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AGENT TIM OSMAN OF THE CIA.
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By Lisa O'Carroll via information clearing House and The Guardian.
By Lisa O'Carroll via information clearing House and The Guardian.
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Seymour
Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism –
close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of
editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of
journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
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It
doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh,
the
investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US
presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by
the Republican party as “the closest thing American
journalism has to a terrorist”.
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He is
angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their
failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular
messenger of truth.
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Don’t even
get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends “so
much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they
would” – or the death of Osama bin Laden. “Nothing’s been done
about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,”
he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.
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Hersh is
writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter
to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an
“independent” Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad
compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to
scrutiny. “The Pakistanis put out a report, don’t get me going
on it. Let’s put it this way, it was done with considerable
American input. It’s a bullshit report,” he says hinting of
revelations to come in his book.
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The Obama
administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the
leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print
titles, challenge him.
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“It’s
pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick
on this guy [Obama],” he declares in an interview with the
Guardian.
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“It used
to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic
happened, the president and the minions around the president had
control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would
do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that
doesn’t happen any more. Now they take advantage of something
like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.
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He isn’t
even sure if the recent revelations about the depth and breadth
of surveillance by the National Security Agency will have a
lasting effect.
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Hope of redemption
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Despite
his concern about the temerity of journalism he believes the
trade still offers hope of redemption.
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“I have
this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer
hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more
than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it’s not,
but at least we offer some way out, some integrity.”
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His story
of how he uncovered the My Lai atrocity is one of old-fashioned
shoe-leather journalism and doggedness. Back in 1969, he got a
tip about a platoon leader, William Calley, who had
been charged by the army with alleged mass murder.
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Instead of
picking up the phone to a press officer, he got into his car and
started looking for him in the army camp of Fort Benning in
Georgia, where he heard he had been detained. From door to door
he searched the vast compound, sometimes blagging his way,
marching up to the reception, slamming his fist on the table and
shouting: “Sergeant, I want Calley out now.”
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Eventually
his efforts paid off
with
his first story appearing in the St Louis Post-Despatch,
which was then syndicated across America and eventually earned
him the Pulitzer Prize. “I did five stories. I charged $100 for
the first, by the end the [New York] Times were paying $5,000.”
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He was
hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal
and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years
later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his
exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
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Put in the hours
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For
students of journalism his message is put the miles and the
hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could
write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army
officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to
Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their
families asking them to come and kill them because they had been
“despoiled”.
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“I went
five months looking for a document, because without a document,
there’s nothing there, it doesn’t go anywhere.”
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Hersh
returns to US president Barack Obama. He has said before that
the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government
collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than
Bush.
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“Do you
think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has
Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention
to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are
not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the
hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on
[with journalists]?” he asks.
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He says
investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis
of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what
the job entails.
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“Too much
of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It’s journalism looking
for the Pulitzer Prize,” he adds. “It’s a packaged journalism,
so you pick a target like – I don’t mean to diminish because
anyone who does it works hard – but are railway crossings safe
and stuff like that, that’s a serious issue but there are other
issues too.
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“Like
killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone
programme, why aren’t we doing more? How does he justify it?
What’s the intelligence? Why don’t we find out how good or bad
this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or
three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don’t we do our
own work?
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“Our job
is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here’s a
debate’ our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who’s
right and who’s wrong about issues. That doesn’t happen enough.
It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardises, it raises risks.
There are some people – the New York Times still has
investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying
water for the president than I ever thought they would … it’s
like you don’t dare be an outsider any more.”
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He says in
some ways President George Bush’s administration was easier to
write about. “The Bush era, I felt it was much easier to be
critical than it is [of] Obama. Much more difficult in the Obama
era,” he said.
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Asked what
the solution is Hersh warms to his theme that most editors are
pusillanimous and should be fired.
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“I’ll tell
you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist
and start promoting editors that you can’t control,” he says. I
saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are
the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and
what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don’t get
promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye
and say ‘I don’t care what you say’.
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Nor does
he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden
files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.
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If Hersh
was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy
wouldn’t stop with newspapers.
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“I would
close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all
over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this
– just do something different, do something that gets people mad
at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” he says.
Hersh is
currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which
undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush
and Obama.
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“The
republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become
the State norm.” And he implores journalists to do something about
it.
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