Journalist Blasts Bush at Memorial Lecture

In front of an overflowing Pauley Ballroom audience last night, investigative journalist and author Seymour Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai Massacre, gave a harsh critique of American foreign policy as the main speaker for the ninth annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture.

The lecture, along with the accompanying Young Activist Award, is presented each year at UC Berkeley to commemorate Mario Savio, the leader of the 1960s Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

Hersh, who first chronicled the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in The New Yorker, made his stance clear against the Bush administration and their decision to go to war from the very start.

"I think the bad news is ... there's 1,180 days to go," he said. "The good thing, tomorrow morning when we wake up, there'll be one less."

Hersh came out strong against the Oct. 15th Iraqi constitutional referendum, citing the creation of a Kurdish region in the north, a Shiite region in the south and a Sunni-controlled central Iraq, all having various competing interests.

"The constitution is meaningless," he said. "It's a guaranteed formula for civil war, for sectarian war."

He also stressed the lack of journalists in areas where voting occurred, and pointed to this as a cause for the lack of media attention on the many accounts of voter fraud.

"Anybody who seriously wants to do reporting there is walking through a death trap," he said.

Hersh partly attributed the Abu Ghraib scandal to the amount of pressure commanding officers were under to obtain intelligence from prison inmates, which he said led to the indoctrination of soldiers by their commanding officer.

"They're keeping them not only from bullets and bombs, they're keeping them from themselves," he said.

Hersh also drew comparisons between the Abu Ghraib scandal and the My Lai Massacre during Vietnam War, where he blamed those in power for specifically recruiting minorities, those coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and holding lower levels of education.

"He simply wanted cannon fodder," Hersh said, regarding former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's preference of military recruits. "He wanted to get more black people in there."

Hersh acknowledged that the number of American soldiers in Iraq would eventually decrease, but he stressed that this only means more bombing attacks will occur.

"As the troops are reduced, American bombs are going to replace them," he said.

Most attendees reacted positively to Hersh's talk.

"I'm just amazed by the man's fountain of information," said Berkeley resident Larry Fishbein. "It's like getting a lesson in current American history."

Fishbein said he was surprised by the amount of information presentedby Seymour.

Peg Darby, another attendee, was shocked by Hersh's depiction of the apparent secrecy of the Bush administration.

"He has sealed himself off from any input from outside of a small circle," she said.

In addition to Hersh's speech, The Mario Savio Young Activist Award was also presented to Erin Durban, a 22-year old activist from Denver, who among other things, has led Colorado's first anti-Iraq war student effort and organized gay and lesbian rights groups.

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