Torture in the gulag: How bad is it really?

I'm going to be away for three weeks soon, and my pre-departure posting time is getting limited.  I'll be doing some updates in my time away, but not daily.  But through Thursday, I'll still be posting links to items I think are noteworthy.  But my comments may be limited.

Economist Brad DeLong has posted an account (06/10/04) by author Rick Pearlstein of a speech given by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh at the University of Chicago.  That sounds like a rumor chain the way I said it.  But it's a first-person account by Pearlstein of Hersh's speech.  The whole thing is well worth reading.  The final paragraphs of Pearlstein's account reproduced by DeLong are grim reading:

And this was one of the most stunning parts. He had just returned from Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it.... He lamented of his journalistic colleagues, "I don't know whey they don't just tell it like it is."...

He said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were the military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.... He talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with their superiors)....

He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. "When these guys memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."...

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He looked frightened.

Remember, Hersh is the war correspondent who exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.  He's done some of the best investigative reporting on the Afghan and Iraq War.  When a jaded war correspondent like him says, "You haven't begun to see evil," it makes my blood run cold.

Torturing children in front of their mothers?  My gut response to this report, on top of all the other things we know about the gulag, is the same as DeLong's:  "Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than the close of business today."