CHRIS HEDGES, AUTHOR, COLLATERAL DAMAGE: Well, I had a good friend when I worked at The New York Times, Steve Kinzer, who said that I’m not really a journalist, I’m just a minister pretending to be a journalist. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that.

LAMB: Explain that.

HEDGES: I come out of a very strong religious tradition. My father was a parish minister for four years. I grew up in the church. My mother was a seminary graduate. I graduated from seminary, although I was not ordained. And I became a journalist.

But one doesn’t escape that kind of an upbringing, that kind of religious or theological orientation of the world where what is paramount is not your career. But trying to, in the best way that you can, achieve what would be defined as the moral life and be willing to take the cost of that, to take risks that are entailed with that, sometimes physical, which I certainly underwent as a war correspondent, sometimes professional.

And my own very vocal criticism in the buildup to this war in Iraq, which finally estranged me from my employer, The New York Times, where I had worked for 15 years.

LAMB: Did you leave on your own accord? Or did they suggest that you…

HEDGES: Well, I was given a – I had given a commencement address in 2003 at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois – this was a couple weeks after President Bush had landed on the aircraft carrier with a mission accomplished banner – and said in that address things like, ”This is a war of liberation but it is a war of liberation by Iraqis against American occupation.”

I was booed off the stage. My microphone was cut twice. And finally to the end of about 17 or 18 minutes, young men actually climbed up on the stage. I was escorted off in the middle of the ceremony by campus security. That became a national story picked up by a right wing talk show host, people like O’Reilly and others. Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial denouncing me.

And I knew what I was doing. I’d been a news reporter there for a long time. I knew that that was kind of professional suicide. And the paper – I had long been vocal. And the paper issued me a formal written reprimand. We were guild, which means we’re union. And that’s the process by which they give you a warning, a formal warning. And then if you do it again, you’re removed.

So I realized that I had a choice and that I could pay fielty (ph) to my career and muzzle myself. I had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, by the way, seven years in the Middle East. I’m an Arabic speaker. Both war and Iraq are not abstractions to me.

And – but to do so I felt would be to betray my tradition, betray where I came from, betray who I was, and I left the paper.

LAMB: And you’ve got two books at least, right? How many books have you written altogether?

HEDGES: Six.

LAMB: ”I Don’t Believe in Atheists” and ”Collateral Damage,” both this year?

HEDGES: Yes.

LAMB: In ”I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” I haven’t got the quote here, but I believe you said you were Harvard divinity student. What year did you graduate?

HEDGES: 1983.

LAMB: Were you a seminarian at any point?

HEDGES: I was. I have all of the academic work to be a minister.

LAMB: In what church?

HEDGES: Presbyterian.

LAMB: And then you say later on in this introduction that you don’t go to church.

HEDGES: No.

LAMB: At all?

HEDGES: Very rarely.

LAMB: Why?

HEDGES: Well, I have a very antagonistic relationship with institutional religion, partly because of the relationship my father had to the Presbyterian Church. He had been a very vocal supporter of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and finally, interestingly enough, in the latter part of his life – he died in 1995 – the gay rights movement. His youngest brother, my uncle, was gay, lived with his partner in Greenwich Village. My father had a particular sensitivity to the pain of being a gay man in America in the 1950s and ’60s.

So he was often at odds with not only members of his own congregation but the institution itself. And I, you know, I think I quote Paul Tillic (ph), the great theologian, who talks about how every institution, including the church, is inherently demonic. Or as the theologian Reinhold Neville (ph) would write, we can – institutions can never achieve the morality of individuals because institutions are finally about self-perpetuation. And when pushed, you know that will take precedence over moral choice whereas people can make a moral choice that is in physical terms detrimental, even self destructive. That very rarely – probably never – happens with institutions.

I also you know have a great deal of problem with the liberal church, my own tradition. I had wanted to be an inner-city minister so that when I graduated from college I went to live in – across the street from a housing project in Roxbury in Boston and ran a church there for two and a half years. And that made me painfully aware of how the liberal church had left the city with white flight (ph).

I commuted from Roxbury you know almost every day to Cambridge to the garden that is Harvard where people talked about you know empowering those they never met. You know they liked the poor but they didn’t like the smell of the poor. And that was a kind of crisis for me, a kind of window into perhaps the hollowness and even hypocrisy of my own tradition.

So I remain certainly reverential towards the values, and I would say the religious values that were imparted to me by great figures, not only my father but you know those icons within our house. So Martin Luther King, Daniel Berrigan, William Stone Coffin (ph), Dorothy Day.

But one must also remember that all of these figures had antagonistic relationships with the institutions, with the religious institutions that they worked for.

So for me there is quite a demarcation between the religious impulse and the religious life and religious institutions, which are human constructs and often use religion – and this is certainly true in the wars that I’ve covered in the Middle East, in the Balkans – use religion for I think very dark and nefarious religion.

LAMB: Where do you live?

HEDGES: Princeton, New Jersey.

LAMB: How long have you lived there?

HEDGES: Two years.

LAMB: Are you – do you have a family?

HEDGES: Yes. Three children.

LAMB: How old are they?

HEDGES: 18, 13, and five months.

LAMB: And where did you grow up?

HEDGES: Upstate New York, in a farm town upstate New York.

LAMB: What year did you get out of Harvard?

HEDGES: ’83.

LAMB: Yes. You told me that earlier. How long did you work for The New York Times?

HEDGES: Fifteen years.

LAMB: How long have you been gone from The New York Times?

