Five Minutes With: Seymour Hersh

by Elana Berkowitz

Seymour Hersh, one of our finest investigative reporters and an unrepentant progressive provocateur, embodies the Edward Abbey quote that says “a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” His journalistic career began as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago in 1959, but he gained worldwide recognition when he uncovered the My Lai massacre and its subsequent cover-up during the Vietnam War, earning him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize. Now a staff writer at the New Yorker, he continues to prompt media firestorms with his reports on Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the War on Terror, and Iran at a time when many journalists duck controversy in favor of toeing the party line. His brutally honest and highly contentious style hasn’t always won him friends, but that doesn’t bother Hersh, who makes no bones about his concern for our country in the face of its neo-conservative leadership. Thirty-five years after his first big story, at a time when talking points, sound bites, right-wing talking heads, and spin pass as journalism, Hersh keeps soldiering on, turning out more critical muckraking journalism.

Seymour Hersh spoke with Campus Progress from his office in Washington, D.C.

You uncovered both My Lai and Abu Ghraib. My Lai and the Vietnam War had a really profound impact on students and student activism. Do you feel like Abu Ghraib has had the same impact? Are students as engaged with the issue?

Well, I can certainly tell you students in the Middle East and Europe now responded as intensely as back then. If you’re talking about Americans I think you’re basically right – there wasn’t the same sort of overwhelming shock. But the importance of Abu Ghraib in terms of damage to our reputation is every bit as significant as in My Lai in Europe and the Middle East, where we’re really in big trouble and growing in deeper trouble. Abu Ghraib had a horrific impact, particularly in cultures like in the Middle East where they view us as sexually perverse.

What kind of particular impact did the sexual nature of the abuse at Abu Ghraib have?

You just don’t do these kind of things to Muslim males; it is the equivalent of their highest form of torture. Arab society is built on shame – we’re built on guilt – sexual taboos are pretty extreme there. A man does not let another man see him naked, the homosexuality, the stimulated sex act, the woman giving the thumbs up there, all those were rocketed to the forefront.

The kids that have been prosecuted – the eight enlisted people who have either pled guilty or have been found guilty or are being prosecuted – before they got to Iraq, they were from rural Virginia, rural West Virginia. By any definition they were not particularly sophisticated, not particularly educated. The idea that they would somehow come to their own realization that the way to deconstruct the Muslim male and prepare him for interrogation was to sexually humiliate him and destroy him in a sense – there’s no way these people knew that. It was something told to them, and I don’t have to say what that means. I can’t demonstrate it, but I can say it suggests, as we now have a lot of reason to believe, that this sort of treatment was widespread and emanated from a higher level than that of a bunch of GIs in a prison in Iraq.

Despite this crisis and a litany of other international and domestic problems, this administration seems to be made of Teflon. Why aren’t more of these proven accusations sticking and making impact?

I think you can track a lot of stuff to 9/11. There was a sort of residual fear – not only among the population and Congress but among the press corps. Some people decided this was the time to be on the bandwagon, on the team. 9/11 was sort of a Pearl Harbor – they had this idea that we’re with the president or we’re against him – I think a lot of the press joined the team, and it became much easier to overlook stories that didn’t fit a mold. That’s just my guess.

Is this all attributable to September 11th? How did we get to where we are now?

We got panicked by 9/11 – all of us did. The president, the vice president, they all got scared, and they’re still scared. I think there’s a lot of fear; there’s also a lot of anger and a lot of wanting payback – that’s sort of another American tradition. We want to hit back at the people who killed all those people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The critical decision that Bush made – and that history will judge him very harshly on – is his decision that the road to fighting international terrorism led to Baghdad. It has had horrible consequences – there are well over 100,000 Iraqis killed and we don’t even count them. And there’s the growing death toll of Americans and the destruction of their society and the enmity we’ve created among the world that could lead to huge escalation in the price of oil and a collective attitude of hostility in the Middle East. I think history’s going to judge Bush as one of the worst presidents we’ve had. But he doesn’t think so. He’s convinced that he’s done the right thing, that if it doesn’t work now in Iraq, it’ll work in five, ten years, and fifty years from now, and that there’ll be democracy in the Middle East, Israel will be safe, the oil will be safe, and he will go down in history as one of the great presidents.

I read somewhere that when your My Lai story was first published there was an opinion poll that showed more than half of Americans didn’t think it should have been published. How did you respond to that?

One of the things about My Lai that was so different then was that it was 1969 – World War II. I was alive in the beginning of World War II – and I used to go to movies in the ‘40s and we’d always have these kind of propaganda movies with good old American boys – Dan Johnson and Robert Ryan would fly around in their fighter planes with silk scarves – we were always fighting “the Nips” in those movies and they wore these funny leather helmets and they always squinted. At a critical moment, one of the American pilots would kill a “Jap” and there’d be a tight close-up of the cockpit and we’d hear the plane start going down and we’d all be cheering. Right before the plane hit the water, a trickle of blood would come out the Jap’s mouth and we’d cheer more and he’d hit the water and die. And then you’d have the Nazis and the Nips, and here comes some guy 25 years later saying, “You know what? We don’t fight war any better than anybody who fought war any time. We may not have Holocausts – of course we don’t – but in terms of what happens in combat, bad things happen and we’re no better than anybody else.” It was trouble to say that back then.

Do you have any advice for aspiring young journalists?

I always tell students a few things. One is read before you write, and two is get the hell out of the way of the story – don’t overwrite the story, just tell it.

How do you keep on top of the news? What do you read?

I read the papers. I read foreign papers – I don’t just read the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. I read Al-Jazeera, I read Der Speigel, I go online – I read Haaretz, the Israeli daily, I read the London papers, particularly the Independent and the Guardian, which offer some very good work- so does the Telegraph. I read the blogs. I try to keep up with what’s going on so I have some idea. It’s hard. I mean, what is the percentage of students in college who understand the ins and outs of the war in Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia and Croatia? Most don’t know a thing about it. The average person just doesn’t. It’s complicated and hard so I just say get to know the tough issues.

You’ve spent years building up inside sources. How do you go about doing that?

After My Lai, a bunch of young officers in the Army who taught at West Point decided that the Army couldn’t go on this way. They had to put some radical changes into the thinking of the Army and a bunch of officers began turning to me. So I got to know a bunch of idealistic majors, lieutenants, colonels. There are people in the Army and CIA and the FBI who care just as much about the Bill of Rights and Constitution as anybody and they were very troubled by what was going on. So I began to know people who became generals – and once you know 3 and 4-star generals, you meet the next generation and then you just get to know people. Over the years, I’ve been lucky. I can do more reporting because I can call people who will talk to me. So, I guess nasty, brutal, dishonest wars are good for me professionally.

Are there any stories from last year that you think should have gotten more play in the American media?

The Swift Boat stuff always bothered me. I’m sure there was much more to that story. I thought that what happened at CBS with Dan Rather was an outrage. Dan Rather reported a story based on documents that no one to this day is sure are accurate, and whether they’re real or not they’re terribly consistent with everything else we know about the special treatment that Bush got. So the gist of the story was right but because the politics tilted the wrong way all those people got fired. I think it tells us how frightened the president and all the people around the president are. They’re really a bunch of little mice.

Needless to say, you are fairly outspoken. Have you ever been afraid of retribution?

Bush has called me a liar in print a couple of times, and people get mad at me. There’s a couple of guys at the Pentagon who scream and rant and rave about me publicly. I’m just as mainstream as them for trying to go after them. I am just as much of an American.