Joi Itoquotes Lauren Weinstein:

Greetings. Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, who exposed so many aspects of the Iraqi prisoner abuse story, now reports that U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice secretly approved the expansion of a clandestine program that encouraged physical coercion, sexual humiliation, and blackmail of Iraqi prisoners, setting the stage for the abuses that these same officials have recently been condemning so publicly.

According to the report, President Bush was kept informed regarding this program. The Department of Defense called the accusations in the story “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”

Joi wonders:

How accepted is this view in the US now?

I don’t know. I’ve been on the road for two weeks and listened to Seymour Hersh talking to Liane Hansen about how high it might go on May 2nd (audio here). We were driving across Nebraska and Colorado that morning, and the concept seemed shocking but all too credible as we rolled through the endless heartland.

The next week, there was a timeline piece, and Liane read selected letters generated by the previous week’s show. It seemed like the piece on “intelligent design” (a euphemism for creationism taught in public schools) motivated more people to comment. There was still more flap going over Bob Edwards’ being kicked upstairs than there seems to be over whether :NPR has got the wrong end of the stick on prisoner abuse and whether Rumsfeld and/or Cambone and/or Rice condoned it and when Bush knew.

I think :NPR listeners, who tend to be well educated (though many apparently drive tractors or tend dairy cattle while listening, according to Bob Edwards), decide for themselves what’s right and what’s not in the news. I think they’re listening, hard, to what Seymour Hersh says and to what other correspondents are saying about what’s been going on and who ultimately is responsible.

As for what the country as a whole thinks, it’s hard to say… but I suspect a lot of people are thinking “bull” when anyone in the administration says anything, except for Colin Powell.

I think that Mr. Powell may well take a page from the British and Japanese, and resign over this issue eventually – and I’d respect him for it.

edited to add: I am an idjit. Bad spellers untie. As you were.