US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

http://www.counterpunch.org/hersh01272005.htmlThe Military is Nowhere; the Press is Nowhere; the Congress is Nowhere...We've Been Taken Over By a CultBy SEYMOUR HERSHCounterpunchJanuary 27, 2005Editors' Note: This is a transcript of remarks by Seymour Hersh at the Stephen Wise FreeSynagogue in New York.About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at TheNew Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last threeyears, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- Idon't know whether he thinks he's doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it'ssome mandate from -- you know, I just don't know, but George Bush thinks this is the rightthing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, Ithink, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference tohim. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a pricehe has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange wayto people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So,the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, manyof people who voted for him weren't voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we'regoing to have.It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him?How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees asvirtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can't begin toexaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don'tunderstand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee,the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of akabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awfullot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot ofthings he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before theykill us, as Peter said. "They did it to us. We've got to do it to them." That is the attitude that -- atthe very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive menuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with.I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word"insurgency". It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had goneto Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and wethen had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting thepeople we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We arefighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than wewant them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took67