The link I posted above - I've only listened to it now, and transcribed it. (Warning: Hersh hardly ever utters a complete sentence, he trails off all the time, so you'll be better off listening to him than reading my transcript.) The thing is, in the video he doesn't say any of the things we know he's supposed to have said. His speech cuts off at some point and another speaker is introduced. I can't say if the video has been edited, or if it's a different speech, or what. Anyway, here's the transcript. I've omitted most of his 'uhs' and aborted sentence fragments. Paragraph breaks are totally arbitrary, since he makes none as he speaks :)
We don't know - I'll tell you right now - the reason I'm saying all that is, what happened in Abu Ghraib, I can just tell you this and I've got to do the reporting on this and you've got to wait for me to do it. But it's not about an academic debate in long essays between the Justice Department and the White House, legal essays about where the Geneva Convention ends and the presidential prerogative begins. What we had was a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and vice-president... {applause} by this administration anyway, I can say that. I can't say who did it, but the only way to look at this is as war crimes. What happened were war crimes. {applause} I'm not saying it's there yet. It's not there yet but that's where it has to go. We have to stop looking at it as a some sort of an academic debate about the Geneva Convention and really begin to look at it in terms of who did what, who died, why did he die? Are there people missing, are we doing what the Brazilians and Argentineans did back two or three decades ago - actually into this decade. Are we disappearing people? Are there people being tortured knowingly in advance that the torture was gonna put their lives in peril, and is nothing being done to relieve their suffering and to the point that they die? Is there 'mens rea,' is there guilty knowledge? Is it a crime? And we're gonna get there, because I think that's where it sort of is ineluctably going, (...) on and on and on.
We're not there yet and I'm not sure - I'm not telling you whether I can take it there. I'm just telling you that that's the way you have to look at it. And so... you know, I'll tell you what an Israeli told me. And the Israelis are, you know, a very tough, hard-nosed Israeli told me at one point about all this. He said: 'You know, we hate the Arabs.' This is a guy who spent his career in the intelligence service. You know, his hands are bloody. He said, 'We hate the Arabs, and the Arabs hate us. Before 1948, we've been killing Arabs and they've been killing us, but I have to tell you something,' he said, 'we know somewhere down the line we're gonna have to live with these people as much as we can't stand them. They're gonna have to be our neighbors. And if we had done in our prisons to the Arabs what you've done to the Arabs in your prisons, we couldn't live that way.'
And so the bottom line is, we have started something we don't know the end of. The bottom line is about this treatment, and as more details come out... And I can tell you, it was much worse, and the government knows it's much worse. They've even told you, there's worse photos, worse videotapes, worse events. To the New Yorker's credit, we decided - not for censorship, but just because how much can you levy on Arab manhood in public - but Arabs, I will tell you, it's not just the radicals. And we all know, how this policy, this administration's policy, in Afghanistan too, and also of course in Iraq, has really done, has acted contrary to what they said they were gonna do, they haven't ended the war on terrorism, they've expanded it, it's totally clear. But Arabs now, moderate Arabs, Arabs that normally would be doing the kind of, as you know the overwhelming, vastly overwhelming percentage of moderate Arabs deplored what happened to this country on 9-11 as much as anybody here. But those Arabs we've lost. They see us as a sexually perverse society. The sexual stuff we did to them is seen as just perversion. And I think we're gonna have consequences for a long time to come. There's an awful lot of respect in the Arab world for Americans. I travel there all the time and America - Jews even, it's... I wouldn't walk around Baghdad, but most of the world is very safe. We have a lot of problems. So rather than deal with the obvious stuff about Bush and this election and what it means, I think the real question we have to answer - this is the question I don't have any answer to - my friend Dan Ellsberg would say 'heuristic', I have some heuristic thoughts about it. He's a great expert in heurism {laughter}.
And um, the question we have to say to ourselves is, okay, so here's what happens. A bunch of guys, eight or nine neo-conservatives, cultists... not Charles Manson cultists but cultists, get in, and it's not - with all due respect to Michael Moore, his movie's fine, but it's not about oil, it's not even about protecting Israel, it's about the utopia they have, it's about an idea they have. Not only about that democracy can be spread, in a sense, I would say Paul Wolfowitz is the greatest Trotskyite of our time. He believes in a permanent revolution. And in the Middle East to begin, needless to say. And so you have a bunch of people who for 10-12 years have been fantasizing, since the 1991 Gulf War, on the way to resolve problems. And of course there will be beneficiaries. Israel will be a beneficiary, etcetera. But the world in their eyes is a utopia. And so they got together this small group of cultists. And how do they do it? They did do it. They've taken the government over. And what's amazing to me and what really is troubling, is how fragile our democracy is. Look what happened to us. We all heard tonight, all of our speakers, indirectly and directly, certainly in the Sales (sp?) movie about the press, how it's... John Sales used the word censorship, it's the beacon word, what I was thinking comes more from the corporate mentality out there, but there's also a tremendous amount of self-censorship among the press. It's like a disease. But also, they not only - they took away the edge from the press, they also muzzled the bureaucracy, they muzzled the military, they muzzled the Congress. It's an amazing feat. We're supposed to be a democratic society, and all of those areas of our democracy bowed and (scraped?) to this group of neo-cons, who advocated a policy... We all know the story of how mad they got at General Shinseki, who I think is gonna run for the Senate in Hawaii (...), he's a great general. The important thing about Shinseki to me, and this is just if a heuristic, I don't KNOW this. The important thing about Shinseki is this: he testifies before the gulf war, we're gonna (end with?) a couple hundred thousand troops, and everybody, Wolfowitz and the others - I count Wolfowitz, I lead with him, because he's sort of the, he's the genius in the background, he's the man with uh, very articulate, very persuasive. And so Shinseki testifies, we're gonna need a couple hundred thousand, and everybody's mad and it's about two weeks before the war. It made sense, everybody said. They were mad because he's talking about numbers that these guys say you won't need, they're gonna go and invade Iraq and, you know the story, we'll be greeted with flowers, that stuff, we all know the story. But it wasn't that. Their complaint with Shinseki was really much more interesting. It was: Didn't he get it? Didn't he know what we were talking about in the (???) with the JCS and the generals. Didn't he get it? We can do it with five thousand troops, we have to make these bargains with these crazy Clintonized generals! - I'm talking like Rummy, Rumsfeld would talk {laughter}. These soft generals, literally - these Clintonized generals. Didn't Shinseki get it, doesn't he understand what we're doing here?! We did it in Afghanistan, we're gonna do it in Iraq. Some special forces, some bombing, we're gonna take it over. It's gonna be like this. HE DIDN'T GET IT - that was the problem, that's why they had to weed him out. He wasn't on the team.
So we have a government that's basically been operating since 9-11 very successfully on the principle that if you're with us, you're a genius. If you're against us, you're not just loyal opposition, you're a traitor.
http://stream.realimpact.net/?file=clients/aclu/conf2004/20040707_aclu_AmericaAtACrossroads_300.rm&start=1:07:51
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