Hersh, whose New Yorker article “Up In The Air” is rippling across the blogosphere (but not in the MSM — [editor’s note, by susanhu] Crooks & Liars has video of Hersh on the Today show, and Hersh just appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball), is of course employing irony when he describes Bushco’s view that “the world’s our playpen.”


In his powerful essay, “Cheney’s history needs a revise,” in the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten condemned “the linguistic evasions of our home-grown torturers, their accomplices and apologists” — specifically targetting Vice President Cheney and Porter Goss, the director of the CIA.

(And in that list I’ll include Donald Rumsfeld, who’s on my teevee set as I write this and who denies there are “roving death squads” in Iraq. See E&P’s “Journalists Report Evidence of Hundreds of Sunnis Executed in Iraq,” via Howie in Seattle.)

CIA’s Goss … told USA Today: “This agency does not torture. We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information, and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture.”


Fortunately, some of the people forced to work for Goss have consciences stronger than their stomachs. The interrogation techniques they described to ABC News don’t sound particularly “innovative or unique,” though they do sound exactly like torture …

Tim Rutten‘s column, L.A. Times, Nov. 26, 2005


“[C]onsciences stronger than their stomachs” … that’s why former CIA employees like Larry Johnson are vocal about condemning torture.

Sy Hersh described these consciences today to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!. First, a bit of background. At the conclusion of his New Yorker piece, Hersh wrote:

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.”

(From the reprint at Uruknet)


I searched Google News for any reference to these S.M.U.s, and found nothing except for three links to Hersh’s own article. Amy Goodman is the first journalist to ask Hersh about these units:

AMY GOODMAN: Last question, and that has to do with your last section of your piece on this composite American Special Forces team, known as the S.M.U., special mission unit, in Syria.


SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, there’s more than one. There’s many of them. You know, there’s more than a handful of these units. Some are in Syria, some are other places. These are combined teams that have been set up, so not any one service isn’t involved. And I think, you know, obviously we think that this government believes that when it comes to a high-value target, you know, a potential al-Qaeda or believed al-Qaeda target, we can do anything we want anywhere in the world.

And the world’s our playpen.


Then Hersh talks about how the intelligence community feels about these operations:

HERSH: And I can tell you right now, inside the American intelligence community, and I’m talking about high up in the community, there’s a great deal of concern about these kind of operations, because our troop go in and do what they do to people they think are Iraqis — I mean, al-Qaeda. And it’s very rough. And they don’t clear it with either the State Department or the ambassador in the country or the C.I.A. chief of station. It’s a formula for chaos. And it’s going on now. And it’s been going on for quite a while, many months. And it’s a new sort of step-up in the war. And Congress? Do they want to know? I don’t think so.


AMY GOODMAN: And the S.M.U.s, where else are they? The special mission units?


SEYMOUR HERSH: In places where we think there’s – you know, certainly in Iraq, and other places in the world where we think they can do some good. …


I gasped as Hersh kept talking. And so will you. Below the fold, there’s worse that is yet to come, and which we U.S. citizens (and world citizens) will have to brace ourselves for:


Really. Brace yourselves:

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, do you believe that the secret prisons are in Romania and Poland, as Human Rights Watch believes, that the Washington Post won’t name, but exposed?


SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, Amy, I’m actually doing some more work on it. But I will tell you this, the C.I.A. prisons are there. There have been prisons, the C.I.A. has run prisons for many, many years around the world. And I’m sure terrible things happen. But that’s actually not where the real game is. They’re somewhere else.


AMY GOODMAN: Where?


SEYMOUR HERSH: Other places. I’m — let me do my reporting, and I promise I’ll publish it, and I promise I’ll come and talk to you about it.


AMY GOODMAN: Okay, well, Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you for being with us. His latest piece is in The New Yorker magazine; it is called “Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next?” Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, thanks for being with us.




The real game?


What in the name of god does that mean?


Sy Hersh must write this next story. I hope he can. I pray the New Yorker lets him. They already held him back on the Abu Ghraib story. Let’s see if they come through this next time.


And, don’t miss the entire interview at Democracy Now! where you can watch, listen or read the transcript. (I always prefer to listen, especially to Sy Hersh, because he has a great voice to match his reporting skills.)




______________________________


P.S. About those death squads that Rumsfeld is pshawwing about, Hersh writes:

The fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would inevitably trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas, that war has, in a sense, already begun, and the United States military is being drawn into the sectarian violence. An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were “rounding up any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them.” The officer went on, “They were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shiites,” with the active participation of a militia unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier. “People like me have gotten so downhearted,” the officer added.