Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"

The Road to 'Body Baghdad': Why sent your children to war ?

Pullitzer Prize winning and famous journalist Seymour Hersh spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.:

Quote from the transcript - Hersh: "In any case, you know, it's - in this case, these - a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day.

They stopped in the middle and they had lunch.

One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch.

They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars [ the 'economic' drafting - HR], those kind of kids did the killing.

Paul Medlow

One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed.

Kill him, “Plug him,” he said.

When they were sitting having the K rations -- that’s what they called them -- MRE’s now -- the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, “Plug him,” he said.

And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it, so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine.

Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and [Calley] shot him in the back of the head.

The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac’d out.

As he was being medevac’d out, he cursed, and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, “God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too.” - [Hersh - http://tinyurl.com/5zw59 ]

Update of the earlier item on making friends and foes: Like in Iraq, again the whole present situation reminds of this, and looks cursed. In Vietnam at that time it was the same discussion: how to make friends, and win the minds and hearts of the people which the US wanted to conquer.

As in all history, it was shown that it was impossible to make friends by invading, intimidating, shooting, bombing, jailing, torturing, killing, maiming, napalming or other deadly actions.

It showed every time that the only people the US could call their friends were the dead:
because they couldn't protest anymore.

Flying aboard a US B-52 bomber plane up north in Vietnam in 1971, and looking at the huge amount of money represented by all the bombs in the holds, the crew - and we journalists - aboard agreed: if this had been the equivalent in crispy dollar notes to be dropped, the US would have had the best friends in the world among many local populations. Be it in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia or other by the US invaded and bombed countries like now Iraq or Afghanistan.

But - even if we all agreed - flying high and dry above the misery, in the rice paddies, or in the bar of the Caravelle journalists-hotel in Saigon: the US cannon fodder "had no choice" they said.

And it was very scary, not only to see this 'warp' of moral and mental thinking, the loss of human values in the war in Vietnam and the rest of South East Asia, but also later on, when being based in Latin America.

"Befehl ist Befehl" - Orders are orders?

Like seeing the US ordered and organized coup in Chile unfold in the time I lived and worked there. ('72 > July '74) And again seeing that the deadly effect of the "Orders are Orders"-mentality creates a disaster. There was nothing human left in the US mercenaries under the command of General and dictator Augusto Pinochet, and his hated secret service DINA - to 'win hearts and minds': they all became "Dead Friends".

Another better kind of 'Dead Friend' however, was my American colleague Charlie Horman, who can be read, or seen in the very good movie "Missing - Who killed the American?": he also became one of the many victims of the killing spree in Chili, the wholesale murder of people and Allende's democracy - inhuman actions supported by the US government's CIA and Kissinger's crooks.

Among the war crimes Kissinger is responsible for, most people will remember the war in Vietnam and especially the picture of the horrified little Vietnamese girl - running away from her bombed village with her napalm burnt back - http://tinyurl.com/54jaj - a show case of the horror of war, which seems to be forgotten or impossible to imagine for the Washingtonian 'chicken hawks', sending of all the ill-informed soldiers to war, but very seldom they want their own children to take part in it.

The Road to 'Body Baghdad': Why sent your children to war ?

The negative role of the mainstream media - owned by the same multinationals that start and advocate wars - and their media's degenerating and dumbing down effect of all their brainwashing, is clearly shown in the fact that all parents say 'they hate war', but still they all let their children go of to war and it's 'killing fields'.

But, beware: even if their child gets back alive, it will never be 'their child' again.

Again another US war, and based again on lies, fakes and brutal force. Where not the law, but the US-made 'Might makes Right' prevails, resulting in a globally growing and fierce resistance proving that one doesn't make friends by kicking them in the groin or on the shins.

If the Vietnamese girl could have been photographed in a new 'ao dai' - the elegant Vietnamese dress - http://tinyurl.com/63vuj - for instance costing the equivalent of what the napalm burning her life had cost, the story - for all involved - would have been totally different.

So now we all are confronted with the situation, that for the past decade, and more and more fomented by the American murderous 'gun-ship-policy' with it's deadly effects, there's a daily growing hate against the US and it's killing allies, everywhere in the 199 countries surrounding the US.

