'There To Tell the Truth'
Seymour Hersh on journalism, politics, presidents, and war
By Michael King, Fri., March 30, 2012
(Page 4 of 4)
On the American Future
There are a couple things that are really strong about America, no matter what. There's no question of an economic decline, and our military disasters have certainly reduced it, but we have a legal system that is very strong. So people are always going to be interested in investing in America, because when, unlike in most places in the world, if you run into a legal problem, you have a recourse. Nobody's going to want to spend a lot of money investing in Russia or some of these places, so we have a real advantage in that our legal system is still very strong and very vibrant. So I don't see any reluctance to soak up American dollars, as the Asians, South Korea, and China – although they hold a great deal of our debt.
On the economic side, they say it's improving. I don't see that much growth, but it's improving in some sectors, I guess.
On the other stuff – the whole neo-con stuff, the Paul Wolfowitz stuff that we all read about – that all stemmed from when Russia fell. I have a simple view of that, which is, the whole neo-con mantra began: Russia fell, and then we helped Russia get rid of some of the old nuclear arms in the Ukraine and in Georgia. We monitored the redeployment or the destruction of weapons. So the whole neo-con idea was: "We are now number one. We've got more nukes than anybody else; we can outnuke anybody. China knows that we can out-nuke them, and the Russians are now second-rate." So what emerges is the want nobody that we don't have some confidence in – to wit, anybody in the Arab world who doesn't like Israel (at least in Wolfowitz's case) – to ever get a bomb.
And that's why there was so much anger about Iraq. They believed Iraq had a bomb. I really think it was very primitive – it was the idea that we're going to be first, always. Well, that's not going to happen anymore, because the technology has spread.
But I don't think you can write off America. I just don't think so. We're such a powerful engine. The Chinese are not looking for a fight with us. We have a lot of inherent racism. I always make a joke my family is tired of me making, about Clinton. In 1999, he bombed the former Yugoslavia, and therefore became the first president since World War II to bomb white people. That's just a fact, so make your own view about it.
Obviously, I have strong feelings about our willingness to kill Asians and others, so I'm biased. But we're not liked anymore, and what worries me is the next step is, so far it really hasn't transferred too much to ordinary Americans. There's been an understanding; they don't like America, and there was a great deal of shock around the world when Bush was reelected. I travel all the time in the Middle East, and I still feel safe. But an American [Joel Shrum] got killed in Yemen, somebody doing good work, something with disabled children – doing God's work, if you believe in that. I don't like to think they'll start willy-nilly killing us.
I'll tell you something about Pashtun society. When we first bombed – I don't believe we had to go to war with Afghanistan, in the fall of '01 – I'm in the minority on that – I just think that was an unnecessary war, and I can tell you, there were a lot more people inside who thought, "there's another way to do it," than has been let on. And among other things, I also don't believe that we really know who did 9/11, in the sense that bin Laden was certainly part of the team and all that, but I think most of it was done in Hamburg, with [Mohamed] Atta – bin Laden didn't know that much.
On the Bin Laden Documents
I don't know if you've been reading the paper, but David Ignatius, a columnist for The Washington Post, was given a look at a bunch of bin Laden's scribblings ... and they show that he was ranting and raving, and David dutifully reported what he was told. These are papers taken from the home he was living in – but I'll use the word "prison." I'm writing about it in the book, and I won't say a lot about it, but don't believe what you read in the press.
He writes about bin Laden, and he says a lot of stuff about he's going to kill Obama and install a nincompoop, Biden .... These papers are there; they're going to be released to all the press. All right – what you want to do is go back about May 8th or 9th, in the aftermath of the bin Laden stuff, a man named [John] Brennan is briefing the press like crazy on background. Brennan is sort of the henchman of the White House, the apparatchik – I really don't like that guy. I never met him, but he's a menace. So what were you told after they did the raid? Do you remember the words "treasure trove"? "There was a treasure trove of documents that not only are so hot, there's a team called in, we're going to be translating them instantly, and lo and behold, we have made some strikes in the last few days, based on those documents, that have eviscerated – that have decimated, whatever the word is – that have wiped out the remnants of al Qaeda etc. etc."
So now it turns out, that the documents they talked about in May are a lot of mumbling and jumbling – with a lot of porno, remember that line. So I'm just at a loss to know how you cope with all this crap, why the press doesn't do a better job, why nobody remembers ... why somebody can't ask the question in the last two or three days: "Wait a minute, they told us this was a treasure trove. Look what it is; it turns out to be a bunch of crap. What the hell's going on here?" Nobody does that anymore. No memory.
