Dear friends

These reports on the escalating war in Iraq should be read by all Americans. Please share them as far and as wide as you can. jamie

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New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh blast Bush over Iraqi war

The Associated Press
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Europe is set to become a collective violent block against the United States, if the war against Iraq continues, investigative reporter and New Yorker writer Seymour M. Hersh said at a talk Friday night at the University of California, Berkeley

Dear friends,

These reports on the escalating war in Iraq should be read by all Americans. Please share them as far and as wide as you can. jamie

-----

New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh blasts Bush over Iraqi war

The Associated Press
BERKELEY, Calif. -- Europe is set to become a collective violent block against the United States, if the war against Iraq continues, investigative reporter and New Yorker writer Seymour M. Hersh said at a talk Friday night at the University of California, Berkeley.

Speaking to KQED Radio talk-show host Michael Krasny, Hersh lambasted the Bush administration for the war in Iraq and for making "us all more vulnerable."

"If Bush is re-elected, he has one thing to do. He will bomb the hell out of the place," Hersh said. "We are basically in a full-scale air war against mythical people. We have no intelligence. We bomb what we see."

Hersh, best known for breaking the My Lai massacre story in Vietnam and his coverage of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, was speaking at a discussion on "Resisting Government Secrecy in a Time of Terrorism," organized by the California First Amendment Coalition and the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

It is part of a two-day conference on government secrecy.

Speaking about how U.S. intelligence failed to penetrate the insurgency in Iraq, Hersh said sources indicated that "the war in Iraq is done, the insurgency has won the war."

Referring to the Iraq invasion as "a war of ideology," Hersh said, "The real serious problem is that he (Bush) believes what he's doing. He sees himself as the guy in the white hat. He sees himself as virtuous."

He said Bush entered the war thinking that democracy in Iraq would spread through Iran and Syria and that oil and Israel would be safer.

"The overwhelming idea was the utopian idea of spreading democracy," Hersh said.

But the war and the Abu Ghraib prison fiasco has let the Arab world fuming.

The treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was a government plan to blackmail Iraqi prisoners into helping find insurgents, Hersh said. The idea, he said, was to play on the Iraqi's sense of shame by photographing them nude and threatening to circulate the photographs if they did not help pin down insurgents.

The Bush administration received pictures of prisoner abuse in mid-January and the government did nothing for four months until the story became public in late April, Hersh said.
Last modified: October 09. 2004 2:30AM


U.S Company Recruits Salvadorans For Security Jobs In Iraq
Last Updated: 10/8/2004 2:29:47 PM

For many Salvadorans, the newspaper ad seemed too good to be true: A U.S. company willing to pay experienced security guards a minimum of $1,700 a month to work outside the country. Never mind that it was Iraq.

Hundreds showed up for the interview, and few were dissuaded by the prospect of working in a nation now infamous for beheadings of foreigners by terrorist groups.

"No one lives forever," said Saturnino Hernandez Castilian, 40, the father of four children. "God says how far I am going to get. We may die here or we may die there. If we survive we are going to benefit. If we die, our family will be OK."

The company provides insurance, so if the guards are wounded or killed, their relatives will be taken care of.

Many of Iraq's recent victims have been private contractors from poor nations, lured by high wages. But as violence increases in Iraq and nations like Bulgaria and the Philippines urge their citizens to avoid working there, private contractors are looking toward some Latin American countries, where kidnappings are common and war is nothing new.

Triple Canopy, a Lincolnshire, Ill., company that specializes in security services for U.S. civilian administrators in Iraq, turned to El Salvador in part because of its military history, company spokesman Joe Mayo said Friday.

The company also stopped recruiting in the Philippines and needed a new site, Mayo said. El Salvador, the only Latin American country with troops still in Iraq, was attractive.

"El Salvador is still a coalition partner in Iraq, and we respect that," Mayo said. Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic had earlier sent troops to Iraq but pulled them out.

Private contractors have tapped other Latin American nations, including Colombia and Chile.

Triple Canopy was looking for recruits with military special forces experience, something relatively easy to find in a country that suffered 12 years of civil war, which ended in 1992.

The man who arranged the job interviews in El Salvador is a U.S.-trained former paratrooper and officer of the Salvadoran special forces during the country's civil war.

He is a partner in a Salvadoran security company and agreed to talk to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because his company isn't directly involved in the recruiting and because of local controversy about Salvadoran troops in Iraq.

He said 100 recruits left on Sept. 17 and another small group is training to leave soon. Competition for the jobs was fierce, and many of the hundreds not chosen were angry and phoned recruiters to ask why.

The new recruits could be targets in Iraq, where 380 Salvadoran troops are helping the coalition with reconstruction work. The government was concerned enough by threats posted on radical Islamic Web sites that it announced tighter security at airports and borders in August.

While all Salvadorans know the dangers of Iraq, for many the risk is overcome by the $1,700 a month salary and the free food, housing and uniforms.

Bodyguards in El Salvador make about $350 a month, and thousands of Salvadorans risk their lives every year traveling north through Guatemala and Mexico to cross illegally into the United States, in hopes of a better life.

The AP talked to eight men, all of whom served in the Salvadoran armed forces during the war and were from a small, poor farming community called El Cambio, 25 miles northwest of San Salvador. They range in age from 34 to 49 years old.

Castilian and the other men are headed first to Jordan for training before moving on to Iraq. They said they knew the risks but that the benefits were too good to pass up. The work contract is for six months and may be renewed after the employee returns to his country for a rest period.

The Salvadorans will be working on site security, Mayo said.

"They've got the right background for the type of work we are doing," he said.

Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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