"Let's all forget this word 'insurgency'. It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the very people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that we started fighting - they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because we won.
We took Baghdad because they pulled back, and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting." and
". . . the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside - the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people - serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been 'diminish the agency.' I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power." and, much like the almost secret bombing of Iraq by Britain and the United States that took place in the years of the 'no-fly zones', an amazing revelation hidden by the fact that the journalists in Iraq who are supposed to be covering the war are cowering under their beds in their hotel rooms (my emphasis):
"Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq - some of you remember Vietnam - Iraq is being turn into a 'free-fire zone' right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people - I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said, 'Welcome to Stalingrad.' We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it."
and, after comparing My Lai to Abu Ghraib, and a discussion of the effect of the brutality on the soldiers, and all the horribly wounded Americans, and the fact that those in the military are going to start to question what is going on in Iraq:
"Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe - Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody - it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit - our - we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're going to have some very bad months ahead."
Solid predictions. Do you want to believe the warmongers, who say that everything is just swell, or Hersh, who puts it on the line with some clear predictions? Who is your money on? There's more content in this little interview than you would get if you read every word in the disgusting American press for the last four years. You can tie the new cult neatly into the real problem with Gonzales as attorney general, that Gonzales gave Bush a legal opinion essentially saying that Bush was bound by no law in doing what he wanted to do. As Tom Engelhardt writes:
". . . the legal theory that first came to light in the 'torture memos' that emerged from the White House Legal Counsel's office - that, in his role as commander-in-chief in 'wartime,' the President was essentially unfettered by Congress or the courts and could act as he wished - turns out to reach way beyond the issue of torture. Yes, Rumsfeld's Pentagon had trumped the CIA and was once again expanding its turf. It was now to be the armed intelligence and diplomatic spearhead of an ever-more militarized government; but at least as important was the urge that lurked behind this development - to free the President of all accountability, all democratic fetters, all those balancing powers so familiar to high-school students in any civics class. What this represents is a strikingly expansive imperial definition of 'freedom."
We took Baghdad because they pulled back, and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting." and
". . . the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside - the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people - serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been 'diminish the agency.' I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power." and, much like the almost secret bombing of Iraq by Britain and the United States that took place in the years of the 'no-fly zones', an amazing revelation hidden by the fact that the journalists in Iraq who are supposed to be covering the war are cowering under their beds in their hotel rooms (my emphasis):
"Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq - some of you remember Vietnam - Iraq is being turn into a 'free-fire zone' right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people - I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he said, 'Welcome to Stalingrad.' We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it."
and, after comparing My Lai to Abu Ghraib, and a discussion of the effect of the brutality on the soldiers, and all the horribly wounded Americans, and the fact that those in the military are going to start to question what is going on in Iraq:
"Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe - Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody - it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit - our - we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he's going to do between then and now is enormous. We're going to have some very bad months ahead."
Solid predictions. Do you want to believe the warmongers, who say that everything is just swell, or Hersh, who puts it on the line with some clear predictions? Who is your money on? There's more content in this little interview than you would get if you read every word in the disgusting American press for the last four years. You can tie the new cult neatly into the real problem with Gonzales as attorney general, that Gonzales gave Bush a legal opinion essentially saying that Bush was bound by no law in doing what he wanted to do. As Tom Engelhardt writes:
". . . the legal theory that first came to light in the 'torture memos' that emerged from the White House Legal Counsel's office - that, in his role as commander-in-chief in 'wartime,' the President was essentially unfettered by Congress or the courts and could act as he wished - turns out to reach way beyond the issue of torture. Yes, Rumsfeld's Pentagon had trumped the CIA and was once again expanding its turf. It was now to be the armed intelligence and diplomatic spearhead of an ever-more militarized government; but at least as important was the urge that lurked behind this development - to free the President of all accountability, all democratic fetters, all those balancing powers so familiar to high-school students in any civics class. What this represents is a strikingly expansive imperial definition of 'freedom."
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