'We've been taken over by a cult'

The Military is nowhere; the Press is nowhere; the Congress is nowhere...

[ transcript of remarks by Seymour Hersh at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, via SmirkingChimp.com ]

excerpt:

"These are punitive people. One of the ways-- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we've been taken over basically by a cult: eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.

What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside-- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people-- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues-- as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers.

That's what's happening."

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See also:

The Coming Wars
17 January 2005, Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker