Seymour Hersh: The Man Who Knows Too Much

Seymour Hersh: The Man Who Knows Too Much

He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib... No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as 'the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist'. Rachel Cooke meets the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington

by Rachel Cooke


Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. 'Brad Pitt loved this place,' says Hersh with a wolfish grin. 'It totally fits the cliché of the grungy reporter's den!' When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated - the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It's not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees, trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems, each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers. By the time I look at Hersh again - the full panorama takes a moment or two - he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its horns on it.


American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Photograph: Martha Camarillo

And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their scoop, they describe him - the competition. He was unlike any reporter they'd ever seen: 'Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and rumpled, bleached khakis.' Forty years on, little has changed. Today he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and - thanks to a tennis injury - he is walking like an old guy: chest forward, knees bandy, slight limp in one leg. There is something cherishably chaotic about him. A fuzzy halo of frantic inquiry follows him wherever he goes, like the cloud of dust that hovers above Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown strip. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his thoughts pour forth, unmediated and - unless you concentrate very hard - seemingly unconnected. 'Yeah, I shoot my mouth off,' he says, with faux remorse. 'There's a huge difference between writing and thinking.' Not that he has much time for those who put cosy pontification over the graft of reporting: 'I think... My colleagues! I watch 'em on TV, and every sentence begins with the words: "I think." They could write a book called I Think.'

But we must backtrack a little. Before the office, there is the breakfast joint. Hersh and I meet at the Tabard Inn, a Washington hangout so gloomily lit I could do with a torch. He has poached eggs and coffee and 'none of that other stuff, thanks'. (I think he means that he doesn't want potatoes with his eggs). Like everyone in America just now, he is on tenterhooks. A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds that he might 'jinx it'. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. 'You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January ,' he says, with relish. '{They say:} "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.' He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won't change anything - 'They've got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney {for war crimes} is kidding themselves' - it will reveal how the White House 'set out to sabotage the system... It wasn't that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.'

In one way, it's amazing Hersh has anything left to say about Bush, Cheney and their antics. Then again, with him, this pushing of a story on and on is standard practice. Though it was Woodward and Bernstein who uncovered the significance of the burglary at the Watergate building, Hersh followed up their scoop by becoming one of Nixon's harshest critics and by breaking stories about how the government had supported Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile, secretly bombed Cambodia and used the CIA to spy on its domestic enemies. His 1983 book about Nixon, The Price of Power, is definitive. So far as the War on Terror goes, Hersh has already delivered his alternative history - Chain of Command, a book based on the series of stories he wrote for the New Yorker in the aftermath of 9/11 and following Bush's invasion of Iraq. Among other things, Hersh told us of the bungled efforts to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; of the dubious business dealings of the superhawk Richard Perle - a report that led to Perle's resignation as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (Hersh alleged that Perle improperly mixed his business affairs with his influence over US foreign policy when he met the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in 2003. Perle described Hersh as 'the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist' and threatened to sue before falling oddly silent); and of how Saddam's famous efforts to buy uranium in Africa, as quoted by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, were a fiction. Most electrifying of all, however, was his triple salvo on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It was Hersh who first revealed the full extent of this torture, for which he traced the ultimate responsibility carefully back to the upper reaches of the administration. 'In each successive report,' writes David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, in his introduction to Chain of Command, 'it became clear that Abu Ghraib was not an "isolated incident" but, rather, a concerted attempt by the government and the military leadership to circumvent the Geneva Conventions in order to extract intelligence and quell the Iraqi insurgency.' As Remnick points out, this reporting has 'stood up over time and in the face of a president whose calumny has turned out to be a kind of endorsement'. Bush reportedly told Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that Hersh was 'a liar'; after the third of his reports on Abu Ghraib, a Pentagon spokesman announced that Hersh merely 'threw a lot of crap against the wall and he expects someone to peel off what's real. It's a tapestry of nonsense.'

Earlier this year, Hersh turned his attention to Iran: to Bush's desire to bomb it and to America's covert operations there. But while Hersh believes the President would still dearly love to go after Iran, the danger of that actually happening has now passed. Events, not least the sinking of the global economy, have moved on. So he is shortly to write about Syria instead, which he has recently visited. In the dying days of the Bush administration, he says, it is noticeably easier to meet contacts - Cheney, the enforcer, is a lot less powerful - and the information he is getting is good. By coincidence, it was in Syria that he first heard about what was going on inside Abu Ghraib, long before he saw documentary evidence of it. 'I got in touch with a guy inside Iraq during the Prague Spring after the fall of Baghdad, a two-star guy from the old regime. He came up to Damascus by cab. We talked for four days, and one of the things we talked about was prisons. He told me that some of the women inside had been sending messages to their fathers and brothers asking them to come and kill them because they'd been molested. I didn't know whether it was GIs playing grab ass or what, but it was clear that the women had been shamed. So when I first heard about the photographs, I knew they were real. Did I think the story would be as big as it was? Yeah. But was it as big as My Lai? No.' Only a handful of relatively lowly military personnel have so far been punished for their part in the abuse, and Colonel Janis Karpinski, the commander of the Iraqi prisons, was merely demoted (from Brigadier General), in spite of the fact that the Taguba Report, the internal US army report on detainee abuse that was leaked to Hersh, singled her out for blame. 'And John Kerry wouldn't even use it {Abu Ghraib} in his campaign. He didn't want to offend the military, I assume.'

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/10/19-3

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Sold out.

for us. If he falls or falters we will be much nearer to our demise as a republic.

Thanks for posting this, babylonsister.

It was at an investigative journalism conference hosted by a Canadian university's J-school. I was photographing the conference as a budding wannabe photojournalist, and I was in total awe of the man. He's been my journalistic hero ever since My Lai. The US is very lucky to have someone like him working to keep your power brokers honest (or at least keep their heads down). What a man.

Thanks for posting this.:thumbsup:

'You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January ,' he says, with relish. '{They say:} "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.' He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won't change anything - 'They've got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney {for war crimes} is kidding themselves' - it will reveal how the White House 'set out to sabotage the system... It wasn't that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.'

I can't wait until they call him on the 20th of Jan. So...they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene," huh? That's fucking treason. I, for one, will not rest until they put these fuckers in prison. No American should.

would still be Presidential secrets.

You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January ,' he says, with relish. '{They say:} "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.'