Get Everybody Out By Midnight

In an interview for Der Spiegel, Seymour Hersh discusses how the surge means the president has accepted, and could care less about, ethnic cleansing in Iraq, the capacity of Americans to "Hitlerize" people, and the coming attack on Iran, about which he bitterly remarks, "you'd think that in this country with so many smart people, that we can't possibly do the same dumb thing again." This same sentiment was voiced by Studs Terkel in the pages of In These Times exactly four years ago: "One of the things that keeps people from doing what they know they should do for their own good is the national Alzheimer’s disease. There is no memory of the past. There is no yesterday…" Considering we're still mired in the Iraq disaster, it seems this needs some amending, it seems in America there is no NOW. Hersh, whose tenacious and unflinching muckraking brought us reports on the My Lai massacre, the torture at Abu Ghraib, and more recently, CIA black sites and the Bush Administration's Iran War machinations, was interviewed on the occasion of his visit to Berlin this week to accept the Democracy Prize handed out by the political journal Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik. Read the full interview here. UPDATE: Hersh has a new piece in The New Yorker on the craven, obdurate efforts of the Bush Administration to reframe and thus sell their Iran plans more effectively. Hersh reports that the term they're using now to describe their hellbent intent to attack is "surgical strikes," a clever little name evoking palliative action, a benign operation by trained professionals to save lives. However they want to spin it, frame it, tinker with their words, bottom line is the "psychopathic personalities," (as Vonnegut dubbed them), running our country are talking about the blowing apart of bodies by bombs. Also, read Scott Ritter's piece on why, in light of Bush's Iran-War-myopia, Iraq Will Have To Wait. And Cockburn talks with Chomsky who believes they'll bomb the country to rubble."