Via The Poor Man and Brad DeLong, Ed Cone has an account of Sy Hersh's speech to the ACLU.
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.
Brad says, "Either Sy Hersh has gone completely insane, or the House needs to vote to impeach George W. Bush tonight." There's no evidence that Hersh is insane or otherwise untrustworthy. In any case, we need a vigorous investigation of these allegations.
But of course, we've needed a vigorous investigation for a long time. As soon as we learned of the torture of Iraqis by Americans at Abu Ghraib, we should have dropped everything to ask: "How could this happen?" Instead, we got a party-line vote against subpoenaing the memos on U.S. government torture policy, and White House stonewalling as to where the orders came from. It seems that some people--though I'll hold out hope for John Warner--have decided that Americans torturing innocent Iraqis is no big deal, at least not compared to safeguarding their own party.
And that's true regardless of whether Sy Hersh is insane. Even if he's making everything up, there's no excuse for the failure to investigate it.
Posted by Matt Weiner at July 15, 2004 12:12 PM