Brad reports on a Sy Hersh speech at U.Chicago in Torture and Rumors of Torture.
We're heavy into hearsay territory here, but if this is really true, we haven't hit bottom yet:
Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. “When these guys memoirs come out, it will shock all of us.”…
He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, “You haven't begun to see evil…” then trailed off. He said, “horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”
He looked frightened.
At some point, we run out of new horrors, don't we? Please?
(And at some point, Real Soon Now, mass revulsion takes over, right?)
We are indeed far into hearsay territory. But Seymour Hersh is not without credibility–he has been misled by sources in the past, but what he says he has seen, he has seen.
I trust Hersh as a good reporter. But when the chain of hearsay includes an anonymous correspondent writing down what he thinks Hersh said in a speech, I’m just a little more cautious…
If these horrible allegations are indeed true, it will be interesting to watch the reaction from the White House. Rove and Bush will be confronted with a tough choice; ride it out and hope that the electorate will lapse into amnesia by November, or engage in a serious housecleaning of the entire national security apparatus.
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