Seymour Hersh Weighs In on Sanders vs. Clinton: "Something Amazing Is Happening in This Country"

SEYMOUR HERSH: First of all, you're just going have to take my word for it. Gaddafi was a tame cat. We got to him in the Bush-Cheney years. If you remember the history, we had a lot of bad trouble. Bush and Cheney were -- I think normally would be embarrassed, should have been embarrassed, by the lies they told and the mistakes they made -- let's put it that way -- about the WMDs that the -- Saddam did not have an ongoing nuclear weapons system, which was known to an awful lot of people before -- before we took over Baghdad and discovered nothing. At that point -- I think it was a year later, in 2004 -- suddenly, Gaddafi, after allegedly having caught -- we caught a ship full of some dual-use goods, and we stopped a ship that was going to Tripoli with it. He suddenly announced that he was giving up -- unilaterally going to give up all his chemical arsenal and his WMD, his nuclear plans or options. And it was a big victory at a very much needed time by the Bush and Cheney crowd, that was a victory that showed our policy is working right. Money was involved, the CIA, covert money. A lot of stuff was going on. As you know, I've been doing a book about Cheney for a long time. And I can tell you that it was a considerable amount of CIA activity involved to turn him around.

I don't think -- which is amazing -- it's clear to me that the president and Hillary, the secretary of state, did not know about this secret agreement made. It's just amazing to me that one administration will leave -- it's one of the things I first learned from a friend who went to work -- I think it was way back -- maybe it was for Clinton. This friend got a job, a high-ranking job, in the government. The first thing he discovered, that all the files related to everything significant that had happened, all the agreements that had been made in his area -- it was in the State Department -- had been gone, had been cleaned out. Nothing was left. So, they were -- you know, as I said, they were going after a guy that had been doing a lot of good work for us, believe it or not, horrible as he was. He was a horrible human being. Bad things happened inside that country to the people. But he was actively working with us on the al-Qaeda issue, and, you know, if the -- I don't believe al-Qaeda exists there. I think the al-Qaeda we talked about disappeared with bin Laden. There's just copycats, and we like to call it al-Qaeda. But Sunni jihadists, Sunni Salafist and Wahhabi extremists are spreading all over, in part in response to what we did after 9/11. But that's the story we all know. So, they didn't really know what the hell had happened with Gaddafi. They took out a guy that didn't need to go. And the French were pushing for it, and we went along. It looked good.

It's a little bit like putting a couple hundred guys, and maybe a lot more that we don't know about, into Syria now, and many more than that into Iraq, where the -- God knows what's going to happen in both places. It's just -- it's done without consulting the Congress, which probably this Congress probably doesn't want to be consulted, but that's the -- you know, the Constitution is not a nuisance, as many in the Republican Party, as Bush and Cheney, and now, in many areas, even Obama believes, it seems to be a nuisance. We don't tell Congress anything. We don't go and--we don't tell the people anything. And the control -- the control of the media that goes on now, the major media, is, I think, much more acute now. I can go days wondering, you know, why we don't do more aggressive reporting on certain things.