HEDGES: I left the Times I guess it’s three or four years now I’ve been…

LAMB: This book, ”I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” page 109, I just want to read a little bit what you wrote. You said, ”The founding myth of the United States tells its citizens that it is the duty of the nation to bring enlightenment to the rest of humanity. An entire historical narrative has been created to perpetuate this myth. The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglas or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power.”

Explain that.

HEDGES: Well, that is how you perpetuate a national myth, a myth of creation. Every nation has it. We’re not exempt that you know we elevate, for instance – and this is you know very much the currency of our – of the political debate today. We elevate the founding fathers who were figures who, in most cases, embraced – or at least tolerated – slavery, the kinds of things that they wrote to justify the extermination, a campaign of genocide against native Americans, the fact that women had no voice within our society.

I mean, all of these kinds of issues don’t support that mythic narrative of us as a virtuous and a good people. And so it’s not told. It’s – those voices are – one can find them. But in this sort of officially sanctioned narratives, the ones that are really at their core used to promote self exultation are you know – those kinds of truths are painful and inconvenient and force us to carry out a kind of self reflection or self criticism that in – especially in a time of war or in a time of you know national solidarity, are not only rendered inconvenient but often shot it down.

LAMB: On June 23, I found this in something called ”Truth Dig,” you have a column that says the ”Heedness of Power.” And I want to read you this one quote and then ask you why you wrote this.

”We were instructed by the high priests on television over the past few days to mourn a Sunday morning talk show host who made $5 million a year and it gave a platform to the powerful and the famous so they could spin, equivocate, and lie to the nation. We were repeatedly told by these television courtiers, people like Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer, that this talk show host is one of our nation’s greatest journalists, as if in a studio putting on makeup and chatting with Dick Cheney or George W. Bush have much to do with journalism.”

And in the next sentence, by the way, is ”No journalist makes $5 million a year.” As you know, there was a lot of the reverse of that on television and in the newspapers after Tim Russert died.

HEDGES: A lot of the reverse of what?

LAMB: Of that statement. In other words, a lot of…

HEDGES: Well, it was – you know and this has nothing to do with Tim Russert, by the way, I – who you know may very well have been appalled at what followed. But as somebody who comes out of the dying tradition of reporting, I think the notion that television celebrities, that what television celebrities do is equate-able with journalism, has been very detrimental to the health of the news gathering industry within the United States.

You know, I often feel, especially as we watch newspapers just sort of implode from the inside that the skills that go into making a good reporter – and you know I was abroad for almost 20 years, most of them with The New York Times. I certainly interviewed heads of state, figures like (INAUDIBLE), King Hussein, Josne Mubarik (ph) when I was in the Middle East, Fran Yotudeman (ph), et cetera.

But that’s a very small part of what it is to be a reporter or to be a journalist, that it’s you know it’s a trade. It’s not a profession. And I think that when you look, especially in Washington at how celebrity journalism is practiced on commercial television, it is very much I think courtier is the right word. I think that they are courtiers.

They feed off of their access to the powerful and the famous. And you know I.F. Stone (ph) was right. All governments, it really doesn’t matter what their ideological stripe or what party they you know they come from, lie. And it’s the job of a reporter to ferret out those lies, to shine a light on areas that without that journalistic endeavor would remain dark. And good journalists, people like Cy Hirsch (ph), for instance, are very unpopular figures and people in power don’t like them.

And I think that – you know and I really here fault commercial television which has stopped gathering news, largely, I think. I mean, news is judged solely on its entertainment value. I mean there’s been a terrible, terrible corruption in commercial news, which – and I’ve watched it.

You know when I began covering the war in El Salvador in the early 1980s, all of the networks had bureaus. They would have reporters and producers. They went out with us. I was working as a print reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. They gathered stories. They produced them. They reported them. That’s that. It’s all gone.

And it’s become trivia and celebrity gossip and chatter. And you know the noise pollution that emanates from television I find deeply disturbing. And I think that that equation of essentially you know the world of power and access to power and with journalism itself has been as destructive to the health of our democracy as the equation of Christianity to the Demagogs who dominate the religious right, people like Pat Robertson, for instance, or Rod Parsley.

LAMB: Define courtier.

HEDGES: Well, a courtier is somebody who has a kind of parasitic attachment to centers of power. I think that’s the article where I described Washington as a Versailles. And that’s what Washington’s become.

And the courtiers extend beyond the press. I think most people in the democratic party could be defined as courtiers in the sense that – I mean if you look at since the democratic party has taken control of the Congress since 2006, they have done little to nothing to defy the desires and projects propagated by the Bush White House, although they were clearly elected to do so.

And that’s what courtiers do. Courtiers you know they’re a new class of Unix (ph). And you can find them in the halls of Congress and you can find them strutting around the bureaus of the big Washington networks.

LAMB: You also write, ”Being a courtier and Obama is the best – one of the best – requires agility and eloquence. The most talented of them can be lauded as persuasive actors. They entertain us. They make us feel good. They convince us they are our friends. We would like to have dinner with them. They are the smiley faces of the corporate state that has hijacked the government and is raping the nation. When the corporations make their iron demands, these courtiers drop to their knees where – to placate the telecommunications companies that fund their campaigns and want to be protected from lawsuits or to permit oil and gas companies to rake in obscene profits and keep in place the vast subsidies of corporate welfare doled out by the state.”

What do you think of Mr. Obama? I mean, explain what your relevance to him is.

