May It Not Be True

From Ed Cone, here's a summary of a new speech by Seymour Hersh containing credible allegations of war crimes too troubling for words:

Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher." [...]

Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq.

"The disaffecion inside the Pentagon is extremeley accute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear." [...]

Hersh described the folks in charge of US policy as "neoconservative cultists" who have taken the government over, and show "how fragile our democracy is."

May the stories of videotaped child rape not be true. But if it does turn out to be true, it seems to me that Congress should initiate impeachment proceedings right away. Period.

[See previous posts: To Right These Wrongs; Lost in Abu Ghraib; A Buddhist Perspective on Abu Ghraib; and American Heartland of Darkness]