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| Fifth Column | |
| Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh speaks out. | |
| 2004-10-13 | |
The past two years will "go down as one of the classic sort of failures" in history, said the man who has been called the "greatest muckraker of all time" and (paradoxically) the "enfant terrible of journalism for more than 30 years." While Hersh blamed the White House and the Pentagon for the Iraq quagmire and America's besmirched world image, he was stymied by how it all happened. "How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?" From My Lai to Abu Ghraib That fragility clearly unnerves him. Hersh summarizes his mission as "to hold the people in public office to the highest possible standard of decency and of honesty
to tolerate anything less, even in the name of national security, is wrong." He tries his best. More than any other U.S. journalist alive today, he embodies the statement that "a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government," a belief defined by the conservationist Edward Abbey. | |
| Posted by:Hupereger Ebbigum6422 |
| #28 Sgt Mom, here are some good ones just off the top of my grape: 1) What Lieutenant's going to call Hersh from halfway around the world? What, on a cellphone in a combat zone? Failing to prevent a war crime and totally bucking the chain of command to include the Battalion C.O., Regimental C.O., Division C.O., etc. Doesn't wash. 2) Just happened to have Hersh's hotline or Hersh interviewed some guy dying to tell some bullshit that he himself was involved in, responsible for and failed to prevent. That's even too stupid for any Lieutenant I've ever known to include myself when I was one (and I did some real dumb shit). Sounds like Winter Soldier Part Deux. 3) There are strict rules of engagement and ethics every officer is entrusted to carry out to include refusing unlawful orders - this is drilled into us. Being a "zero" myself I can say w/100% certainty no Company Commander allowed this to happen - not today or under such black and white circumstances. I lmao when I first read it. 4) 43 Guys in one rifle platoon for us Gyrines, makes 86 if there's two. And Hersh is the first one to hear about this and this happened when? Give me a big fricken break. This would've gotten out big time, people would already be in the brig or getting thrown out w/a bcd. I don't know too many Lance Corporals that can keep a secret and their saying about 40 of them could here in this instance...bwhahahaha. 5) Human rights assholes would've been on this way before Hersh if we were whacking locals in some town in front of other locals. Perfect fodder for the jihadis and they missed it to? yeah, right. 6) If it sounds like hollywood bullshit - it is. Mikey J. Fox and commie Penn should be suing Hersh for infringement...he lifted the script from "Casualties of War" & ran w/it. |
| Posted by: Jarhead 2004-10-13 11:23:47 PM |
| #27 I never want to see more of hersh. the only good thing about hersh is that he will die sooner or later, and in 50 years nobody will remember who he was. his writing will end up burned on the world's trash heap. |
| Posted by: anymouse 2004-10-13 6:05:16 PM |
| #26 Hupereger Ebbigum6422, According to my 'unnamed, high-level, and in-the-know sources, Sy is a IDIOT! Much like his buddy Dan he has been wrong at pretty much every charge he has laid on this administration. He reminds of the sniveling little rat Krugman, who taught book cooking at the prestige’s Eron Corp (according to my sources). Can you honestly read that crap about the granary massacre, secret units disappearing, and claim this guy is playing with a full deck? Maybe he, Krugman, and you can share some nice blue pills together? Remember you need to take those daily. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2004-10-13 5:54:36 PM |
| #25 Jarhead, I am positive that the granary massacre is BS, and I want to see that story torn apart, and Seymour Hersh join Dan Rather in the corner of irrelevancy, but I don't have specifics, other than the conviction that you couldn't have 50 or so American military guys see this happening and not one do a thing about it. List and explain all the ways it is a BS story, from your point of view. I am afraid if this story is not immediatly and promptly debunked, it will live as long as the stories about the whacked-out, atrocity-committing Vietnam vet. I am sick to death of people making careers out of bogus atrocity stories. |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2004-10-13 4:30:24 PM |
