Sunday, September 12, 2004

Update on Torture, Seymour Hersch

On Friday, this site stated that it had heard "informed" rumor that Sy Hersch's new book alleges that the tortures in Iraq were known up the chain of command.

That story is no longer a rumor:

Senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused, according to a new book by a prominent journalist.

Seymour M. Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker who earlier this year was among the first to disclose details of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, makes the charges in his book "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" (HarperCollins), which is being released Monday. The book draws on the articles he wrote about the campaign against terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Hersh asserts that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who visited the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the late summer of 2002 filed a report of abuses there that drew the attention of Gen. John A. Gordon, a deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser.

But when General Gordon called the matter to her attention and she discussed it with other senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, no significant change resulted. Mr. Hersh's account is based on anonymous sources, some secondhand, and could not be independently verified.


Naturally, the administration denies it. There lips appear to have been moving, so that should pretty much take care of the credibility issue.

This SHOULD BE HUGE.

Will it be?

I don't know, have we heard enough about typewriters yet?

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