Sy Hersh Gets the real News AGAIN

I've been telling people for four year that everything we found out about the Bushies after they invaded Iraq - ie: that there might not be any WMD, that the post war chaos could be huge and if not contained could blow up into civil war was all spelled out quite nicely by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker beginning around October 2002 until at least his expose on the Abu Ghraib scandal. Now he has a new piece in this Week's New Yorker that discloses more lies and more importantly, more perjury by the administration. It is not just "More of the same" Hersh's particular talent is his ability to convey the subtext in the room. You see Rumsfeld's attempts to intimidate General Taguba who had been charged with investigating the atrocities from the moment he walks in the door. By the time of that meeting, Taguba's report had been widely circulated, and at some point was leaked to the press. Rumsfeld makes it clear that he thinks Taguba leaked it and therefore he, Rumsfeld, believes he's justified in treating Taguba like Sh*t. Taguba was not the leaker, we know because the person to whom it was leaked (Sy Hersh) says that it was not Taguba. More importantly, Rumsfeld had NO evidence that Taguba was the leaker.

Anyway, the most important piece of information that comes out is that everyone above a certain rank had easy access to the report and had been sent numerous back-channel emails describing the problem long before the report was released. Nonetheless, Rummy showed up in front of Congress pretending to be totally in the dark -- he never saw the pictures before they were put on TV. According to Taguba Rumsfeld is, at best, in denial, and he is MUCH more likely to simply have committed perjury as so many of our high ranking officials seem to be doing these days.

The link to the article is to the right in my "Shared Items" frame. It is the article entitled: "The General's Report."