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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