Seymour Hersh just won’t shut up (thankfully)

Hersh, the man who exposed My Lai and chronicled Abu Ghraib, stepped up to the mike again on July 7th at the 2004 ACLU Membership Conference. He talked about the press, about the neo-con cabal running the government, and about Abu Ghraib. But where the first two subjects have already been discussed at length, what he had to say about the prison scandal was almost as shocking as the way it has been ignored by the media. "There are women there … passing messages out [to their men] saying 'Please come and kill me.'" said Hersh (Watch the speech here.) He referred to videos depicting the "abuses" that led these women to long for their deaths: "Those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking." The Independent, of London, is the only major paper Lexis-Nexis can find that has reported on Hersh's allegations, weighing in with a 5-paragraph article today on page 24. That the media are ignoring Hersh's charge that "The government knows it's much worse," seems an echo of what happened two months ago, when the Pentagon presented still-unreleased videos and photographs of the depravities to appalled members of Congress. Describing the experience, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) said, ""It felt like you were descending into the rings of hell, and it was of our own creation." Then, as now, the cowed mainstream media refused to run with the story. Apparently, politicians having sex with their own wives is news worthy of expensive investigations, but when it comes to US soldiers committing some of the foulest atrocities imaginable, discretion is the better part of docility.