HEDGES: Well, that sort of summed it up. You can’t run for president of this country unless you play that game, unless you allow yourself to become a commercialized product. And Obama’s very good at it. He’s – you know one of the things that was fascinating to watch in the primaries was how he out-Clintoned the Clintons.

But substance. There’s no substance. You know watching – listening to an Obama speech is like watching a Pepsi commercial. There’s nothing there. It’s – you know it can be moving. It can be eloquent. But you know when you reach out to grasp anything hard, it slips through your hand.

And you know I think that you know one should not pay much attention to what politicians say in an election cycle in a campaign. One should look at their voting records.

And when Obama went and supported this FISA reform act, that was a clear indication that he was, and is, beholden to the corporate interests who are our shadow government. You know we live in a corporate state. And when you live in a corporate state, you undergo what we have been undergoing which is a coup d’etat in slow motion.

We are being stripped as citizens daily of power. The FISA bill would be a perfect example of that. You know, however inept or clumsy or dysfunctional government may be, it is the only institution citizens have to protect their interests, to safeguard their interests, whether that’s through regulatory agencies, whether that’s through public education, whether that’s setting mine and safety standards, clean water acts, et cetera.

And when that’s taken away from you, when government works at the behest of corporations, then you as a citizen are completely disempowered. And I think that when you look at the voting record of Congress, you see how – you know it doesn’t matter what we want. We may – you know 70-something percent of Americans want to end the War in Iraq.

But there are many people, many corporations, Haliburton and you know Lockheed Martin, the list goes on and on and on, who for all in this war (ph) is a good business. And they don’t want it stopped. And the voices of the citizens are irrelevant because the entire election cycle, the entire campaign process, is hostage to corporate dollars, 35,000 lobbyists descending, you know like hyenas on Capitol Hill.

And when you look at the way – you know Barack Obama’s voting record on many, many, many issues going back and looking at his two years in the Senate, is one that pleases corporate backers. And I think that taking a hard look at his stances and where he stands – he’s talking now, of course, about expanding the war in Afghanistan as if you know Afghanis want to be occupied any more than Iraqis.

I am – you know I’m in a bit of despair over where we’re going. And until we break the stranglehold of the corporate state, you know there are already a lot of people suffering in this country and you know much of my own family comes from the working class. NAFTA and you know let’s be fair, the democrats have been as bad as the republicans on this. Clinton’s administration was a disaster for the working class in this country.

LAMB: Do you still have an association with Princeton?

HEDGES: I have taught there off and on. I was the Anschutz Fellow and taught in the program in American Studies. But I’m not teaching this year.

LAMB: Let me ask you about the Anschutz connection because – correct me if I’m wrong – but Philip Anschutz and the fellowship that you had, he is one of the richest men in the world. He’d been involved in oil. He was Coloradoan. Politically could not think more differently than you do.

HEDGES: It’s too late. He can’t take it away from me. It’s already over.

LAMB: But what was your feeling about getting paid by the Anschutz money to do what you did at Princeton?

HEDGES: Well, it wasn’t that much.

LAMB: Was it $50,000?

HEDGES: It was – for the program in American Studies it was $30,000 a semester. Oh you know look, if you look at the way universities like Princeton or Harvard have built their endowments, you can hardly pinpoint Anschutz money. I mean, it’s – you know Brown University was founded by slaveholders and largely funded by people who profited off of slave trade.

I mean you know you – I think that – I didn’t have a moral dilemma about that.

LAMB: Did he?

HEDGES: Well, I don’t – he probably didn’t know who I was. He was certainly not on the committee who selected me, and as far as I know had nothing to do – as a matter of fact, I know he had nothing to do with my selection as a fellow.

LAMB: Money given to Princeton in their names, he and his wife, for – on behalf of their daughters who went to Princeton, is I believe it worked.

HEDGES: I’m not sure why the money was. But the committee that selects the Anschutz Fellows has – you know he doesn’t vet the Fellows, obviously, because I would not be somebody he’d probably want teaching there.

LAMB: Any of this describe your politics? I found this on Wikipedia, by the way. This is about Mr. Anschutz. ”Help fund Colorado’s 1992 amendment a ballot initiative designed to nullify state favoritism of gays and lesbians, to help fund the discovery institute of think tank based in Seattle and that it promotes intelligent design and critiques theories of evolution. Three, support of the Parents (ph) Television Council, a group against television indecency.” You can see where I’m going.

HEDGES: Right. Well, those are all the things I’ve spent most of my life fighting against, so.

LAMB: On the other side of that, you’re associated with a Nation Institute.

HEDGES: Yes.

LAMB: Explain that.

HEDGES: The Nation Institute is an appendage of the Nation magazine. And it functions like it’s a left leaning sort of think tank or institute that supports writers such as myself, Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the book on Blackwater, Naomi Klein who wrote ”Shock Doctor” and before that wrote ”No Logo.”

LAMB: Run – I mean, headed up for funded a lot by Hamilton Fish.

HEDGES: I don’t know how much Ham funds it. He runs it.

LAMB: But Hamilton Fish is the son of the former republican congressman from New York?

HEDGES: Yes, he is.

LAMB: And you’re from New York originally, upstate?

HEDGES: Yes. I was a little further upstate.

LAMB: What I’m getting at is here you have people all over the lot, parents, republican, now they’re not, and all that. Where do you come down at this stage in your life? Would you put a label on yourself? And who would you vote for?

HEDGES: I’m going to vote for Nader. Part of that’s a moral issue. I can’t vote for anybody who doesn’t call for an immediate end to the war in Iraq. You know I have a lot of friends in Baghdad who’ve suffered in this conflict.