| #24 The granary guard story is bullshit. If anyone else here has been in the military or with a grunt outfit within the last 10 years you'll know a half dozen reasons why it's bullshit off the bat. I still liked the camelot book though. |
| Posted by: Jarhead 2004-10-13 3:51:33 PM |
| #23 Sy Hersh can't name his sorces because there aren't any. He come from the Dan Rather school of journalism - if the facts don't suit the thesis, make them up. |
| Posted by: SR71 2004-10-13 3:33:48 PM |
| #22 master of super-informed and highly placed "unnamed" sources privy to all manner of embarrassing secrets! He makes that shit up |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-10-13 2:58:38 PM |
| #21 Hersh is fairly consistently wrong, misinformed (despite his "impeccable" sources) or operating from a separate set of assumptions from the rest of us. I quit reading anything he wrote when he wrote up the KAL007 shootdown in, I think, 1984, and managed to "prove" that a foreign airliner was, in fact, a U.S. intel collection platform and thus deserved to be shot down. Pfui. |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-10-13 2:51:15 PM |
| #20 Spemble: while corporations own the networks, it doesn't seem to have crimped the style of the left-wing reporters. 2 -- Sinclair isn't violating election laws, though I suspect they've tip-toed right up to the line. They have pretty good lawyers, and I'll bet the lawyers looked at this very carefully. 3 -- As to Farenheit 911: go ahead and broadcast it. More who see it the better, so that all can see just how desparate Michael Moore is. 4 -- While a journalist sometimes can't name sources, a reporter who never names sources isn't going to be credible. 5 -- Scott Ritter -- completely unreliable and unbelievable. 6 -- Hans Blix (aka Inspector Clouseau) -- ditto. You'll have to do better than Ritter and Blix. 7 -- Wilson -- unreliable and a political hack who didn't do the job he was sent to do. Rather damning for a government official, eh? Sy Hersh occasionally does good work. Problem is, he believes his own press releases. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2004-10-13 2:30:06 PM |
| #19 Can you imagine the furour if anyone tried to release Farenheit 9/11? Yeah. Wow. Thank God that'll never happen.People would be so pissed... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-10-13 2:23:16 PM |
| #18 lol spemble brains....nice try. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-10-13 2:14:24 PM |
| #17 Of course he can't name his sources. That's a retarded comment. Journalists are nothing without sources - give them up and you cease to be a journalist. Journalism as a whole gets demolished. And you can't base accusations on a single line of text taken out of CONtext. That's equally retarded. So far all Hersh has got are the drool marks from right-wing attack dogs who can't find any teeth to bite him with. Well, and you guys, of course. Who are nothing if not lovin' the right wing. Hersh brought the inevitable failure of this war to light when he talked to military and intelligence members almost one year ago, who all told him that the plan Bush had was untenable. Only now is it coming to light that he was right. Similarly he talked to both Scott Ritter and Hand Blix, both of whom were in charge of the search for WMD. He predicted that none would be found, as sanctions had made it impossible for Hussein to import any of the necessary materials. Two years ago he exposed the Bush camp's reliance on documents that "supposedly" proved that Hussein bought uranium from Nigeria. Like Ambassador Joseph Wilson before him, he discredited any claims that that might have been true, exposing those documents as crude forgeries that no one in the CIA actually believed, but which Cheney wanted very badly. You people have completely given up any form of "free press". Liberal bias is bullshit. Yes, reporters and artists are generally left wing. But who OWNS those networks? Who OWNS the airwaves? Which financial conglomerates are at the head of all information dissemination in your country? Look at Sinclair media - forcing 62 stations to air an attack-documentary about Kerry weeks before the election - contrary to US ELECTION LAW!. Can you imagine the furour if anyone tried to release Farenheit 9/11? The only reason Hersh seems like a crackpot is because he's employed by one of the only media outlets in the country financially secure enough to AFFORD to tell the truth. Thank god for New York. That city alone almost wipes out the shame of the American Bible-belt. |
