19th Jul 2004
ACLU 2004 Membership Conference
I just watched/listened to all two-plus hours of the gala dinner presentation for the 2004 Membership Conference in San Francisco (Real Video file), which took place last week. Speakers included comedian Sandra Tsing Loh, railing against public radio for an incident in which she was fired for a misunderstanding involving the word Fuck, independent filmmaker John Sayles, who has a new political film coming out soon that got an extended preview at the event, commedian Greg Proops and, most notably, Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker investigative journalist who broke both the story of the My Lai massecre in Vietnam back in 1969 and the Abu Ghraib torture abuse scandal in Iraq earlier this year.
Most remarkably, Hersh (who starts roughly 1 hour 8 minutes into the clip) claims to have seen videos the US military took in the prison of children being raped. From Daily Kos’s partial transcript:
Some of the worse that happened that you don’t know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad [...]The women were passing messages saying “Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened”. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.
Presumably, Hersh going to report about this in an upcoming issue of the New Yorker. This story has been floating around the Net and the international press for weeks now (fucking Aljazeera has scooped the US press with it by now) — when the hell is the NY Times or NPR going to decide this is newsworthy already?
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De-italicize already!
Seriously, though, on topic and not related to proofreading, we should assume there is some terrible nastiness on whatever kind of evidence was shown in closed session.
It is my belief that in the absence of information, people tend to insinuate negatively. It would have been better to get this over with at one time, rather than face the possibility of the inevitable leaks in dribs and drabs.
Like what we saw that was released wasn’t bad enough.
Marc Racicot for GOP VP?
I just read the angriest boil update. Phew! Am I relieved.
So, Pablo, how’s that hunt for a girlfriend coming?