Seymour Hersh

29. Back on Top

328 CHAPTER 29 Back on Top “Pictures like That, You Could Die For” Sy Hersh, sixty-seven years old, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld , seventy-two, had been dealing with each other for thirty years. Hersh called him “funny and attractive and witty, seriously good company. You call him, he calls you back. You have a lot of fun. You laugh. He laughs.” And that was despite the fact that in 1975 Rumsfeld, President Ford’s chief of staff, had gone along with suggestions that the FBI consider breaking into Hersh’s house to see if he had copies of stolen secret documents. But no one at the Pentagon cared much about that anymore, Rumsfeld’s spokesman said in 2004. “That’s not the way people are around here,” explained Lawrence Di Rita. “They’re much too busy.” As was Hersh, who was zeroing in on his old enemy. “He doesn’t talk to me any more because I am not on the reservation,” Hersh said. “Everything I do, I have to sneak. I have become a professional sneak.”1 And the sneaking was paying off. In the spring of 2004 someone leaked to Hersh a devastating critique of the war in Afghanistan prepared by a retired colonel. He talked, reluctantly, only because he knew Hersh had independently obtained the report, which, Hersh wrote in the New Yorker, “describes a wide gap between how Donald Rumsfeld represented the war and what was actually taking place.” The Bush administration “has consistently invoked Afghanistan as a success story—an example of the President’s determination.” But the country is still a haven for thousands of al-Qaeda loyalists; Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still on the loose; Afghan’s president has little control outside Kabul; and heroin production is soaring. The victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all. The situation, Hersh asserted, “is deteriorating rapidly.” Quipped Jon Stewart to Hersh about BACK ON TOP 329 his gloomy portraits: “It is a pleasure to talk to Sister Mary Sunshine.”2 Much of the gloom was directed at Rumsfeld. And it soon got worse. Always trawling, Hersh was in Damascus, Syria, in spring 2003 soon after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces. For four days he met with an Iraqi—“a two-star guy from the old regime.” They talked about many things, including prisons, and he told Hersh that some of the women in prisons under U.S. control had asked relatives to come kill them because they had been molested. “I didn’t know whether it was GIs playing grab ass or what, but it was clear that the women had been shamed,” he said. And then Hersh heard about photographs—of other activities. Hersh was a prolific daily reader: Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Al-Jazeera, Der Spiegel, all the London papers. But this information surprised him. Perhaps it should not have. The American press had nibbled at this story for some time. In March 2003, right before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Times’ Carlotta Gall wrote about the homicide of an Afghani prisoner; it was buried on page fourteen. Then, on December 26, 2003, Dana Priest and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post revealed how al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects were often severely beaten to make them talk. Some officials bragged about the treatment. Some suspects were whisked out of the country to secret locations to be tortured. Outside of a few human rights organizations, however, the stories did not cause a stir, as everyone fretted about threats to domestic security. Hersh seemed not to have seen these stories. He kept coming back to the photographs. He knew that when My Lai was revealed, the country was in denial—until photographs surfaced, and no one could deny the massacre.3 And in 2004 a new digital world had dawned. Many soldiers in the Mideast had laptop computers, mostly to watch movies. But it also enabled them to compile and share photographs. At some point a mother in the Northeast contacted Hersh about her married daughter, who returned from the Mideast severely depressed. Hersh met the mother, who said her daughter had left her husband and was covering her body with tattoos , as if to blot out her past. He helped her get counseling, actually the kind of work his wife, Elizabeth, did in Washington. The woman also told Hersh that when using her daughter’s computer...