corrente

You ever get the feeling they've trained us TOO well? What, I kept wondering, was going to be so explosive they had to run the "Fontgate" play right now to get everybody all hot and bothered and occupy the gasbags on Sunday morning?

Seymour Hersh's book comes out Monday.

Don't even bother with this miserable excuse of a "story" (via ho-hum NYT), just make plans to be at your local bookstore come opening time.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 - Senior military and national security officials in the Bush administration were repeatedly warned by subordinates in 2002 and 2003 that prisoners in military custody were being abused, according to a new book by a prominent journalist.

Seymour M. Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker who earlier this year was among the first to disclose details of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, makes the charges in his book "Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" (HarperCollins), which is being released Monday.

Mr. Hersh asserts that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who visited the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the late summer of 2002 filed a report of abuses there that drew the attention of Gen. John A. Gordon, the deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser.

But when General Gordon called the matter to her attention and she discussed it with other senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, no significant change resulted.

Mr. Hersh also says that a military officer involved in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq learned of the abuses at Abu Ghraib in November and reported it to two of his superiors, General John P. Abizaid, the regional commander, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith.

Mr. Hersh's thesis is that "the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists" who have been charged so far, "but in the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion - and eye-for-eye retribution - in fighting terrorism."

In particular, Mr. Hersh has reported that a secret program to capture and interrogate terrorists led to the abuse of prisoners.

Let's see how our pet Anonymous handles this....have they handed out the flip chart of talking points and denials for this filthy stinking mess yet or are they going to keep yammering nonsense about kerning?