If attacked back in kind, how could we ask why?

[yes_justice]

Real Video. (The story begins at 41:30.)

HERSH: "I got a call last week from a soldier -- it's different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He's an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It's a place where we claim we've done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy. It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary... It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn't explicit -- we're talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody...

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you've complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back. You don't need that. And that's where we are with this war."

(From tiny revolution)

Update: Another recent Sy Hersh interview may be found online here.

Comments

[deadrelatives.livejournal.com]

i'm not that easy to tears. that just tore me up.

dammit!

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Fuck the war.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Yep. Much thanks to the laughs your posts have provided me.

[snuh.livejournal.com]

Harry, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it, don't wait for it, just... let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee. - Agent Cooper

Over one hour of Sy Hersch? Thanks for today's present!

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Cool! Another recent Sy here.

[snuh.livejournal.com]

Great, listening to it now!

Here's some of what Hersch said at Berkley:

I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside — and there are a lot of good people inside — are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because, if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place. He's been bombing the hell of that place — and here's what really irritates me again, about the press — since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 — the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially. There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordinance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see.

And yet — despite the more than 1,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and the horrific number of Iraqi casualties — Bush continues to believe we are doing the right thing. He thinks he's wearing the white hat, Bush and the neocons are not hypocrites.

I think it's real simple to say he's a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood. I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing.

No amount of body bags is going to dissuade Bush the war in Iraq is not winnable. It's over.