You Can Trust Sy Hersh...Can You Trust the Pentagon?

Seymour Hersh exposed the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in an article in the New Yorker in 2004. He has a 5,600 word piece, “The Coming Wars”, in the current double issue of The New Yorker (January 24 and 31) that will blow your socks off. You can download it now or print it out. It’s a must-read. Once again, Sy Hersh is causing agida in the Pentagon. So much so that even the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia quoted a statement written by Pentagon spokesman and defense department apologist Larry DiRita. DiRita denied the facts in the Hersh piece. “It is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed,” DiRita said. Which means, of course, that the Hersh piece is absolutely true and factual and you can take every word to the bank. Back in 1969, Seymour Hersh received a Pulitzer for his reporting of the My Lai massacre and the US cover-up during the war in Viet Nam. He started out as a police reporter in Chicago, was a correspondent for both UPI and AP, a reporter for the New York Times Washington Bureau and has written eight books. Larry DiRita is a veteran of the Navy, was on Colin Powell’s Joint Staff, became Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s (R-TX) Chief of Staff and joined the Department of Defense in 2001. DiRita usually can be heard calling complaints about the DOD “frivolous” or defending DOD blunders--such as the Abu Ghraib scandal and General Boykin’s anti-Muslim remarks. Interestingly, DiRita does not refute Hersh’s claim that the US has authorized covert operations in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East, South Asia and Iran. Hersh says the goal is “to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids." Bad enough that this morning’s count of American soldiers who have died in Iraq is 1,369. Bad enough that this morning’s tally of the cost of the unnecessary war in Iraq is $150,464,000,000. (Billion!). In fact, the Pentagon's plans for the future are much worse. And the worst part of the information in the Hersh article is not that we’re looking to bomb 36 targets in as many as 10 more countries. The worst part is that since the Bush administration has removed all government checks and balances on the Pentagon, and made the CIA impotent, Donald Rumsfeld has been given total power to do whatever he wants. As Hersh says, Rumsfeld can run his war operations “off the books”. He doesn’t have to ask Congress or the American people for a by-your-leave. Read the Seymour Hersh New Yorker article, “The Coming Wars--What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret” before January 20. And while you watch the BushMen get high on their $40 million dollar inauguration parties, understand what their smiles and gloating really means: We have insane, sociopathic men running our country. If you don’t see a similarity between the Bush White House and Hitler’s Third Reich, then you have willed yourself to be blind. The world said, NEVER AGAIN! Remember? The Fourth Reich has to be stopped.