From the Glickman Lecture, March 22:
On American Contradictions
I should really begin with a little bit of praise for America. That's just to say, I grew up from an immigrant family, first generation; my parents didn't get through high school. They worked hard; we were lower middle-class, I went to public schools, didn't pay for education, my father died young, and I went to a free public junior college. A professor dragged me over to the University of Chicago, where I went to school for just a few hundred bucks a year, some kind of a discounted rate. I was not headed to the Yale Daily News, The Harvard Crimson, or even The Daily Texan.
So here I am, 11 years after graduating with a B.A. in English and History, from the University of Chicago, in 1969. I come from basically nowhere to stick two fingers in the eye of a sitting American president, Richard Nixon. He had campaigned for the presidency and won it by telling Americans that he had a plan to end the war – it turned out his plan to end the war was to win it. In the middle of all this, I write these series of articles as a freelance writer, about this horrible [My Lai] massacre in Vietnam. A bunch of American boys, good boys, trained to kill and be killed, go into a village expecting to find the enemy. They don't find the enemy, and for five or six hours – they took a lunch break – murdered about 555 people in cold blood.
So I wrote this story, and I'm aware, that in a lot of societies, I would be purged, I would be exiled, I would be put into a camp. Who knows what would happen to me? But not in America. In America, one gets lionized, one wins a lot of prizes, one is deified by colleagues and peers. So, for anybody to think that I come to criticism easily or I don't love my country – not that anybody does – but I always want to say that, because it's an amazing place, and there's a strong belief here, no matter how much we yip and yap about it. And the public goes and complains about the press and the media, and there's too much exposure, and how dumb it is. Anybody who tries to tamper with the First Amendment runs into a wall of opposition. And that's something very strong, and inherent, and very powerful, unlike any other country.
You just don't have this Jeffersonian democracy. The way it works in America is it's their job to keep the secrets, and it's my job to find them. Nothing can stop me or bar me, no classification, no law – it's an amazing society. They're working on it – the government's always to working to improve [its power]. But the First Amendment's very strong.
So I say this because, now that I have done that – let me explain why we are screwed, hated, and in real trouble all over the world.
On the Failure of Memory
I'm going to talk about the details, but one of the things that always amazes me is this total sense of tabula rasa in America. Here we go, we slogged through Vietnam, not understanding the culture, not beginning to understand why we're there – thinking perhaps we're there to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Not knowing even, for example – some of you are old enough to remember – we were told we had to fight in Vietnam to stop the spread of Chinese communism – not knowing that Vietnam and China had fought forever and would fight again in 1979, after the war was over.
We do it again in Iraq. We come in to a culture – we don't know a thing about the culture. We think we're there to stop Saddam Hussein from having nuclear weapons that he does not have.
And now, here we are again in Afghanistan, fighting a war against – I wouldn't call them monstrous, I'd just call them very, very backward – fighting a war against an Arab society, the Taliban, who, the last thing on their agenda is to come to New York and knock down a building. There is no national security threat from the Taliban; we all know that. We all know that we're in some big, horrible morass. I personally just can't wait for the peace talks to begin, so the Taliban can take our surrender and we can figure our way out of there. It's been a no-go from the very beginning.
So the lack of a learning curve is really very depressing. I don't know if we're in worse shape than we've ever been, but we're in pretty bad shape.
I've been doing a book for a couple of years on Dick Cheney, and what happened inside that vice president's office. And I have some access to stuff that's interesting, and it's pretty horrible, and the word "constitution" doesn't mean much. ... But some of the worst elements of that Bush/Cheney government, we maintain today. There's no question about it. Renditions? Yes – we still rendition. We still feel we have the right to kill Americans abroad without due process; in fact, we had the attorney general say a few weeks ago in a speech in Ann Arbor, that "due process" doesn't mean "due justice." Explaining that, "Trust us – we can kill an American because we, the executive, can make a decision that he's a bad guy – we don't need to bring it to any judicial or some outside party. We can make the decision ourselves, we who have been so wonderful and dependable, we can do it. It's something the founding fathers –" ... Well, I don't need to go on with that.
*Sponsorship corrected. We'll post more from Seymour Hersh's Glickman lecture as time and available labor allow.
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