The war under post Nuremburg laws is a criminal war of aggression. It’s illegal. We have no right as a nation to debate the terms of the occupation. We have no right to be there, neither do we have a right to be in Afghanistan.

And that was a line I wouldn’t cross. I will not vote for a candidate who doesn’t call for immediate withdrawal.

LAMB: This book, ”Collateral Damage” then, as we haven’t talked about yet, is dedicated to Sami Al-Arian. His daughter is co-author with you on – is it Laila?

HEDGES: Yes.

LAMB: Laila Al-Arian. Sami Al-Arian, as you know, served at least 14 months…

HEDGES: He’s still in prison.

LAMB: …yes. Explain all that to us and the whole business of Jihad and supporting the Palestinian fundraising effort.

HEDGES: Well, he certainly did support – he’s a Palestinian, a very articulate Palestinian activist, was one of the first people that Ashcroft publicly announced as sort of sweeping up in his drag net against domestic terrorism. I think the government spent about $30 million trying to prosecute him.

He was acquitted on – I don’t have the exact number – on most of the counts. And then the jury was hung. I think there was one hold-out on two or three other accounts. But he wasn’t found guilty in quite an elaborate show trial, which if you read through the transcripts, you reach a point of sort of kafkaesque absurdity, you know playing transcripts in accord of the family ordering pizza and this kind of stuff.

LAMB: Did he plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to provide services?

HEDGES: Not in that trial. The government threatened to retry him again. He was financially broken and you know was – the sort of emotional ordeal. So he pled for this lesser account with the understanding that after serving 14 months, he would be deported.

LAMB: So the relationship between you and his daughter, how’d that come about on this book.

HEDGES: Well, I – this book was extremely labor intensive in that we – well, I wanted to write a book where we set out to try and explain to Americans what was happening to Iraqi civilians, very much focused on – or you know the sort of model was the winner solider film that came out in 1971 where Vietnam veterans went to Detroit and filmed this great documentary where they talked often with great emotion about atrocities that they had either witnessed or taken part in in the war in Vietnam.

The security situation is such in Iraq that you just can’t spend prolonged periods of time with Iraqi civilians writing about the war from their perspective. It’s too dangerous. I don’t actually fault the press on this one.

And so this was a way to come through the back door to seek out combat veterans who would be willing to speak openly and honestly about atrocities that they either saw or participated in. And we – I wanted a critical mass because I didn’t want the critics to say, ”Well, OK, there was that incident. That was an aberration.” Or I wanted to expose the patterns of the war.

And so over a seven-month period, we interviewed – or often more than once, 50 Iraqi veterans all on the record and everything was taped because I didn’t want anonymous sources. And if there was any contention about you know the information in the book, I wanted a record.

Now, all those tapes – transcripts were typed out, hundreds and hundreds of pages. And it was just – you know I would have spent three years doing it myself for a book that I figured not a lot of people would probably buy. It’s a very counter narrative to you know the notion of our heroes.

And so the – I had not met Laila, but she was working. She had just graduated from Columbia Journalism Review and you know very bright and thoughtful young woman. And so I asked the Nation if I could work with someone you know to help me sort of break up the you know tracking down people willing to talk and breaking up the interviews and that was the beginning of our collaboration.

LAMB: Where does she live and what does she do?

HEDGES: She’s now in Washington working for English Al Jazeera.

LAMB: And you say on the back that the Iraqi Veterans Against the War were the ones that put you in touch with these 50?

HEDGES: Not many of them. Not all of them. They’re actually people we interviewed who still support the war – or at least they did when I interviewed them. But Iraqi Veterans Against the War was very helpful.

However, you know most people wouldn’t talk. It was very hard to get people to talk, partly because it was so emotional. You know I would say that in almost every interview that we carried out there were moments when these veterans just broke down and wept. You know and I’m not into sort of the emotional pornography that you know seems to sort of have taken over television or commercial television interviews. And so that’s when we turned the tape recorder off and waited for them to sort of become composed.

But it was very, very painful, and very courageous because you know these people you know as you know from reading through the book, not only spoke about things that they saw but in many cases spoke about horrible things that they did.

LAMB: I want to jump into a Specialist Philip Chrystal in the introduction you use him. And we’re going to use a fellow by the name of Lloyd James, who is the leader of the audio book of this. Let’s listen to a little bit of this and then you can explain what he’s talking about.

(AUDIO PRESENTATION BEGINS)

LLOYD JAMES READING FROM AUDIO BOOK: And we were approaching this one house in this farming area. They’re like built up into little courtyards, he said. So they have like a main house, common area, they have like a kitchen and then they have like a storage shed type deal. And we were approaching and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously because it was doing its job.

And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn’t – mother fucker, he shot it and we’re in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog – and I’m a huge animal lover. I love animals. And this dog has like these eyes on it and he’s running around spraying blood all over the place. And like you know the family is sitting right there with three little children, and a mom and a dad, horrified.

And I’m at a loss for words. And so I yell at him. I’m like, ”What the fuck are you doing?” And so the dog’s yelping. It’s crying out without a jaw. And I’m looking at the family and they’re just scared. And so I told them, I was like, ”Fucking shoot it, you know? At least kill it because that can’t be fixed. It’s suffering.”

And I actually get tears from just saying this right now. But – and I had tears then, too. And I’m looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and you know I got my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks because that’s what I had. I know – I had him give it to them and told them that I’m so sorry that asshole did that, which was very common.

