It Will All Fall Down: A Conversation with Seymour Hersh
from AdBusters.org
In the pantheon of legendary journalists, Seymour Hersh stands out as a preeminent chronicler of US power. Born in Chicago in 1937, he came to international prominence with a 1969 report on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The report on the hundreds of civilians, primarily women and children, who were slaughtered by US troops energized the anti-war movement and won Hersh a Pulitzer Prize. In later years he wrote on Henry Kissinger, jfk, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome and imprisoned for 18 years in Israel after exposing Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.
Famous for using high-level inside sources, Hersh’s reports for the New Yorker on the Iraq War have become a must-read for their revelations on the inner workings of the Bush administration. Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and one of the authors of the Iraq War, called Hersh the “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist” after he exposed Perle’s involvement in financial dealings designed to profit from the war. Perle lost his position as chair of the influential Defense Policy Board as a result of the report and threatened to sue Hersh for libel but never followed through. In 2005 Hersh reported that the US was conducting covert operations within Iran to locate targets for a possible attack. In 2006, he revealed that the administration was considering a nuclear strike on Iran, and reported that the US had encouraged Israel to plan and execute the war against Lebanon, in which more than a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed. More recently he has written about US and Saudi support for Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. If the aim of journalism is to hold the powerful to account, Hersh is a towering example on how to do just that. He spoke to Adbusters contributing editor Deborah Campbell from his office in Washington, DC.
DC: Your recent article on the stifling of General Taguba’s inquiry into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal [in which Donald Rumsfeld was accused of misleading Congress] was pretty shocking. What was the most surprising revelation for you?
SH: I’ve given up being surprised by these guys. I would guess the bald affrontery of the contempt for Congress. We already know about their contempt for the press. Just going to Congress and misrepresenting what they know. And we all know they do it.
(Continued here.)
In the pantheon of legendary journalists, Seymour Hersh stands out as a preeminent chronicler of US power. Born in Chicago in 1937, he came to international prominence with a 1969 report on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The report on the hundreds of civilians, primarily women and children, who were slaughtered by US troops energized the anti-war movement and won Hersh a Pulitzer Prize. In later years he wrote on Henry Kissinger, jfk, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome and imprisoned for 18 years in Israel after exposing Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.
Famous for using high-level inside sources, Hersh’s reports for the New Yorker on the Iraq War have become a must-read for their revelations on the inner workings of the Bush administration. Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and one of the authors of the Iraq War, called Hersh the “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist” after he exposed Perle’s involvement in financial dealings designed to profit from the war. Perle lost his position as chair of the influential Defense Policy Board as a result of the report and threatened to sue Hersh for libel but never followed through. In 2005 Hersh reported that the US was conducting covert operations within Iran to locate targets for a possible attack. In 2006, he revealed that the administration was considering a nuclear strike on Iran, and reported that the US had encouraged Israel to plan and execute the war against Lebanon, in which more than a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed. More recently he has written about US and Saudi support for Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. If the aim of journalism is to hold the powerful to account, Hersh is a towering example on how to do just that. He spoke to Adbusters contributing editor Deborah Campbell from his office in Washington, DC.
DC: Your recent article on the stifling of General Taguba’s inquiry into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal [in which Donald Rumsfeld was accused of misleading Congress] was pretty shocking. What was the most surprising revelation for you?
SH: I’ve given up being surprised by these guys. I would guess the bald affrontery of the contempt for Congress. We already know about their contempt for the press. Just going to Congress and misrepresenting what they know. And we all know they do it.
(Continued here.)
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