A heads-up: Seymour Hersh interview on BBC radio in 30mins

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

ish -- interview promised after 2, so that could be anywhere in the hour. I'll kick this up when he's on, but thought I'd give plenty advance warning.

To listen, click

http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/

then follow the 'listen live' link.

[Political_Junkie]

1. Thanks, Monkey

Love Seymour Hersh!

[Tatiana]

2. Thanks for the heads up! n/t

[seemslikeadream]

3. Wow Thanks

Should be very interesting.

[Bozita]

4. Wonk, are you there?

[Hubert Flottz]

5. Thanks I'm tuned in!

Will bookmark!

[Bozita]

6. Can someone record this? I can't stream BBC

[Tatiana]

7. I think it's coming up n/t

[nostamj]

8. wow! home just in time

thanks for the heads up and link!

hersh is hot right now

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

9. HERSH ON NOW nt

[Political_Junkie]

10. I can't believe she asked if this was credible.

[Junkdrawer]

15. "Incendiary, Are we to believe OUR troops would really do these things"..

Again and again it's the "if it's too disturbing to think about, it's not true" defense.

[Tatiana]

11. Somebody told those soldiers what to do.

Someone up higher.

Are we really to believe this is what coalition forces are engaged in?

Hersh says there are three separate reports. Highest command knew things were out of control back in September. Minimum nine months of high level knowledge of these types of things going on. Most of these prisoners are just people picked up randomly. They are civilians who have not be adjudicated.

[Tatiana]

12. Photos and videos of abuse.

More than 50 other incidents photographed. Purpose was to humiliate prisoners before interrogations. Prisons run by intelligence service. Turned into Guantanamo.

[Political_Junkie]

13. I'll say it again

Love Seymour Hersh!

[Bozita]

14. link to Hersh's "New Yorker" article on TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040510fa_fact


TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?

Issue of 2004-05-10
Posted 2004-04-30


In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.

In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.

Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.

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