Hersh's book is on BARD. If BARD is unreachable because of the shutdown,
it's also on Bookshare.
Miriam
Banishing Truth
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir "Reporter,"
describes a moment when as a young reporter he overheard a Chicago cop admit
to murdering an African-American man. The murdered man had been falsely
described by police as a robbery suspect who had been shot while trying to
avoid arrest. Hersh frantically called his editor to ask what to do.
"The editor urged me to do nothing," he writes. "It would be my word versus
that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message
was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did." He describes
himself as "full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession
that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship."
Hersh, the greatest investigative reporter of his generation, uncovered the
U.S. military's chemical weapons program, which used thousands of soldiers
and volunteers, including pacifists from the Seventh-day Adventist Church,
as unwitting human guinea pigs to measure the impact of biological agents
including tularemia, yellow fever, Rift Valley fever and the plague. He
broke the story of the My Lai massacre. He exposed Henry Kissinger's
wiretapping of his closest aides at the National Security Council (NSC) and
journalists, the CIA's funding of violent extremist groups to overthrow the
Chilean President Salvador Allende, the CIA's spying on domestic dissidents
within the United States, the sadistic torture practices at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq by American soldiers and contractors and the lies told by the
Obama administration about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet he
begins his memoir by the candid admission, familiar to any reporter, that
there are crimes and events committed by the powerful you never write about,
at least if you want to keep your job. One of his laments in the book is his
decision not to follow up on a report he received that disgraced President
Richard Nixon had hit his wife, Pat, and she had ended up in an emergency
room in California.
Reporters embedded with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan routinely
witness atrocities and often war crimes committed by the U.S. military, yet
they know that access is dependent on keeping quiet. This collusion between
the press and the powerful is a fundamental feature of journalism, one that
even someone as courageous as Hersh, at least a few times, was forced to
accept. And yet, there comes a time when reporters, at least the good ones,
decide to sacrifice their careers to tell the truth. Hersh, relentlessly
chronicling the crimes of the late empire, including the widespread use of
torture, indiscriminate military strikes on civilian targets and targeted
assassinations, has for this reason been virtually blacklisted in the
American media. And the loss of his voice-he used to work for The New York
Times and later The New Yorker-is evidence that the press, always flawed,
has now been neutered by corporate power. Hersh's memoir is as much about
his remarkable career as it is about the death of investigative journalism
and the transformation of news into a national reality television show that
subsists on gossip, invective, officially approved narratives and leaks and
entertainment.
Investigative journalism depends not only on reporters such as Hersh, but as
importantly on men and women inside the systems of power who have the moral
courage to expose lies and make public crimes. Writing off any institution,
no matter how nefarious the activity, as filled with the irredeemable is a
mistake. "There are many officers, including generals and admirals, who
understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and
defend the Constitution and not the President, or an immediate superior," he
writes. "They deserve my respect and got it. Want to be a good military
reporter? Find those officers." One of the heroes in Hersh's book is Ron
Ridenhour, who served in a combat unit in Vietnam and who initiated the
army's investigation into the My Lai massacre and generously helped Hersh
track down eyewitnesses and participants.
The government's wholesale surveillance, however, has crippled the ability
of those with a conscience, such as Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, to
expose the crimes of state and remain undetected. The Obama administration
charged eight people under the Espionage Act of leaking to the media-Thomas
Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben,
Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden-effectively ending the
vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the
government.
This government persecution has, by default, left the exposure of government
lies, fraud and crimes to hackers. And this is the reason hackers, and those
who publish their material such as Julian Assange at WikiLeaks, are
relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state is to hermetically
seal their activities, especially those that violate the law, from outside
oversight or observation. And this goal is very far advanced.
Hersh notes throughout his memoir that, like all good reporters, he
constantly battled his editors and fellow reporters as much as he did the
government or corporations. There is a species of reporter you can see on
most cable news programs and on the floor of the newsrooms at papers such as
The New York Times who make their living as courtiers to the powerful. They
will, at times, critique the excesses of power but never the virtues of the
systems of power, including corporate capitalism or the motivations of the
ruling elites. They detest reporters, like Hersh, whose reporting exposes
their collusion.
The Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal was held in 1967 in Europe during
the Vietnam War. It included the testimony of three American soldiers who
spoke of watching soldiers and Marines routinely pump indiscriminate rounds
of ammunition into villages with no regard for civilian casualties. Most of
the American press dismissed the findings of the tribunal. The Times
foreign affairs columnist, C.L. Sulzberger, launched a venomous attack
against the Noble Prize-winning philosopher and mathematician, who was then
94 years old. Sulzberger, a member of the family that owned the paper, wrote
that Russell had "outlived his own conscious idea and become clay in
unscrupulous hands." The tribunal, Sulzberger went on, "cannot fairly be
laid at the door of the wasted peer whose bodily endurance outpaced his
brain."