I don’t know if it’s rednecks or what, but they feel that shooting dogs is something that adds to one’s manliness traits. I don’t know. I had a big problem with that.

”Was a report ever filed about it?” he asked. ”Was anything ever done? Any punishment ever dished out?” No. Absolutely not.

(END AUDIO PRESENTATION)

LAMB: The point?

HEDGES: The essence of war is death. Death is about the destruction or war is about the destruction of all living things, all systems that nurture and protect and sustain life from the trivial to the family dog to the grave and serious murder of children. That’s what the reality of war is.

I spent many years of my life as a war correspondent and wrote a book called, ”War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” It was my first book that attempted to implode the myth that we tell ourselves about war and grapple with the dark destructive power and intoxicating effects of violence. And you know that is very much what propelled me to seek out these veterans.

And you know as you can hear all of these quotes are verbatim. And I did that on purpose. You know when you write for The New York Times you make everyone sound like they graduated from Princeton. And I wanted to keep this really – keep their voices authentic and real, which is why all the profanity is in there as well.

LAMB: Here’s another one that has profanity in it, warn the audience in case they don’t want to hear it. It’s Specialist Patrick Campbell – by the way, did you meet either Specialist Chrystal or Specialist Patrick Campbell? These are veterans. They’re not in the service now.

HEDGES: No.

LAMB: Did you meet either one of these?

HEDGES: I can’t remember whether – who I did and who I didn’t often. I think Campbell I interviewed and I think Chrystal was interviewed by Laila.

LAMB: This is under a section called Convoys. Before we play it, what’s the purpose of – you divide these sections up with different titles. Convoy is one of them. What’s that about?

HEDGES: Well, I wanted to pick out the flashpoints of the war in Iraq. Those you know moments when Iraqis would come face to face with the occupation on a daily basis. So that would be checkpoints, convoys you know which are ubiquitous. They’re freight trains of death. They barrel through Iraq, Iraqi towns and cities often at 50, 60 miles an hour.

The soldiers and Marines that we interviewed all talked about being briefed before they went into Iraq, but they were not to stop the convoy, even if children ran out in front of the convoys. They were to be run over. And they are run over. You know they have to keep moving at all costs. It’s dangerous out there. That means driving down the meridian in the center of the road, often driving straight into oncoming traffic, plowing into Iraqi vehicles to shove them out of the way.

And then of course, when an IED, or an improvised explosive device, goes off near a convoy or destroys a vehicle within a convoy, they lay down withering, suppressing fire, with incredibly powerful weapons, belt-fed saws. These are light 7.62 machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, 50 caliber machine guns. These are not weapons – and I’ve seen them all at work – that are designed to be used in densely populated areas. And then of course you know numerous Iraqi civilians are wounded and killed. And very rarely does anyone stop to inspect the damage.

So convoys are one of I think the pillars of the occupation and have been one of those many – well, probably maybe the most important source of you know what the military euphemistically calls collateral damage or civilian casualties in Iraq.

LAMB: How much time have you spent in Iraq?

HEDGES: Well, not in this war but a lot of time in Iraq. I covered the – went into Kuwait with the First Battalion, First Marines and then was in and out of Iraq for seven years. I mean, I was covering Iraq for The New York Times, covered – made two trips into the marshes with the Shiites, a lot of time with the Kurds, covered the inspection teams after the war.

So a lot of time in Iraq.

LAMB: Here is Sergeant – I’m sorry, Specialist Patrick Campbell.

(BEGIN AUDIO PRESENTATION)

LLOYD JAMES READING FROM AUDIO BOOK: ”You don’t want to shoot kids. I mean, no one does,” said Sergeant Campbell as he began to describe an incident in the summer of 2005 where he counted a hin (ph) by several men in his unit.

But you have this. I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid in the trash pile below pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he’s going to start shooting. And you’ve got to understand, when you have spent nine months in a war zone where no one – every time you’ve been shot at, you’ve never seen the person shooting at you. I mean, you could never shoot back.

Here’s some guy, some 14-year-old kid with an AK-47 decides he’s going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you’ve ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds.

Sergeant Campbell was not present at the incident, which took place in Kudamian (ph). But he saw photographs shown to him by members of his unit and heard descriptions from several eyewitnesses.

Everyone was so happy, like this release that they finally killed an insurgent, he said. Then when they got there they realized it was just a little kid. And I know that really fucked up a lot of people in the head. They’d show all the pictures and some people were really happy like, ”Oh look what we did.” And other people were like, ”I don’t want to see that ever again.”

(END AUDIO PRESENTATION)

LAMB: Would you get this – I mean, this story is being told negatively because the fellow doesn’t like it. Would you get a different story if you talked to people who were for the war?

HEDGES: No. Because anybody who’s been through combat is going to tell the same stories. It’s how you rationalize it afterwards that matters. And I think – you know and I found this. I mean they, because there were 50 people, I can’t – I’m not always great with the names. But one of the most devastating stories we uncovered was told by a guy who supported the war.

But the reality of combat is venal (ph) and brutal and dirty. And if you come out of that reality, the stories are the same.

LAMB: What would – you can imagine people listening saying, ”Oh, this guy’s anti-war and he sounds like he’s maybe not even for America. He doesn’t like the history of America and all that.” What if you found your – let me just start by asking first, what do you think of the United States?

HEDGES: I think that the country that I grew up in and cherished and loved and honored is being destroyed.

LAMB: If you were in the White House and you had been there during 9/11, we’ve talked a lot about this so I don’t need to go off on all the war stuff, but what would you have done? What would have been the legitimate thing, from your perspective, to do if you had 3,000 people who had been killed?

