Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has won a Pulitzer prize in addition to various other awards for his work.

He is perhaps best known for covering the My Lai incident during the Vietnam war as well as the US prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

In 2015, Hersh wrote an article for the London Review of Books alleging that Barack Obama had lied about the circumstances surrounding the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

How the US Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline

Hersh wrote "I’ve been a freelancer for much of my career. In 1969, I broke the story of a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who had committed a horrific war crime They were ordered to attack an ordinary peasant village where, as a few officers knew, they would get no opposition—and told to kill on sight. The boys murdered, raped and mutilated for hours, with no enemy to be found. The crime was covered up at the top of the military chain of command for eighteen months—until I uncovered it.

I won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for that work, but getting it before the American public was no easy task. I wasn’t an established journalist working for an established outfit. My first story, published under a barely existent wire service run by a friend of mine, was initially rejected by the editors at Life and Look magazines. When the Washington Post finally published it, they littered it with Pentagon denials and the unthinking skepticism of the rewrite man.

I’ve been told my stories were wrong, invented, outrageous for as long as I can remember—but I’ve never stopped. In 2004, after I published the first stories about the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a Pentagon spokesman responded by calling my journalism “a tapestry of nonsense.” (He also said I was a guy who “threw a lot of crap against the wall” and “expects someone to peel off what’s real.” I won my fifth George Polk Award for that work.)

I’ve put in my time at the major outlets, but was never at home there. More recently, I wouldn’t be welcome anyway. Money, as always, was part of the problem. The Washington Post and my old newspaper, The New York Times (to name just a few), have found themselves in a cycle of dwindling home delivery, newsstand sales, and display advertisements. CNN and its offspring, like MSNBC and Fox News, battle for sensational headlines over investigative journalism. There are still many brilliant journalists at work, but so much of the reporting has to be within guidelines and constraints that did not exist in the years I was turning out daily stories for the Times.

What you’ll find here is, I hope, a reflection of that freedom. The story you will read today is the truth as I worked for three months to find, with no pressure from a publisher, editors or peers to make it hew to certain lines of thought—or pare it back to assuage their fears. Substack simply means reporting is back . . . unfiltered and unprogrammed—just the way I like it."

Criticism

According to Jonathan Pollard, Hersh has a "long history of visceral anti-Americanism, which resonates with the journalistic elite." Pollard was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act in 1987 after pleading guilty to selling numerous closely guarded state secrets, including the National Security Agency's ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies.

See also

• John Brennan
• Abbottabad raid

External link

The Redirection, Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, February 2007.