| Posted by: Spemble Spains3686 2004-10-13 2:04:08 PM |
| #16 Oh, maybe a few days into the Afghanistan opertion when Mr. Hersh on the NBC Today program said, based upon 'unnamed sources' in DoD, that the entire operation was going wrong, busted. He was just putting his hat in the race to prejudge the campaign as a failure, disaster. The vote in a Afghanistan this weekend basically buried the nay sayers like Hersh. |
| Posted by: Don 2004-10-13 1:52:55 PM |
| #15 The Cult of Seymour Hersh Columnist John Lofton quotes Hersh in a 1984 interview with the University of Chicago magazine: "I'm not interested in history because I'm trying to change things." And a lot more. |
| Posted by: ed 2004-10-13 1:50:06 PM |
| #14 Okay, I'll accuse Hersh of lying. Better now? Have a cookie. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-10-13 1:48:46 PM |
| #13 What the fuck is wrong with you people? What in Seymour Hersh's record leads you to believe that he's lying? I don't even recall him ever being ACCUSED of lying. His facts are always impeccable, and his stories backed up by actual facts and photographs. Christ. This web site's a right-wing loony house. |
| Posted by: Hupereger Ebbigum6422 2004-10-13 1:41:27 PM |
| #12 This war will go down as one of Biblical proportions. Those who conducted can be assured their name will be in history books for centuries to come. Sy will be forgotten before his body is cold. |
| Posted by: Sheck Hupoluns8631 2004-10-13 1:13:06 PM |
| #11 Sy Hersh is auditioning to replace Dan Rather on Sixty Minutes II. |
| Posted by: doc 2004-10-13 12:42:18 PM |
| #10 I'm sorry, the story of the massacre of the granary guards just reeks... how the hell could two units (platoon-sized, apparently) full of eyewitnesses keep something like that quiet, especially in the internet age? You can't keep something like that quiet, not for very long. Even My Lai couldn't be "dissappeared". There were rumours afterwards, enough to get a journalist named Ron Ridenhour onto the story. |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2004-10-13 12:28:56 PM |
| #9 I saw him on the Daily New show with John Stuart and he was saying much of the same B.S. but amazingly enough the audience could not seem to get enough. John Stuart dropped his usual joking and practically rolled on the ground asking for his tummy to be rubbed. Pretty sad and amazing. |
| Posted by: robi 2004-10-13 12:23:38 PM |
| #8 I saw this Joker on MSNBC and he was prognosticating that Americans could not do business in the Middle East due to the war. He based this on the comment (probably over a bong) with one ‘Special Forces’ operative. I don’t think Sy has even been on Free Iraqi soil and yet he writes a book on how bad things are going? This book was a good talking point about two weeks ago. Today the Iraqi and U.S. forces are pushing the Jihadists out of most of the trouble spots so his predictions have been overcome by reality. Notice Kerry and Edwards have stopped predicting doom and gloom in Iraq. Sy was probably hoping for a quagmire to last until he could get his book published. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2004-10-13 12:14:49 PM |
| #7 Murat(or Hupereger Ebbigum6422, perhaps?) was a big Sy fan as I remember. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-10-13 11:29:29 AM |
| #6 I read his kennedy darkside camelot book - that was pretty good to go. He was on O'Reilly the other night trying to argue that our interrogation techniques are all wrong but gave no alternative to cracking the jihadis other then we need to gain their trust....I could only scratch my head at him. |
| Posted by: Jarhead 2004-10-13 11:20:28 AM |
| #5 Just how many of these keanulint-brains are there? |
| Posted by: Steve from Relto 2004-10-13 11:13:42 AM |
| #4 Can we please have a moratorium on posting lefty wet dreams? I mean, geez, Hersh? He's a lying sack of shit. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-10-13 10:59:48 AM |
| #3 No picture of the crowd kissing the hem of his hemp robe? |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2004-10-13 10:59:44 AM |
| #2 Sy! Live at Berkeley! There's a Lefty Wet Dream! |
| Posted by: tu3031 2004-10-13 10:50:51 AM |
| #1 Sy Hersh: Fake and inaccurate. |
| Posted by: Xbalanke 2004-10-13 10:49:28 AM |