{"id":124784,"date":"2018-12-31T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=124784"},"modified":"2018-12-25T16:58:37","modified_gmt":"2018-12-25T16:58:37","slug":"banishing-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/12\/banishing-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Banishing Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Seymour Hersh – Mr. Fish \/ Truthdig<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Dec 2018 – <\/em>The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh<\/a>, in his memoir \u201cReporter<\/a>,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe editor urged me to do nothing,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt 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.\u201d He describes himself as \u201cfull of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hersh, the greatest investigative reporter of his generation<\/a>, uncovered the U.S. military\u2019s 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<\/a>. He exposed Henry Kissinger\u2019s wiretapping of his closest aides at the National Security Council (NSC) and journalists, the CIA\u2019s funding of violent extremist groups to overthrow the Chilean President Salvador Allende, the CIA\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014he used to work for The New York Times and later The New Yorker\u2014is evidence that the press, always flawed, has now been neutered by corporate power. Hersh\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThere 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,\u201d he writes. \u201cThey deserve my respect and got it. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.\u201d One of the heroes in Hersh\u2019s book is Ron Ridenhour, who served in a combat unit in Vietnam and who initiated the army\u2019s investigation into the My Lai massacre and generously helped Hersh track down eyewitnesses and participants.<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s 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\u2014Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden\u2014effectively ending the vital connection between investigative reporters and sources inside the government.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>\u00a0at 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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 \u201coutlived his own conscious idea and become clay in unscrupulous hands.\u201d The tribunal, Sulzberger went on, \u201ccannot fairly be laid at the door of the wasted peer whose bodily endurance outpaced his brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI was devastated, and frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was encountering in my profession,\u201d 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014which news organizations feel gives them prestige and an inside seat, although the information they are fed is\u00a0usually lies or half-truths\u2014pits conscientious reporters like Hersh against most editors and reporters in the newsroom.<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me,\u201d Hersh writes. \u201cOn far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max Frankel\u2019s secretary would approach Bernie and tell him that Max [the Times\u2019 bureau chief in Washington] was at that moment on the phone with \u2018Henry\u2019 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\u2014he listened far more than he talked\u2014and 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. \u201cOh no,\u2019 he said. \u2018If I did that, Henry wouldn\u2019t speak to us.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s assurances\u2014Hersh writes that Kissinger \u201clied the way most people breathed\u201d\u2014that 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\u2019s executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, called Hersh with a mixture of affection and wariness \u201cmy little commie.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cPunch\u201d 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 \u201chis ass-kissing coterie of moronic editors,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe experience was frustrating and enervating,\u201d he writes. \u201cWriting 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. \u2026 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. \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cwas trading Pollard\u2019s information to Moscow in exchange for the emigration of Soviet Jews with skills and expertise needed by Israel.\u201d Pollard was released, after heavy Israeli pressure, in 2015 and now lives in Israel.<\/p>\n

The later part of Hersh\u2019s career is the most distressing. He was writing for The New Yorker when Barack Obama was elected president. David Remnick, the magazine\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/em>Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for <\/em>The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and<\/em> The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at <\/em>The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the <\/em>Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The <\/em>Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in <\/em>Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his <\/em>Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at <\/em>The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n

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