Digging through a stupid war >> Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh discusses civilian casualties, American ignorance and leading questions

by MATTHEW HAYS Seymour Hersh has become famous as the American journalist who has exhaustively covered both the Vietnam War and the current Iraq War. In 1969, he won the Pulitzer for his Vietnam coverage, which included his exposing the My Lai massacre. As a regular New Yorker contributor, Hersh has managed to break numerous crucial stories, most notably uncovering treatment of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Hersh was also the first journalist to state unequivocally that weapons of mass destruction would never be found in Iraq. With his staunch criticism of those in power, Hersh has acquired his share of enemies. Pentagon adviser Richard Perle once called Hersh “the closest thing we have to a terrorist.” Hersh will be speaking at McGill today, Thursday, Oct. 26. The Mirror spoke to him over the phone from New York. Mirror: Have you been following the controversy surrounding CNN’s airing of the insurgency sniper footage, in which American soldiers get shot? The American military is accusing CNN of airing enemy propaganda. Seymour Hersh: I’m at a bit of a disadvantage, because I haven’t been following that. But the discrepancy between what’s seen in the Arab world and what’s seen in the American world is just terrifying. We’ll have an incident in which we claim we’ve bombed a village in response to insurgent fire and 35 insurgents were killed, and that’s the end of the story. Al-Jazeera and the other Arab press will have footage of women and children streaming into hospitals, wounded. So you draw your own conclusions. That’s a chronic issue. If you go back to the days of Paul Fussell, who taught at Yale, years after WWII, he wrote a book about the ways in which censorship was just enormous. In the Japanese islands, where the marines suffered enormous casualties, there was no footage of wounded soldiers. We live in a cocoon, no doubt about it. M: In terms of the reporting of civilian casualties in Iraq, it seems American journalists have been complicit— SH: What do you mean by complicit? M: That they partook in this business of not asking enough questions about civilian casualties. SH: I don’t know, I think complicit is a strong word. Casualty discrepancy M: When Bush was asked about civilian casualties, he responded that he thought it was about 30,000. But he wasn’t asked by a journalist, he was asked by a citizen in a town hall meeting. Do you feel the media has been too reluctant to report on civilian casualties in Iraq? SH: Oh I don’t know. I think there’s a general weariness. It’s really extremely difficult to speak so generally, without an empirical basis. I hate to sound like a talking head, but in general, what happens is…. Right now, it’s four dead every day. There’s much too little reporting on the wounded. That’s sort of a no-no. I think people just get worn down by, every day, more deaths. How many different ways can you write the same story? But I think the American people know the casualties are going up. I can fault the press for a lot of other things, particularly in the first couple of years of the war. But I think they’re doing all right on that one. In other words, I disagree with you. M: But we hear about the military casualties, but rarely hear about the numbers of dead Iraqi civilians. I have found that alarming. SH: Okay, that’s something to be alarmed by. I think you’ll discover in all wars, that’s one of the casualties. Inevitably in a war, that will happen, and it’s depressing. But I’ll save the alarm for something else. Not to be cynical about it, but Jesus Christ, what can I tell you? The discrepancy about casualties is pretty alarming, and if those numbers are true, then the average American is doing a lot more killing in this war than in any other war perhaps. But it’s very hard to get a figure on the casualties. It’s incredibly vague, which is one of the horrible things about stupid wars. Opinions are one thing, but I try to be quite empirical about these things. I have no idea, but I would think 300,000–400,000 is probably about right. But it’s hard for me to give a rational answer, because I don’t have one. American blinkers M: Why does so much of the American public often seem wilfully ignorant? Much of the populace seems intent on not knowing what is going on in terms of political and foreign affairs. SH: This is the strangest interview I’ve ever had. M: Why? SH: Because you’re so fucking opinionated. I don’t disagree with you, but we’re just rolling through your thoughts on things. It is sort of silly. No, it’s not silly, but we’re just rolling from whatever obsession you have to the next. You’re pretty obsessional. M: Isn’t that a fair question? SH: The ignorance may not be wilful. The problem with this is, in order to answer your questions, I have to buy into what it is you’re saying. I have no fucking way of knowing whether they’re ignorant. I mean, Americans are pretty fucking ignorant. What we don’t know is pretty huge. You could never accuse Americans of learning from history or learning from past mistakes. You’re talking about a country that went to war in Vietnam with the theory that we had to bomb North Vietnam in order to keep the hordes of Red China from coming, right? Not knowing that Vietnam and China had fought wars for 2,000 years and would fight one four years after the war was over, in ’79. What we don’t know is just breathtaking in my country. To call this ignorance wilful as opposed to general ignorance, I don’t know. On any issue, Americans can display an incredible lack of information. I doubt if there’s a society which has paid less attention to the facts than any else. Quagmire redux M: There have been many comparisons made between the Vietnam War and the current Iraq War. Though there was resistance to this, Bush recently acknowledged some parallels in an interview. As someone who has covered both conflicts extensively, were you surprised that so many of the same mistakes appeared to be made in Iraq so soon after Vietnam? SH: Are you suggesting that a) we learn from our mistakes? Or b) that wilful ignorance goes from one generation to the other? (laughs) I’m just answering your questions. You are pretty tendentious. It’s okay, it’s better than dumb questions. It’s not dumb, but just don’t be a lawyer, because the judge will just say, “Rephrase. You’re leading the client.” But that’s okay, you’re entitled to an opinion. I have the same view you do, the problem is that I do believe in being vaguely empirical. M: Now the debate over the war has come down to how best to pull out of Iraq. What do you think the way out of Iraq is? SH: There are two options. One is everybody out by midnight tonight, and the second option is everybody out by midnight tomorrow. I don’t think it’s cutting and running, I think it’s getting out. Two years ago, I was pretty sure that the 200-octane fuel that was driving the “insurgency” was us, and the faster we get out, the better. The country was not terribly sectarian before we got on the premises. The Sunnis and the Shi’ites intermarried, many tribes are 50-50. We’ve fostered a great deal of sectarian work. Even the awful, evil Saddam, by the mid-1990s, began to put all kind of Shia into the senior officer corps, in an effort to make it less dominated by the Sunnis. I’m no longer sure who the insurgency is. It’s all so screwed up. If I lived in a country and a bunch of people came in and started raiding my house, and capturing people and killing willy-nilly, I think I would take up arms against those people. Am I an insurgent then? Are the insurgents insurgents or are the Americans insurgents? I think the whole nomenclature is bizarre. We’re the insurgents. It’s their country. It’s a disaster. It’s been a civil war for a year. Seymour Hersh will deliver his lecture, “Report from Washington,” tonight, Thursday, Oct. 26, at 6 p.m. at McGill’s Mount Royal Centre (2200 Mansfield). Admission free