Hersh, however, tipped off by the testimony at the tribunal, eventually
uncovered the My Lai massacre. But no publication would touch it. Magazines
such as Life and Look turned down the story. "I was devastated, and
frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was encountering in my
profession," Hersh writes. He finally published the story with the obscure,
anti-war Dispatch News Service. Major publications, including The New York
Times, along with Newsweek and Time, ignored the report. Hersh kept digging.
More lurid facts about the massacre came to light. It became too big to
dismiss, as hard as the mainstream media initially tried, and Hersh was
awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The only
officer convicted of the war crime, which left 106 men, women and children
dead, was Lt. William Calley, who spent three months and 13 days in prison.
Papers like the New York Times pride themselves on their special access to
the powerful, even if that access turns them into a public relations arm of
the elites. This desire for access-which news organizations feel gives them
prestige and an inside seat, although the information they are fed is
usually lies or half-truths-pits conscientious reporters like Hersh against
most editors and reporters in the newsroom. Hersh, who at the time was
working for the Times, describes sitting across from another reporter,
Bernard Gwertzman, who was covering Henry Kissinger and the NSC.
"There was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me," Hersh
writes. "On far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max Frankel's secretary
would approach Bernie and tell him that Max [the Times' bureau chief in
Washington] was at that moment on the phone with 'Henry' and the call would
soon he switched to him. Sure enough, in a few moments Bernie would avidly
begin scratching notes as he listened to Kissinger-he listened far more than
he talked-and the result was a foreign policy story that invariably led the
paper the next morning, with quotes from an unnamed senior government
official. After a week or two of observing the process, I asked the always
affable and straightforward Bernie if he ever checked what Henry was telling
him with Bill Rogers, the secretary of state, or Mel Laird at the Pentagon.
"Oh no,' he said. 'If I did that, Henry wouldn't speak to us.'"
The Washington Post broke the Watergate story, in which operatives for the
Nixon White House in June 1972 broke into the Democratic National Committee
headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington while Hersh was
at the Times. Kissinger's assurances-Hersh writes that Kissinger "lied the
way most people breathed"-that it was not an event of consequence saw the
top editors at The New York Times initially ignore it. The paper, however,
finally embarrassed by the revelations in The Washington Post, threw Hersh
onto the story, although the paper's executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, called
Hersh with a mixture of affection and wariness "my little commie."
Hersh left the paper after a massive expose he and Jeff Gerth wrote about
the corporation Gulf and Western, which carried out fraud, abuse, tax
avoidance and had connections with the mob, was rewritten by cautious and
timid editors. Charles Bluhdorn, the CEO of Gulf and Western, socialized
with the publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger. Bluhdorn used his connections
at the paper to discredit Hersh and Gerth, as well as bombard the paper with
accusatory letters and menacing phone calls. When Hersh filed his
15,000-word expose, the business editor, John Lee, and "his ass-kissing
coterie of moronic editors," perhaps fearful of being sued, neutered it. It
was one thing, Hersh found, to go up against a public institution. It was
something else to take on a private institution. He would never again work
regularly for a newspaper.
"The experience was frustrating and enervating," he writes. "Writing about
corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and
unnerved me. There would be no check on corporate America, I feared: Greed
had won out. The ugly fight with Gulf and Western had rattled the publisher
and the editors to the point that the editors who ran the business pages had
been allowed to vitiate and undercut the good work Jeff and I had done. .
The courage the Times had shown in confronting the wrath of a president and
an attorney general in the crisis over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was
nowhere to be seen when confronted by a gaggle of corporate con men. ."
His reporting, however, continued to relentlessly expose the falsifications
in official narratives. The Navy intelligence official, Jonathan Pollard,
for example, had been caught spying for Israel in 1985 and given a life
sentence. Hersh found that Pollard primarily stole documents on how the
United States spied on the Soviet Union. The Israeli government, Hersh
suspected, "was trading Pollard's information to Moscow in exchange for the
emigration of Soviet Jews with skills and expertise needed by Israel."
Pollard was released, after heavy Israeli pressure, in 2015 and now lives in
Israel.
The later part of Hersh's career is the most distressing. He was writing for
The New Yorker when Barack Obama was elected president. David Remnick, the
magazine's editor, socialized with Obama and was apparently wary of
offending the president. When Hersh exposed the fictitious narrative spun
out by the Obama administration about the killing of Bin Laden, the magazine
killed the story, running instead a report about the raid, provided by the
administration, from the point of view of one of the SEALs who was on the
mission. Hersh resigned. He published the account of the raid in the London
Review of Books, the beginning of his current exile to foreign publications.
When we most urgently need Hersh and good investigative reporters like him,
they have largely disappeared. A democracy, at best, tolerates them. A
failed democracy, like ours, banishes them, and when it does, it kills its
press.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-