Seymour Hersh: The Good American
Are Americans as well-informed as it would appear, given the country’s mind-boggling number of media outlets? According to this feature article from Germany’s Die Zeit, it takes a man like journalist Seymour Hersh to ‘to open their eyes about their own country.’
The people of New York are surrounded by media. Nonetheless, it took an hour of questions and answers with star journalist Seymour Hersh to open their eyes about their own country.
By Eva Schweitzer
Translated By Ulf Behncke
October 7, 2008
Germany – Die Zeit – Original Article (German)
New York is globally connected like no other city in the world. Here, there are 350 television channels including the BBC and Al-Jazeera, the Internet via cable, DSL or WiFi, newspapers from overseas, AP, Reuters, The New York Times and the news studios of CNN, Fox and NBC. Nevertheless, even New York seems at times strangely disconnected from the world. “Plato imagined prisoners in a cave, backs to its opening, who saw reality as shadows reflected off a wall,” writes journalist Mort Rosenblum . America, he says, is still very much like this to this very day.
Every now and then, though, a saber-toothed tiger breaks into the cave and delivers real news, as occurred on Saturday at a festival for The New Yorker magazine at the Directors Guild Theatre, where Sy Hersh spoke. Hersh reports for the magazine on what the Pentagon and CIA are up to, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in Iran. Over 500 people came (and paid), to hear about it first hand. Amazing in a city where one trips over the media at ever step.
Utterly unpretentiously, Hersh sits on the stage casually dressed and jokes with his editor-in-chief David Remnick, all the while saying the most unbelievable things. Iran? Yes, an attack against Iran is imminent (Hersh reported this just recently in The New Yorker ), but against small targets like training camps and the Revolutionary Guard. “The U.S. has specialists at the borders who, with the assistance of Kurdish and Israeli experts, install “eavesdropping boxes” capable of listening into buildings in Teheran. “We know what’s going on in Iran” Hersh says. The nuclear bomb will take another five years. The bomb is a threat – first and foremost to Israel because it means the end of Zionism. “Once Iran has the bomb, the middle class will give up and say, ‘We’d rather go to Argentina or London, where we can live in peace.’”
The war on terror? “If it comes out, what really happens in Guantanamo Bay, we will all be very ashamed.” This is equally true of Abu Ghraib. “Iraqi girls who are imprisoned there, have begged their fathers to kill them because they were dishonored. I saw photos of GI’s grabbing at naked Iraqi women and girls while showering.” And there are twelve countries in which the CIA or their local henchmen can torture. “Afterwards, they burn the bodies, so that no trace can be found.”
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5 Responses to “Seymour Hersh: The Good American”
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Call me a cynic, but it is my belief most Americans don’t believe these sort of damning revelations for the simple reason they don’t WANT to believe them. What a luxury, to so blithely disconnect ones reality from actual events because they don’t give us the funhouse mirror image of America we prefer to imagine.
I know Mr. Hersh is a respected prize winning author. His writing shines a light on the dard side of things we should know about.
Someitmes, I cna’t help wishing I could ask him: ‘How do you know this?” So many of his sources are anonymous, and it’s often unclear if certain information comes from just one source or if it has been corroborated by others.
I don’t know if this tiny pellet of scepticism comes from Mr. Hersh in particular or from the experience of so many exposes lately that are followed by denials from the people quoted as soon as the book comes out.
There seems to be an element of he said,/ he said about nearly everything these days.
It’s true, though. Sometimes the best sources for US news are in other countreis We don’t get anything like a full picture here, the gazillions of news outlets notwithstanding.
Yes, its an uncomfortable subject for Americans. And Hersh has made himself unpopular by writing about them. But how many times have we seen public officials accidentally give their honest assessments, only to retract them when they realized that they were damaging to the administration?
I must admit that the lack of candor by the WH and its agents on Iraq and Iran, has led me to give more credence to Hersh’s accounts.
Hersh may be unpopular, but I’m glad he’s out there digging up the inconvenient truth. Investigative reporting seems to be going the way of the dinosaur, with more and more newspapers choosing just to mindlessly repeat AP reports, and editorial writers taking increasing liberties with the facts.
Krit-
I agee 1000% about investigative reporting.
I just think that there is a bit of a dilemma here.
Bacuse X is uncovered as having lied, there is the tendency to take everything the debunker says on faith. One liar can truthfully expose another liar.
This having NOTHING TO DO WITH HERSH, I just think we should retain some scepticism and back checking about all news reports, whether the source is the WH or an investigative reporter..