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Seymour Hersh’s new book “Chain of Command” has caused quite an uproar so far.
Though, coming from a reputable reporter none of the allegations can be taken lightly. Seymour Hersh, in case anyone is unfamiliar with the name, exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the cover up (winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1970). Lately, he exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in The New Yorker magazine, once again rocking the boat. “Chain of Command” deals with the White House’s drive to attack Iraq and the events of the prison scandal.
It’s a meaty book and I’m not in the business of reviewing books but one thing in particular is worth mentioning, because as it says, the events “attracted little attention outside of Sweden”:
The seizure of Agiza and Zery attracted little attention outside of Sweden, despite repeated complaints by human-rights groups, until May 2004 when a Swedish television news magazine revealed that the Swedish government had cooperated after being assured that the exiles would not be tortured or otherwise harmed once they were sent to Egypt. Instead, according to a television report, entitled The Broken Promise, Agiza and Zery, in handcuffs and shackles, were driven to the airport by Swedish and, according to one witness, American agents and turned over at plane-side to a group of Americans wearing plain clothes whose faces were concealed. Once in Egypt, Agiza and Zery have reported through Swedish diplomats, family members and attorneys, that they were subjected to repeated torture by electrical shocks distributed by electrodes that were attached to the most sensitive parts of their bodies. Egyptian authorities eventually concluded, according to the documentary, that Zery had few ties to ongoing terrorism, and he was released from jail in October 2003, although he is still under surveillance. Agiza was acknowledged by his attorneys to have been a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group outlawed in Egypt, and also was once close to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is outranked in al-Qaida only by Osama bin Laden. In April 2004, he was sentenced to 25 years in an Egyptian prison.
The latest take on this is that the group involved in the kidnapping was not some makeshift unit but rather a well trained and permanent solution made up of special forces personnel. One could have guessed that the rather brusk treatment of the two Egyptians was a result of a green force at work on unfamiliar ground, but now it is more likely that they were doing exactly what they were meant to do AND that they keep doing it elsewhere, without the world’s insight. Now, isn’t that a nice thought to warm you for the winter? Semi-rogue Black Ops running across borders like it’s 1984.
As for the rest of the book, one could go on forever. But I’m not going to, because I haven’t read the entire book, and many of the incidents are well documented and debated elsewhere on the web.
Of course, one can imagine the US of today is not a place for Whistleblowers and Dissenters. Yet, to anyone interested in fairness and getting to the truth, Seymour Hersh is a hero. And probably the only one in this story.
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