Seymour Hersh conta detalhes das reportagens sobre My Lai e Abu Ghraib

O meu herói vivo jornalismo, Sy Hersh, fez uma palestra na Universidade de Illinois Urban-Champaigne contando detalhes de duas das grandes reportagens dele: o massacre de My Lai no Vietnã e os recentes crimes na prisão iraquiana de Abu Ghraib.

O discurso foi transmitido ontem no Democracy Now! de ontem.

A palestra misturou histórias chocantes e detalhadas, como as entrevistas com as mães dos soldados americanos que cometeram essas duas barbaridades...

So she claims -- this not a woman familiar with Freud or the unconscious -- she claims at that point she just decided to look at the computer after hearing about Abu Ghraib. She said she had -- she just hadnà€™t looked at it. She just was going to clean it up and take it to her office as a second computer. No thoughts. And she is deleting files. She sees a file marked à€œIraq.à€ And she hits it, and out comes 60 or 80 digital photographs of the one that The New Yorker ran of the naked guy standing against a cell in terror, hands behind his back so he canà€™t protect his private parts, which is the instinct. And two snarling German dogs -- shepherds. Somebody said they're Belgian shepherds, perhaps, but two snarling shepherds, you know, on each side of him. And the sequence -- in the sequence, the dogs attack the man, blood all over. I was later told anecdotally, I could never prove it. I am telling you stuff that is not provable -- I mean, at least -- that there was an understanding at least in the prison corps population that the dogs were specially trained to hit the groin area, which is one of the reasons there was so much fear of the dogs. This is à€“ I will tell you right now why they believe among many senior officers that I know in the military, I can -- but again, it's not -- it's not demonstrable. There's no way of codifying that. In any case, the fear was palpable in the picture.

So she looks at this stuff and eventually calls me. And we do it all, and we get permission. We run the photographs, just one -- how much -- and the thought there of the editors was how much do you humiliate the Arab world and the Arab man. One is enough. You know, we can describe what else is on the picture. We just don't need more than one. And then, later the mother calls me back, and we became friends. This happens a lot to people in my business. You get to like people. And she says, you know, one thing I didn't tell you that you have to know about the young woman, when she came back, every weekend, she would go and get herself tattooed, and eventually, she said, she was filling her body with large, black tattoos, and eventually, they filled up every portion of her skin, was tattooed, at least all the portions you could see, and there was no reason to make assumptions about the other portions. She was tattooed completely. It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.

And so, they sent me a boy, and I sent him back a murderer, changing her skin. This war is going to reverberate in ways that we canà€™t even begin to see.

... com observações ácidas e bem humoradas ao governo baby Bush. A melhor, IMHO, é sobre a nomeação do Wolfowitz para a presidência do Banco Mundial...

I think moving Wolfowitz out was a sign of sort of diminished ambitions. And it's good. I'm happy. I'm one of those people that said, à€œYes, World Bank, yes.à€ Then you can just, you know, starve people, change societies, change economic structures, force everybody from any socialist program to private enterprise, but he's not killing people, and that is a plus. And so, I -- you have got to applaud it. I mean, I would -- [ applause] Oh, hey! Bush for Pope. I don't care. I mean, let's do it.

A apresentadora, Amy Goodman, fez uma entrevista ao vivo com Hersh ontem. Hersh contou que houve uma mudança nas regras usadas para relatar as baixas americanas logo após as eleições no Iraque para dar a impressão de que as coisas estariam melhorando com a "democracia".

And what happened is after the election of January 30, the elections so widely hailed by this President and the government, which as we now know has had very little consequence on the reality of what's going on on the ground, as we move towards an open civil war there, but after the election, there were orders put out to change the reporting requirements on incidents. In other words, you had to have a serious American fatality or casualty, not necessarily death, but a serious incident, to get reported. So just a mine going off and somebody being lightly wounded wouldn't get reported. So the numbers went down right away, suggesting that somehow the election had worked.

Não deixe de ouvir... ou pelo menos dê uma lida na transcrição do programa.

BTW, na parte de notícias do programa de ontem deram uma nota sobre a cúpula de Brasília.

Latin American and Arab Leaders Hold Historic Summit

In Brazil, South American and Arab leaders are holding a historic summit aimed, not so subtly, at reducing US power globally. Officially, the summit is addressing economic issues but has moved quickly into some of the most pressing international conflicts. Yesterday, the gathering criticized the world's richest countries and Israel and gave support to the Palestinians. In a statement, the two regions demand that Israel disband settlements in Palestinian areas, including "those in East Jerusalem," and retreat to its borders before the 1967 war. They also blasted U.S. economic sanctions against Syria and denounced terrorism. But they assert the right of people "to resist foreign occupation in accordance with the principles of international legality and in compliance with international humanitarian law." At the summit in Brasilia, there are some 9,000 soldiers, 16 heads of state and top officials from 34 South American, Middle Eastern and North African nations.