Encyclopedia: Seymour Hersh
Seymour Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.
Hersh was born in Chicago and graduated from the University of Chicago. He began his career in journalism as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in 1959. He later became a correspondent for United Press International in South Dakota. In 1963 went on to become a Chicago and Washington DC correspondent for the Associated Press. Five years later, Hersh was hired as a reporter for The New York Times Washington Bureau, where he served from 1972 to 1975 and again in 1979.
His book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House won him the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times book prize in biography. Hersh has written a total of eight books and contributed to the PBS television documentary, Buying the Bomb (1985).
Hersh currently contributes regularly to The New Yorker on military and security matters. A 2004 article investigated exactly how Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld circumvented the normal intelligence analysis function of the CIA in their quest to make a case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His coverage of Richard Perle in another article, Lunch with the Chairman, led Perle to say that Hersh was the "closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist." Perle publicly threatened to sue Hersh for libel in England where the standard of proof is much lower, but failed to file suit before the statute of limitations ran out.
In May 2004, Hersh published a series of articles describing and showing with photos the torture by US military police of prisoners in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib. There are allegations that private contractors contributed to them as well and that intelligence such as the CIA ordered them in order to break prisoners for interrogations. It is said to be a usual practice in other US prisons as well, e.g. in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Hersh went on to publish an article claiming that the abuses were part of a secret interrogations program, known as "Copper Green", expanded to Iraq with the direct approval of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in an attempt to deal with the growing insurgency there.
At a Columbia University speech given by Hersh in June 2004, author Rick Perlstein reported
[Hersh] said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children and women prisoners, as the cameras run." [http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000987.html] and at an ACLU convention in July 2004, he further detailed information he had been given about sexual tortures in Abu Ghraib [http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/2004/07/14.html#a1922]. He claims that there is video footage, being held by the Bush administration, of American soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war."
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Seymour Hersh is a brilliant award winning journalist. |
