and their job is to find the bad guys, grab them out of their beds, no 
extradition. Put them --they have secret -- they have their own aircraft, 
their own helicopters--grab them, pull them out, and bring them to Egypt, 
Singapore, other places for interrogation. Initially by locals, eventually 
by us, very tough stuff. But to get intel. And this operation was called 
into Abu Ghraib. And I guess you could say we've been in the disappearing 
business; because we really don't know much about it. It still exists. It 
still goes on. I've written about it. I write in this book that -- I know 
some reporters in my old business, good reporters in Washington know about 
it. There hasn't been much reporting done on it. It's a secret unit that 
reports directly to Rumsfeld (and, obviously, approved by the President) so 
we can get -- we don't have to go through a legal -- you know going into a 
country to get somebody out you have to talk to our ambassador, the legal 
authorities, and et cetera. You just get them, put them on a Gulfstream 5, 
fly them to Egypt, bam, bam.

I think the program in the beginning was really well -- they tried to run 
it well. People involved tell me in the beginning that we got some very 
good stuff. The people we tried to get were bad guys. But eventually, and 
this is -- I write about this in the book, too --eventually it began to 
turn, became more political, and in the end, I quote somebody in the unit 
as saying, "What do you call it when you torture somebody to get 
information? And you leave them for medical help, and he doesn't get it and 
he dies?" And after a second, he said, "Execution." So, in the end, it ends 
up getting a little bit out of control. They did bring this unit, some 
elements of this unit into the Iraqi prison system in the fall. This is a 
decision made by the President. And this is where the idea of sexuality and 
using nakedness -- I think it came from this group because that's something 
they're very good at. Breaking down people that way.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, how high does this go? Chain of Command, is the 
title of your book.

SEYMOUR HERSH: If you're talking about Abu Ghraib, did Rumsfeld and the 
President know about it? No. If You're talking about the idea that -- a 
military unit is really interesting, anybody who served in the military 
knows, from a platoon to a company to a battalion to a division to the 
Secretary of Defense to the White House to the President, if you set the 
policy, if you say, we will not tolerate stupid abuse of people whose 
information we need, if you make it clear we're going to treat people with 
dignity, because we want our soldiers to be treated with dignity, and 
that's also the way to get the information we need, it would be -- go down 
like a rock from the beginning. It never happened. So it goes to the very 
top. That's why the story I tell at the beginning of the book about Conde 
Rice. I can't tell you that the President knew about this briefing from the 
C.I.A. official and that -- I can just tell you that everybody else in the 
White House did.

AMY GOODMAN: And that C.I.A. official who originally went down to 
Guantanamo and came back so disturbed -- conservative Palestinian?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Yes. Conservative Palestinian.

AMY GOODMAN: C.I.A.?

SEYMOUR HERSH: With integrity, an awful lot of integrity; and thank God 
there are people like that there. And there are there. And I can tell you 
there were many people in the C.I.A, many more than some of the reports 
want you to believe, the Intelligence Committee, who knew that there were 
problems with our intelligence all along, not only on W.M.D., but about the 
war. Just in general the idea that the C.I.A. misled the President is not 
true. This is a White House that wanted it the way they got it. They call 
it -- the cliché is - "intelligence to please." The pressure was always on 
the intelligence agency to tell us anything bad about Saddam and weapons 
you can. The standard for that information was much lower than for any 
other intelligence. Well, so, here we are. You know, we got the bombs going 
off. No solution to this war coming. No exit plan from this White House. No 
exit plan from John Kerry, either.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, do you believe this White House will be there again?

SEYMOUR HERSH: If I was a betting man? Sure. If John Kerry thinks that he 
can go to the Germans and the French and the Italians and say to them, you 
put your -- the Italians are there, the Germans and French -- his plan to 
get our allies to send their troops in there, it's just changing the color 
of the corpses. It's not going to work.

AMY GOODMAN: Given what John Kerry said in 1971, it's rather surprising 35 
years later that he has not raising Abu Ghraib torture as an issue in this 
campaign?

SEYMOUR HERSH: In all fairness to him, I think the campaign is just barely 
-- the book was published yesterday. I don't know what the campaign is 
going to do. I've actually been in contact with -- some people have called 
and asked for copies of the book. I presume -- Look, torturing people --

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you have been writing about it for more than year.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, torturing, well, but torturing people is -- you know --

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. Seymour Hersh, Chain of 
Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. The book was published this 
week, the story he's been reporting for quite some time now. Thank you very 
much.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Glad to see you, Amy.


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