HEDGES: Well, I covered al-Qaida for The New York Times right after 9/11. I was based in Paris and I covered al-Qaida in Europe and North Africa.

Terrorism is a tactic. It’s been with us since Solis (ph) wrote about the Jukasin (ph) wars. It will be with us as long as the human species inhabits the planet. The only way to fight terrorism is to isolate terrorists within their own society.

After 9/11 we had gathered the empathy of the world, including the Muslim world. Muslims – and I was there – were appalled it would have been done in their name and in the name of their religion. Senior clerics, including Sheikh Tontali (ph), the Sheikh of Alazhar (ph), the Chief Sunni Islamic University in the Arab world, immediately denounced the attacks of 9/11 of a crime against humanity, which they were, and then went on to denounce Osama bin Laden as a fraud, somebody who has no theological training, no right to issue fatwas, or religious edicts.

If we had had the courage to be vulnerable, if we had realized that at – that empathy was our greatest strength and our greatest asset, we would be far more secure and safer than we are today. Instead we decided to speak to the terrorists in a language in which they spoke to us, which is a language in violence. And we began dropping iron fragmentation bombs all over Afghanistan and Iraq.

And what we did is essentially resurrect a movement that had been within the Islamic world pushed to the margins. And that is the great tragedy of our response to 9/11.

LAMB: You have a note in your book about a GSA study that was between the years of 2003 and 2006 where we, as a country, have spent $31 million in Celatia (ph) – is that the way you pronounce it? It’s Solis (ph) in both Iraq and Afghanistan, $2,500 for a death, $1,500 for a serious injury, $200 for minor injuries. Have you been able to follow up on that since 2006? And what is this all about?

HEDGES: Well, that’s money that’s sort of doled out you know when families – you know for instance if in Afghanistan a wedding party is killed then a way that they seek to make amends is to give payments to surviving family members.

LAMB: What’s the reaction when people get these payments?

HEDGES: Well, the reaction of any father or mother who’s had a child killed, who has some stranger from another country who doesn’t speak their language or understand their culture come and drop a bundle of currency on their lap and walk away. You know what would be our reaction?

The – you know we – the tragedy of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is that we are the most potent and effective recruiting tools the insurgents have. I mean, that’s why we see a resurrection of the Taliban.

LAMB: We’re now in a period in this world where people are saying, ”We won. The surge worked.” Your reaction to that.

HEDGES: We may – we’ve made a pact with the devil in Iraq by buying off the Sunni insurgents, the so-called awakening groups. They’re 80 to 100,000 Sunnis with a lot of American blood on their hands who now receive salaries from taxpayers of $300 a month…

LAMB: Our taxpayers?

HEDGES: …yes, who have been allowed to ethnically cleanse their little fiefdoms and enclaves in Iraq, pushing out primarily Shiites who have no loyalty to the central government, a weak you know Shiite-led central government, and who are biding their time.

You know by allowing you know the Sunnis to come out of the shadows and create a kind of conventional force over the long term is extremely dangerous because the Sunnis dominated Iraq under Saddam Hussein. They constituted most of the officer corps, all of the intelligence units, and all of the special forces and elite units. They have the wherewithal organizational capacity and training to create a very potent and lethal force within Iraq.

So it’s bought us time. You know the surge – most of the troops that were deployed in the surge were primarily in Baghdad. Baghdad is no longer a unified city. Iraq is no longer a unified country. The experiment that was Iraq and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire is gone and is never coming back.

Iraq is just a war in a labyrinth of blast walls separating Shiites from Kurds from Sunnis who – you know and every once in a while they’ll lob mortars back and forth. It’s a mess. It’s not sustainable.

And I think that you know unfortunately because of many factors, not least of which was the security and the expense, the war is not reported. American Journalism Review did a story a few weeks ago where they looked at air time devoted to the War in Iraq. It’s down in the single digits. I think three or seven percent.

Especially – and this is especially egregious coming from the cable news networks that sold us the war in the first place.

So the notion that the occupation is somehow sustainable is a very dangerous one because it will lead us, I think, down – we have two routes in Iraq. One is either we begin an orderly withdrawal, or the mission collapses. Those are the only two.

And if the mission collapses, it’s chaos.

LAMB: Here’s another reading from Lloyd James who reads the audio part of your book. It says Specialist Abby Pickett (ph). And this is in the section – it’s about not engaging with kids when you give – let’s listen to that and you can explain it.

(BEGIN AUDIO PRESENTATION)

LLOYD JAMES READING FROM AUDIO BOOK: Civil affairs projects were minimal, poorly organized, scattered, and sporadic, veterans said. We should have done it on an enormous systematic scale, not this anecdotal, ”Well, we helped a school here and we helped a school there and it’s great.” ”Nobody’s talking about that,” said Sergeant Flanders.

”You know I hear veterans say that and I want to call bullshit on it,” he continued, ”because the problems of Iraq and their magnitude far outweigh the tiny stories that one veteran can say. I can tell you about the vast amount of school supplies that my unit helped coordinate to have shipped over from our families, and we passed it out to a local school. Yes, we did that. Who cares?”

On the other hand, 99.99 percent of the time, we were not engaging with these people. We weren’t helping them at all. ”We might hand out coloring books and pencils to kids at the schools during the day,” Specialist Middleton said, ”but that night we were arresting their older brothers and killing their dads. So it just seemed kind of pointless.”

