by
Chris Hedges
The
investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir “Reporter,”
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.
“The
editor urged me to do nothing,” he writes. “It 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.” He describes himself as “full of despair at my
weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with
compromise and self-censorship.”
Hersh,
the greatest investigative reporter of his generation, uncovered the
U.S. military’s 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.
He
exposed Henry Kissinger’s wiretapping of his closest aides at the
National Security Council (NSC) and journalists, the CIA’s funding
of violent extremist groups to overthrow the Chilean President
Salvador Allende, the CIA’s 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.
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—he used to work for The New York Times and later The
New Yorker—is evidence that the press, always flawed, has now
been neutered by corporate power.
Hersh’s
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.
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. “There 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,” he writes. “They
deserve my respect and got it. Want to be a good military reporter?
Find those officers.”
One of
the heroes in Hersh’s book is Ron Ridenhour, who served in a combat
unit in Vietnam and who initiated the army’s investigation into the
My Lai massacre and generously helped Hersh track down eyewitnesses
and participants.
The
government’s 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—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim,
Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou
and Edward Snowden—effectively ending the vital connection between
investigative reporters and sources inside the government.
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
at 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.
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.
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. 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 “outlived his own conscious idea and become
clay in unscrupulous hands.” The tribunal, Sulzberger went on,
“cannot fairly be laid at the door of the wasted peer whose
bodily endurance outpaced his brain.”
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. “I was
devastated, and frightened by the extent of self-censorship I was
encountering in my profession,” 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. 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.
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—which news
organizations feel gives them prestige and an inside seat, although
the information they are fed is usually lies or half-truths—pits
conscientious reporters like Hersh against most editors and reporters
in the newsroom. 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.
“There
was a near-daily ritual involving Bernie that stunned me,”
Hersh writes. “On far too many afternoons around 5:00, Max
Frankel’s secretary would approach Bernie and tell him that Max
[the Times’ bureau chief in Washington] was at that moment on the
phone with ‘Henry’ 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—he listened far more than he
talked—and 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. “Oh no,’ he said. ‘If I
did that, Henry wouldn’t speak to us.’”
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’s
assurances—Hersh writes that Kissinger “lied the way most
people breathed”—that 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’s
executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, called Hersh with a mixture of
affection and wariness “my little commie.”
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 “Punch”
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 “his ass-kissing coterie of
moronic editors,” 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.
“The
experience was frustrating and enervating,” he writes. “Writing
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. … 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.
…”
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, “was
trading Pollard’s information to Moscow in exchange for the
emigration of Soviet Jews with skills and expertise needed by
Israel.” Pollard was released, after heavy Israeli pressure, in
2015 and now lives in Israel.
The
later part of Hersh’s career is the most distressing. He was
writing for The New Yorker when Barack Obama was elected
president. David Remnick, the magazine’s 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.
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