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Speaking to launch McGill’s interdisciplinary media studies program last Wednesday, Hersh said he had seen video footage of atrocities in Iraq. Jennifer Bartoli / The McGill Daily |
Posted on 11/01/2006 2:48:26 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
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Speaking to launch McGill’s interdisciplinary media studies program last Wednesday, Hersh said he had seen video footage of atrocities in Iraq. Jennifer Bartoli / The McGill Daily |
During his hour-and-a-half lecture – part of the launch of an interdisciplinary media and communications studies program called Media@McGill – Hersh described video footage depicting U.S. atrocities in Iraq, which he had viewed, but not yet published a story about.
He described one video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer.
“Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,” he began. “Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.”
“Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,” Hersh continued. “[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.”
“About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,” he said.
If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.
“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”
Hersh came out hard against President Bush for his involvement in the Middle East.
“In Washington, you can’t expect any rationality. I don’t know if he’s in Iraq because God told him to, because his father didn’t do it, or because it’s the next step in his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program,” he said.
Hersh hinted that the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq lies with eight or nine members of the administration who have a “neo-conservative agenda” and dictate the U.S.’s post-September 11 foreign policy.
“You have a collapsed Congress, you have a collapsed press. The military is going to do what the President wants,” Hersh said. “How fragile is democracy in America, if a president can come in with an agenda controlled by a few cultists?”
Throughout his talk Hersh remained pessimistic, predicting that the U.S. will initiate an attack against Iran, and that the situation in Iraq will deteriorate further.
“There’s no reason to see a change in policy about Iraq. [Bush] thinks that, in twenty years, he’s going to be recognized for the leader he was – the analogy he uses is Churchill,” Hersh said. “If you read the public statements of the leadership, they’re so confident and so calm…. It’s pretty scary.”
Milblogs is talking about the article:
http://www.mudvillegazette.com/milblogs/2006/11/02/#006913
OMG!!! I hope he rots in he!! for those statements.
There is no substantial evidence that this was actually carried out by Black Jack Pershing (how he came to have that name is also interesting). However there are accounts written in biographies of Pershing that refer to threats he made to the local muslims, indicating that if they would not submit to his authority (as governor of Moros), he would kill them and bury them in pig’s skin, or bury them in common grave with the carcasses of pigs. Other accounts indicate that one or more of his subordinate may have actually carried out the threat.
If you read letters written by Gen. Pershing, it would actually seem very out of character for him to personally carry out an action such as this. He refers to the Moros people as “like his own children”, whom he loves. And it saddened him to have to take such measures.
Also, muslim clerics have now claimed that the body of a martyr is pure, and does not require washing before burial (a muslim custom), and anything done to the remains of a martyr will not prevent the soul from receiving the gift of martyrdom (72 virging in paradise) since the soul was immediately present in paradise at the time of his martyrdom. This was changed when Israeli settlers in the Gaza strip, soon after Israel became a nation again, threatened to sew the dead bodies of 'martyrs' in pigskin and bury them facedown.
I believe this tactic may have worked during the time of Pershing, and may work today with fundamental Islamists, however the clerics will change the standards and requirements of their religion in order to get new recruits. Nothing less than the total anihalation, or that threat breaking their will will win this religious war.
Hotair it talking about it as well:
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/11/01/sy-hersh-us-army-in-iraq-is-the-most-violent-and-murderous-in-american-history/
Actually I picked Ollie because he would of had a circle of friends and the free speech crowd would of been in the Hospital.
killing and wounding enemy is the objective.
Killing and wounding enemy is good.
Sy Hersh Says It’s Okay to Lie (Just Not in Print)
****************************AN EXCERPT ***********************************
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By Chris Suellentrop
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Since the Abu Ghraib story broke eleven months ago, The New Yorker’s national-security correspondent, Seymour Hersh, has followed it up with a series of spectacular scoops. Videotape of young boys being raped at Abu Ghraib. Evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be a “composite figure” and a propaganda creation of either Iraq’s Baathist insurgency or the U.S. government. The active involvement of Karl Rove and the president in “prisoner-interrogation issues.” The mysterious disappearance of $1 billion, in cash, in Iraq. A threat by the administration to a TV network to cut off access to briefings in retaliation for asking Laura Bush “a very tough question about abortion.” The Iraqi insurgency’s access to short-range FROG missiles that “can do grievous damage to American troops.” The murder, by an American platoon, of 36 Iraqi guards.
Not one of these exclusives appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, however. Instead, Hersh delivered them in speeches on college campuses and in front of organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and on public-radio shows like “Democracy Now!” In most cases, Hersh attaches a caveat—such as “I’m just talking now, I’m not writing”—before unloading one of his blockbusters, which can send bloggers and reporters scurrying for confirmation.
Every writer understands that there is a gap between the print persona and the actual self, but Hersh subscribes to a bright-line test, a wider chasm than is usually acknowledged, particularly in today’s multimedia age.
There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001.
Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.”
And in bending the truth, Hersh is, paradoxically enough, remarkably candid. When he supplies unconfirmed accounts of military assaults on Iraqi civilians, or changes certain important details from an episode inside Abu Ghraib (thus rendering the story unverifiable), Hersh argues that he’s protecting the identities of sources who could face grave repercussions for talking. “I defend that totally,” Hersh says of the factual fudges he serves up in speeches and lectures. “I find that totally not inconsistent with anything I do professionally. I’m just communicating another reality that I know, that for a lot of reasons having to do with, basically, someone else’s ass, I’m not writing about it.”
Will be back later!
Wait a minute, we're too damned dumb to be that deadly, remember?
There is a statute of Gen. Pershing in Washington, DC, and I often passed by it and marveled at those birth and death dates. Here was a man born during the year of Lincoln's election and who died after World War II.
Imagine all the technological and political events he got to see, from the use of black-powder muskets to the news about the explosion of the first nuclear bomb. Amazing.
Sure they do. What they don't build nearly so often is politicians with the sort of intestinal fortitude of a Teddy Roosevelt.
Preferably *used" TP.
Do a search on his name. His scribblings are treated as gospel by every barking moonbat, and a goodly chunk of the Democratic Party, plus even a RINO or three.
Considering that he was one of the major enablers of that sort of thing, it's not surprising. He even predates "Jingus F'n Kerrey"
That might be true, but dipping our bullets in pig blood, and similar measures, such as putting balloons of pig blood on Israeli buses, get to the soon to be martyr *before* he gets to his "reward". Not much before of course, but every nanosecond counts.
Your right there! Could just go over there with some crop dusters and spray pig's blood over the entire population. That'd take care of that! LOL
Where is this purported video? Do you know? I don't see a link anywhere.
I'd like to lock Mr. Hersh in Mr. Peabody's Way-Back machine and drop him oh...say, the Battle of Gettysburg.
"there has never been an american army as violent and murderous as the one in irag."
sounds like the insurgents are losing and he doesn't like it.
(one wonders what his sc&*b%g number is in the democrat heirarchy of
sc*mb%gs.)
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