(END AUDIO PRESENTATION)

LAMB: Hearts and minds chapter. A lot of people say, who are for the war, that the media is not reporting the good stuff that they’re doing. You’re suggesting that this only happens about one percent of the time.

HEDGES: Well, that’s, I think, most all of the veterans we interviewed suggest that it only happens about one percent of the time. The only language that we really speak to Iraqis is the language of violence. We don’t have the linguistic cultural, historic, social literacy to speak any other language in Iraq.

And what that does is create two polar extremes. You know if – you know when you speak in the language of violence, it always fuels the two extremes. I saw that in the Balkans, you know that the dictator of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, needed in some perverse way. Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade.

And just as Milosevic needed Tudjman and these extremes play off of each other so that al-Qaida needs a George Bush just in many ways as you know to build his agenda and his imperial project, Bush needs an al-Qaida. And they both inflate and elevate the other.

And they both create a kind of death spiral where the center – and you remember Iraq, where I spent a lot of time – is, or at least was, largely a secular country with a highly educated middle class, a very high standard of living. You know women were not repressed the way they are in Iran or the way they are in Saudi Arabia.

It was in many ways – I mean, certainly you know one thing the Bush administration did say correctly was Saddam was as bad as they said he was. And I, you know I’ve stood over the mass graves of 1,500 bodies when the Iraqi troops withdrew from Northern Iraq after the war. I mean, I’ve seen it.

But this was a state above, perhaps, all states in the Middle East that was best situated or positioned to make that leap forward into a modern functioning you know, if not democracy, certainly a modern functioning system that could work.

LAMB: Did you ever meet Saddam Hussein?

HEDGES: No.

LAMB: What was your reaction when he was executed?

HEDGES: I don’t believe in the death penalty so I mean, I would have preferred that they just lock him up forever. You know, Saddam Hussein was you know as tyrants go, he was right up there. I mean, he you know was somebody that I certainly would have kept behind bars for the rest of his life.

LAMB: The two principal candidates for president, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, are both for going into Afghanistan, even increasing the number of troops there. What do you say to that?

HEDGES: Big mistake.

LAMB: Why?

HEDGES: Because the Afghanis don’t want to be occupied any more than the Iraqis.

LAMB: Well, what do you do about the al-Qaida? If – what’s the purpose of…

HEDGES: Well, the problem’s the Taliban primarily. And it’s that fusion of the Taliban and al-Qaida which has taken place largely in Pakistan. The only way to fight terrorism is to turn over into intelligence agencies. And I think one of the reasons that we reacted after 9/11 the way we did is because of gross intelligence failures.

I was working in Paris and you know several times a week seen the most senior French intelligence officials who, at least at that time, were far advanced in terms of their understanding of Islamic groups. They were the only intelligence agency that I knew of that had actually had human assets inside of al-Qaida. It’s how they stopped the Paris Embassy bombing plot, for instance.

So I think it’s two-pronged. One, of course, you know it is that slow and laborious building of effective intelligence services that can penetrate and understand these movements and then ultimately break them apart. And that takes years, as we saw with the Israelis after Black September, you know it took them two years to hunt these people down.

And then you have to alleviate – and this comes through aid programs, relief programs – alleviate the despair, the desperation, the rage, that goes into creating people who are willing to be human bombs.

You know I spent a lot of my life in Gaza. And you know I have watched – I first went to Gaza in 1988, and I have just – you know when Hamas, by the way, was a marginal non-entity. It was – as a matter of fact, in roundups they would let the Hamas people go because they saw them as a nice way to break up the control of Fatah run by Arafat, the Israelis.

And I’ve watched the Israelis make blunder after blunder after blunder and essentially empower the very radical movements that they’re trying to break. And you know one has to have a great deal of cultural understanding in order to – and of course, it’s very Machiavellian. But I mean, in order to essentially break apart these groups.

If you go in with just a big truncheon, you’re just dumping fuel all over the fire. You know the situation in Afghanistan, if you take they’re 50,000 NATO troops, half of them are American, you know soldiers and Marines are dying at a faster rate given the numbers that are there than are dying in Iraq. We have seen now the transfer of the tactic of suicide bombs – which were nonexistent before December 2005 in Afghanistan – being transferred to Iraq – I mean, from Iraq to Afghanistan

So you know I think just as we resurrected al-Qaida, the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan is resurrecting the Taliban.

LAMB: Fifty interviews with former soldiers…

HEDGES: And Marines.

LAMB: …and Marines, and we’re – is it audio or videotape?

HEDGES: Audio.

LAMB: Where is it – where are you going to put it all?

HEDGES: Well, I have it all – I mean, I have it all typed out.

LAMB: Are you going to have the audio available for anybody to listen to, I mean, Web site?

HEDGES: They put – they put some of the audio up on – the publisher put it up on the Web site. But you know the problem is it’s so – often so meandering that we pulled sort of you know – I think as you did here – some of the most potent stories or anecdotes.

LAMB: This is the Nation books which is – is that a Perseus group?

HEDGES: Yes.

LAMB: And here’s another soldier, Sergeant Camilo, is it Mejia?

HEDGES: Mejia.

LAMB: Should be. It’s a Spanish name or – Mejia. Sergeant Mejia recounted an incident in Ramadi in July, 2003 when an unarmed man drove with his young son too close to the checkpoint. This is under the Checkpoints chapter. And what’s that about? What’s the Checkpoints chapter about?

HEDGES: Well, again, it’s another one of those flashpoints. Checkpoints – you have fixed checkpoints around government buildings and our imperial city, the green zone, and the super bases. But often times you have checkpoints they call flying checkpoints that are put up for a few hours.