With the exception of the equally murderous Israeli-Zionist government and it's backers, the US government and their privately owned Federal Bank fraud, run by the 'cabal of zionists' also known as the 'Strauss Junta'.

"We have been taken over by a cult", writes Pullizer Prize winning famous journalist Seymour Hersh about this hair raising development, and - being Jewish himself - he should know what he is talking and writing about. [Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5lrbl]

The US made 'Grapes of Wrath'

Out of a real and justified fear, Americans can travel as fake 'Canadians' to avoid the wrath: the possible revenge and angry reactions of people they have betrayed. ['US-Canadian' - http://tinyurl.com/45574]
The world knows the US is not benevolent but a bully.

The logic of making friends by helping - instead of killing etc. - seems to have been lost in Washington's warmongering circles. Where the zionist neocon 'tail'- with all the brainwashing done via their media conglomerates - not only wags, but apparently also has fully blinded the american 'Dog of War'.

Now mass graves and cemeteries everywhere - like the 550 in the ditches at My Lai - are filled with people which have been killed instead of helped, and the US will never again be regarded as benevolent: the world has seen enough and knows the US is a bully.

On the wellknown web site 'Axis of Logic' - Canadian writer Paul Harris* wrote: "If the US is a nation of Peace Lovers, than help us God.''

And American writer Howard Zinn explained in an eloquent article in the Miami Herald* that the best support for the troops (of all nations - HR) is to bring them home as soon as is possible:

"We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people. It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain.

A recent New York Times editorial sums up the situation accurately: "Some 21 months after the American invasion, United States military forces remain essentially alone in battling what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of decisive success any time in the foreseeable future.''
 
And then, in an extraordinary 'non sequitur', comes one of those incredible warps again: "Given the lack of other countries willing to put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be more American troops, and not just through the spring, as currently planned. . . Forces need to be expanded through stepped-up recruitment."
 
Here is the flawed logic: "We are alone in the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing.
There is no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let's send more troops?"

The definition of fanaticism is, that when you discover that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your speed.
 
But the first step is to support our troops in the only way that word support can have real meaning
- by saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity. By bringing them home." - [end quote]

And every day Washington's neocons proof the saying that:

'Nobody is blinder, than one who does not want to see'.

BLINDEST ARE THE DEAD


Henk Ruyssenaars

APFN - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/3s859 - Foreign Press Foundation +Hersh

IMPORTANT LINKS CONCERNING THE ILLEGAL WAR IN IRAQ

* 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - UN's Kofi Annan/BBC
- Url.: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3661134.stm

* Howard Zinn - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6wmp4 2005 Mi ami Herald

* Canadian writer Paul Harris - US ''Peace Lovers'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/72eyy

* The deplorable US military history - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5sa2c

* Transcript: Condoleezza Rice on 'Fox News Sunday' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6jgsx

* Hollow Election Held on Bloody Day - Inter Press Service* Dahr Jamail in Baghdad
- Url.: http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/

* Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark Calls For Bush Impeachment
- Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6rcwc

* ''The Lancet'' and the ''Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health''
- ''Over 100.000 killed in the illegal Iraq war'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5gys7

* Bush interv. ABC: No WMD's - many killed: "It was worth it". - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6bal9

* Former Secr. of State Madeleine Albright in her comment on half a milli on dead children in Iraq:
"We think it's worth it" On CBS 60' Minutes - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/2vmc8

* Iraq Body Count - Url.: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

* A crime against humanity is an act of persecution against a group, so heinous as to warrant
punishment under international law: Please scroll - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6rphj

* Gore Vidal on our bleak future - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/4ydyz

* Latest international 'Google News' on the fake election and the violence in Iraq
- Url.: http://tinyurl.com/6qj8q

* Former PM Kok and other Dutch government's war criminals heard in Court
- Url: http://tinyurl.com/662pp - It can be done!

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
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Editor : Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/5uvtv
The Netherlands
FPF@Chell o.nl

The Dutch author has this far worked abroad for 4 decades for international media, as a foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East.

Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism ! ( Former) US Senator Holdings agrees: http://tinyurl.com/2ylmv

Evil triumphs when good men, women and we journalists remain silent: - http://tinyurl.com/3tgqa - Let's fight today, because tomorrow it may be too late...

Help the troops come home ! Url.:http://tinyurl.com/3o6tr - We need them badly to fight our 'governments': http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

HR

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