Sy Hersh on Osama bin Laden raid: “Not one word of it is true”
Legendary journalist unloads on lapdog media in Guardian interview
As reported by The Guardian on Friday, iconic journalist Seymour Hersh tore apart America’s mainstream media before an audience at City University in London, calling for the sacking of 90 percent of editors and claiming that the story of the killing of Osama bin Laden is “one big lie” and that “not one word of it is true.”
The 76-year-old Hersh, who made his name by reporting the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War — and who also revealed torture at Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker in 2004 — leveled a scathing indictment of contemporary American journalism, describing it as a field littered with timid careerists and water-carrying hacks.
“Our job [as journalists] is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here’s a debate’ our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who’s right and who’s wrong about issues,” Hersh said. “That doesn’t happen enough. It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardizes, it raises risks. There are some people – the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it’s like you don’t dare be an outsider any more.”
Asked what the solution is Hersh warms to his theme that most editors are pusillanimous and should be fired.
“I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control,” he says. I saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don’t get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say ‘I don’t care what you say’.
Elias Isquith is an assistant editor at Salon, focusing on politics. Follow him on Twitter at @eliasisquith, and email him at eisquith@salon.com.
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Thanks for posting this
Paul Craig Roberts has been commenting on this for some time now. Here's his latest: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/09/16/pakistani-national-tv-reveals-that-obamas-claim-to-have-killed-osama-bin-laden-...
Seymour Hersh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh
Seymour Hersh
From Wikipedia
Seymour Hersh at the 2004 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award
Born April 8, 1937 (age 76)
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Alma mater University of Chicago
Occupation Journalist
Spouse(s) Elizabeth Sarah Klein
Awards Polk Award (1969, 1973, 1974, 1981, 2004)[1][2]
Pulitzer Prize (1970)[3]
George Orwell Award (2004)[4]
Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh
Hersh on 911blogger: http://911blogger.com/search/node/Seymour%20Hersh
What are we looking at here?
In a Friday 27 September 2013 issue of The Guardian Seymour Hersh said of the Bin Laden killing: " "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true." The veracity of the bin Laden story was discussed on this venue over six months ago, perhaps ealier and yet these people are just now catching up: http://911blogger.com/news/2013-02-11/bin-laden-fable-changes-yet-again
Be sure and scroll down and look at my contribution entitled: Are They Still Broadcasting in Analog in Pakistan? There I question how it is that bin Laden doesn't have as nice a tele as mine when he is flush with cash and lives on the Silk Road which is literally the Wal-Mart of the world, or simply click here: http://911blogger.com/news/2013-02-11/bin-laden-fable-changes-yet-again#comment-258756
The Guardian goes on to state how Hersh gave us stories on My Lai, Watergate, Cambodia and Abu Ghraib, yet much of these stories remain untold. Of My Lai, Hersh tells an encapsulated story of how a renegade company and its defective leader went off the res and razed an entire village. Hersh's one-off massacre is supposed to serve as a cautionary tale of what war can do if we are not careful, not guarded. This a'int how it went down.
In his book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam author Nick Turse speaks of "a My Lai a month." There was nothing unique or encapsulated about My Lai, that strategy was policy. There is also nothing unique about a Pulitzer Prize winning newsman coming late to the table and parsing out news that is no longer news, it can only be one thing: pushback.
Picked up by TIME
http://swampland.time.com/2013/09/27/new-yorkers-seymour-hersh-bin-laden-raid-one-big-lie/
Seymour Hersh also broke the story about the executive assassination ring that answered to Dick Cheney:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Hersh_US_has_been_running_executive_0311.html
And the rejected plan to stage a provocation in the Straits of Hormuz to blame Iran that involved US troops shooting at each other.
Yes, he did
But you still have to wonder who's sand box he is playing in. I question his affiliation with the New Yorker which hasn't been the same since Tina Brown "fixed" it when it didn't need fixing. For a magazine that used to pride itself on getting the DNA of a story, hell they serialized In Cold Blood , for them to come out with a ridiculous one pager about the bin Laden raid like the one by Nicholas Schmidle below worthy of Reader's Digest is just too much: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle
Reprise of my take on the ridiculousness of the bin Laden raid.
Are They Still Broadcasting in Analog in Pakistan?
Are they still broadcasting in analog in Pakistan? I am just wondering because, to me that looks like an old analog set. Unfamiliar with the fit and finish of Pakistani electronics it is hard for me to tell from the above picture if there is a cable box there or a digital TV converter box. While my line of questioning may be spurious and in a sense it is meant to be, so is the whole bin Laden story as you all know. But how is it that bin Laden who according to Celebrity Net Worth has a nest egg of around $50,000,000 has such a crappy TV? With fewer resources than Osama,for certain,I have managed to put together a much better lash-up than he has. I am wondering if this is in any way a continuity problem within the mise-en-scène as I have seen better equipment in a yurt on the Mongolian Steppes; now that's remote. Remember, this is a guy that is supposed to be all hip to satellite phones and other high tech whatnots and he is the leader, if even emeritus, of a group that is poised to wage an "Electronic Jihad" on us. Why, the biggest cheapskate I know has a 42 inch flat screen and while he bristled both at the expense and the learning curve it entailed, this technical neophyte now insists that is the standard! (Oh, and he is broke, with a capital B by the way.) While Pakistan, with her estimated population of 172,000,000 people, has one of the lowest per capita set ownership rates in the world it seems that most of them are in the Punjab region where Osama "was": "as per Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) annual report 2010-11, the total number of TV sets in Pakistan is close to 12 million." A parochial, single purpose website and bulletin board Paklinks.com which caters to the Pakistani diaspora states: "most things are available in Pakistan, although for a higher price sometimes. But all the trouble you go through packing and shopping and shipping and everything is a big hassle. I think it would be easier to shop around in Pakistan and buy everything locally here." There is one other thing to note and that is technical affinity. While I have the cheapest cell phone on the planet which most poseurs wouldn't be caught dead with, I will not settle for less than the best computers as I have used them, owned them, programmed them and hacked them and developed an affinity for them and will accept nothing less than the finest. I even built the one I am typing on to my own specs.
Various estimates of Abbottabad's population range from 300,000 to to around one million with no exact distinction being made between the city proper and its conurbation. Abbottabad lies along the Silk Road and, for the uninitiated, the Silk Road is all about moving goods along an ancient caravan route whose importance seems to have survived modernity. Supposedly in nearby Peshawar (3 hours away) at the Smugglers' Bazaar, a large black market exchange: "everything is available here from cut-price electronics to clothes and stationery. It's an enormous trade that costs Pakistan millions of dollars annually in lost revenue - enough money to generate the bribes that allow the market to flourish."
Also, the local cable company Hazara Communications boasts uninterrupted cable television access.
Address : Flat # 2, Cantonment Plaza,
Abbottabad. (Pakistan)
Contact #:
Phone Off : +92-992-212121
Fax: +92-992-336210
So, no, I a'int buying this po' boy crap.