And Iraqis who don’t – you know have never seen a checkpoint there before will – they drive too quickly. They don’t break fast enough or they’re a Sunni in a Shiite neighborhood and even though they see people in Iraqi Army uniform, that doesn’t inspire confidence because they – and so they try and run the checkpoint or go in reverse and they get shot.

I mean, the numbers of Iraqis who get shot – I mean, you know any car that is perceived by American soldiers approaching a checkpoint as a threat is fired upon.

LAMB: Sergeant Mejia says the father was decapitated in front of the small terrified boy by a member of Mejia’s unit firing a heavy 50-caliber machine gun. Quote, ”By then,” said Mejia, ”we responded to the scene after the fact. This sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.”

The next month, Mejia returned stateside for a two-week rest and refused to go back, launching a public protest over the treatment of Iraqis. He was charged with desertion, sentenced to one year in prison, and given a bad conduct discharge. Troops were rarely held accountable for shooting civilians at checkpoints. Quote, ”Better to be tried by 12 men than carried by six,” unquote, was the prevailing attitude. Court martial, a rare occurrence, was infinitely preferably to possible injury or death.

What happened to Sergeant Mejia after he was discharged – was it a dishonorable discharge?

HEDGES: Yes.

LAMB: Where is he? Do you know?

HEDGES: He lives in Florida and he is – I think he runs – or is one of the directors of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

LAMB: In your opinion, did he do the right thing?

HEDGES: Yes.

LAMB: Why?

HEDGES: Well, he exhibited – physical courage is something you see on a battlefield. Very rarely do you see moral courage. And he exhibited moral courage. He was – came back with his unit and refused to carry a weapon, even though he was a sergeant in the Army.

And you know it is those acts of moral courage. One thinks of a helicopter pilot, for instance, Ed Neui (ph), who the 28-year-old pilot you know who had children of his own, who landed his helicopter to protect I think it was four or five Vietnamese. I mean, it’s extremely lonely and difficult to stand up among the camaraderie of troops and denounce a wrong as a wrong.

And I have tremendous respect for Camilo.

LAMB: What is it – what has all this done to your life? I mean, you’re very critical of a lot of journalists. Your critical of the war, critical of the country and all that. Do you find yourself persona non grata in places that you used to be greeted with open arms because you worked for The New York Times?

HEDGES: Well, as a reporter you know when I came back from overseas, my one non-negotiable demand was, ”Don’t send me to Washington.” I don’t really want to chronicle (ph) the White House. I never wanted to be a state department correspondent. I never wanted to follow a public official around with a tape recorder and stand behind a rope and – that was never the kind of reporting that I did, even when I covered in the first Gulf War, the war. I was always out. I don’t think – most of my time was with the Marine Corps. I very rarely interviewed somebody above the rank of sergeant.

You know I – you know I’m very much an on-the-ground reporter. I very much see – for me the best of journalism is to give a voice to people who without my presence would not have a voice. George Bush doesn’t need me to have a voice.

So the people that I care most about and the people that I sought to write about as a reporter don’t consider me persona non grata. People like Camilo Meija would, I think, argue that it’s good that there are a few of us out there because without us, the stories and the courage that he and many others exhibited, I think most of those exhibited in this book – remember this was you know this was a real act of courage on the part of these veterans to get up and speak like this. You know it wouldn’t have had a venue.

LAMB: I’m going to close this with an audio clip of a suicide note. And the gentleman’s name is Colonel Ted – I’m not sure how you pronounce it – Westhoosing (ph), Westhoosing (ph)?

HEDGES: I’ve only read it. I don’t know how to pronounce it.

LAMB: Why did you open your book with this?

HEDGES: Because at the time he was the highest ranking officer to die in Iraq, and he died at his own hand, apparently. He had been one of the most respected professors of philosophy, I believe, ethics at West Point. He was a man of great – from all I’ve read and what people, people I’ve spoken with around him, of great personal integrity and courage. And he was appalled by what he saw around him.

LAMB: When did he commit suicide?

HEDGES: The date is in there. I think it’s 2004 or 2005?

LAMB: Well, was he there? Was he here? Was it after the war?

HEDGES: He was there. He was there.

LAMB: In Iraq.

HEDGES: Yes. He was working for General Petraeus.

LAMB: Doing what? Do you know?

HEDGES: He was working – he was overseeing – he did several things, I think, but his last job, as I understand it, was that he was overseeing contractors and he was appalled at the fraud and theft and waste and abuse of – on the part of the contractors.

LAMB: What was the military’s official reaction to what happened to him, the suicide?

HEDGES: Well, the military ruled it a suicide. There were family members and others who raised questions about you know whether because he was very critical of the abuse carried out by contractors, whether you know he was killed. But I think it still officially remains a suicide.

LAMB: Here’s Lloyd James reading it. And Chris Hedges, we thank you for joining us.

HEDGES: Thanks for having me.

(BEGIN AUDIO PRESENTATION)

LLOYD JAMES READING LETTER FROM COL. TED WESTHUSING: Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. You were only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff. No mission support, and you don’t care.

I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human right abuses, and liars. I am sullied. No more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way.

All my love to my family, my wife, and my precious children. I love you, and trust you only. Death before being dishonored anymore. Trust is essential. I don’t know who to trust anymore. Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness.

No more. Reevaluate yourselves, commanders. You are not what you think you are, and I know it.

(END AUDIO PRESENTATION)

END