I wish I could read what his eyes are sayin'


Henry Miller with Twinka, Pacific Palisades, California, 1975

* Democracy Now interviews Seymour Hersh. excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to start off with, is it true that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld attempted to break into your home?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, no, not literally, of course, but it is true that they asked the FBI to in 1975, when I was a reporter in Washington for The New York Times. I had written a story about, oh, some secret stuff involving the Navy and spying on Russia and intercepts. It was pretty sensitive stuff. It was given to me by people inside the bureaucracy who thought it was stupid, counterproductive and wasteful and dangerous, so there was a reason to write it. I mean, it wasn't as if I was just exposing something -- it had been the source of enormous dismay inside that we continued to do these provocative operations. This was at the end of the Vietnam War. And so, they got upset. Cheney and -- they were both -- one was Chief of Staff, one was his deputy. Maybe Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense then.

And what happened is that during the 2000 campaign when Cheney was nominated, a bunch of reporters from Newsweek went to the Ford Library in Michigan, Gerald Ford -- I don't -- Grand Rapids, I think it was. There's a library there, and they discovered they had declassified some documents, sort of a 25-year time period, and out popped this file on me. And those guys at Newsweek were very excited about it. They even shared it with me. They sent me a copy. It was about 50 pages of worrying about what to do, and at one point they did ask the -- Rumsfeld -- Cheney was writing notes. Rumsfeld was involved and others were, too, in the White House, the White House Counsel, etc., and people from the Pentagon, and they asked the FBI to do -- to go into my house as -- one of the options was go into my house. There were a series of options. One was do nothing. One was to ask The New York Times to try to do something about me, you know, to shut me down, but the most dramatic one was to go into my house.
...
AMY GOODMAN: The news of this Operation Matador that is taking place right now, US forces carrying it out, one of the largest post-Saddam military operations in Iraq, the US admitting it’s facing fierce resistance. What is the significance of this? When do casualties count, when don't they?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, they're not counting now. American casualties are discounted in the newspapers. We have had an awful lot of people, more than a dozen die in the last few days alone in Iraq. American casualties are back up. And it's not a major story. Once in a while it gets to be a story. And so, they put out -- they do their own sort of accounting. The one way they balance the bad news is they have raids. And we suddenly show us on the offensive. And part of it is what the information -- it's an operation, it's a public relations. It's a strategic deception in a way. I’m not suggesting the raids are not there. I’m not suggesting they may even be finding people. God knows who they find. But clearly, one reason they're being emphasized is to detract from what's going on, which is a steady increase in the insurgency and the resistance.

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"Dennis Miller: Poor old Dennis Miller. From the peak of his powers at the desk of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, to the booth of Monday Night Football, to political commentator on Fox News, to a show nobody watched on CNBC... it's all been downhill for Dennis since he decided to hitch his wagon to an ass named George W. Bush. Last week it was revealed that Mr. Miller's CNBC show has been canceled, a revelation which brought cheers and jeers from - well, nobody, because nobody watched it. Ah well, I guess he's still got the NetZero commercials."

* How to brew beer in a coffee pot.