Mr. Hersh goes to war

[Robbien]

BY TIM MADIGAN

Knight Ridder Newspapers

. . .


"Look, obviously the prisoner abuse scandal had been going on for months in Iraq and there were some dedicated and patriotic people within the Pentagon who just thought it sucked, but they weren't getting anywhere. That (Taguba) report just didn't fall out of the sky. Somebody in the Pentagon finally realized, `Oh, yeah, there's Hersh.'"

. . .

The downtown Washington boardroom of the Center for Public Integrity is crowded by the time Hersh charges in, carrying his tennis racket. Most of the young investigative reporting interns seated around the table are clearly star-struck by the 6-foot man in the rumpled blue suit who's telling them that the government "has been taken over by a cult of eight or nine neocons without a peep from the press."

Hersh makes clear that if he doesn't have an agenda, he has plenty of opinions about the Bush administration. Hersh calls the Bush White House the most secretive administration he's ever encountered. For the first time, Hersh says, he has no highly placed White House source with whom he can check his stories.

"Why do you think I'm here?" Hersh says, grabbing his tennis racket and moving toward the door. "It's my country as much as it is George Bush's. I will not abdicate. I think I'm a better American than 99 percent of the guys in the White House."

. . .

"Let me tell you what I say to all my friends," Hersh says as he charges back down the street. "My youngest (child) is 23, my oldest is 36. This is about them. What right do we have to put them in a permanent war with people who are crazy? Here we have 9-11, and the whole Muslim world, 99 percent of them, even the true believers were horrified and said, `What can we do to help you?' And these nuts drove them away," Hersh says. "These ideologues drove them away. How can you live with people like that?"

http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/politics/9214769.htm

A long, but very interesting read.