Taking the war to Mr President

Hersh?s book makes clear that torture of POWs was based on a book saying the Arab male weakness was sexual humiliation.

Chain of Command
The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
Seymour Hersh
HarperCollins
2004
Pages: 416
Price: $ 20.00
ISBN: 0713998458
Hardcover

In all likelihood, the images from Abu Ghraib will play a major motivational role in the next few years of the war between the US and radical Islam. Months after the initial impact of the photos (and those unreleased) it is still a wonder how things spun out of control. But then, going by Seymour Hersh's latest book, it appears the torture wasn’t an aberration; rather, it was willful retribution provoked by the shock of 9/11. George W. Bush took Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to heart and decided he would wage torture against terror.

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Seymour Hersh was, along with CBS news, the first to break the Iraqi prison scandal. His book is more than just an expansion on his pieces for The New Yorker that draws a line from 9/11 to America's political failure in Iraq. (Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Hersh tells us, has already told US Vice-President Dick Cheney “the only issue ‘was choosing the size of your humiliation’”).

It doesn't just talk about how the obsession with Iraq took the focus off the real war in Afghanistan. It also talks about the focus being lost on the actual WMD problem in Pakistan, North Korea and Iran (which will go nuclear, a CIA official says, “even if Thomas Jefferson became president”). It also looks at the looming problem of Saudi Arabia, where a squabbling corrupt royal family may be unable to prevent a terrorist attack that would drive up the global oil price to $100 a barrel.

The only journalist in the world comparable to Hersh is Bob Woodward. Hersh, an investigative reporter who made a name with his expose of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, includes a book on the Israeli nuclear programme in his resume. The only time Woodward beat him was Watergate, but since then, Woodward has become a sort of official Washington biographer. Hersh, on the other hand, remains content to ferret out dirt, relying on his varied contacts throughout every branch of the intelligence community, the armed forces and the diplomatic corps. To a fellow reporter, he is awesome.