The count down begins


from the beginning of this mad war I was wondering are these Noe lunatics listening to experts
it turned out they were not.

it turned out they were lying to their teeth.

Keep it simple stupid would have made them see what I have seen long time ago.


decades of oppression
decades of bombing on Iraq
decades of intimidating policies
all the dead needed to avenged
revenge is so common to a point were it is institutionalized.
What makes someone blow him self?
he lost his most loved ones and has nothing left to live for.
his house blown or his family gone his job is not there.
more importantly his extended family or tribe expect him to do exactly that. kill as many of those who caused death to his family.
It is enough for him to point finger at one direction and death or revenge will follow sooner or later.
Now the same rule and custom is at work
in this mortal duel between shias and sunnis
Saddam death would have made a difference if it was done early enough.
It is too late.
caos is in and civil war will ravage the middle east.
From DEMOCRACY stand point. It is all good.
the west was never an honest peddler of democracy. because they continue to contradict them selves and lie about who they support and what they claim about freedom and democracy and the more important :support for Israel goes at the expense of all their claims.

Seymour Hersh Slams Bush at McGill Address

Martin Lukacs

The McGill Daily
October 31, 2006


“There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq”

Hersh, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government for nearly 40 years. Since his 1969 exposé of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which is widely believed to have helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War, he has broken news about the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia, covert C.I.A. attempts to overthrow Chilean president Salvador Allende, and, more recently, the first details about American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

During his hour-and-a-half lecture – part of the launch of an interdisciplinary media and communications studies program called Media@McGill – Hersh described video footage depicting U.S. atrocities in Iraq, which he had viewed, but not yet published a story about.

He described one video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer.

“Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,” he began. “Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.”

“Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,” Hersh continued. “[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.”

“About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,” he said.

If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.

“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”

Hersh came out hard against President Bush for his involvement in the Middle East.

“In Washington, you can’t expect any rationality. I don’t know if he’s in Iraq because God told him to, because his father didn’t do it, or because it’s the next step in his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program,” he said.

Hersh hinted that the responsibility for the invasion of Iraq lies with eight or nine members of the administration who have a “neo-conservative agenda” and dictate the U.S.’s post-September 11 foreign policy.

“You have a collapsed Congress, you have a collapsed press. The military is going to do what the President wants,” Hersh said. “How fragile is democracy in America, if a president can come in with an agenda controlled by a few cultists?”
Throughout his talk Hersh remained pessimistic, predicting that the U.S. will initiate an attack against Iran, and that the situation in Iraq will deteriorate further.

“There’s no reason to see a change in policy about Iraq. [Bush] thinks that, in twenty years, he’s going to be recognized for the leader he was – the analogy he uses is Churchill,” Hersh said. “If you read the public statements of the leadership, they’re so confident and so calm…. It’s pretty scary.”

Seymour Hersh's Latest Expose: It Was Not Tolstoy Who Wrote War & Peace!

This is the biggest jolt to the literary world in decades.

The first draft of War and Peace - a classic described as not merely a novel, even less as prose, and still less as an historical chronicle - was not written by Leo Tolstoy but by Jane Austen!

The sensational claim, hitting the Upper West Side Manhattan literary salons like a tsunami, has been made in an investigative article to be published early next year in The New Yorker. The reporter, Mr. Seymour Hersh, is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist best known for his exposes on Vietnam's My Lai massacre and Iraq's Abu Gharib prison scandal.

Jane Austen's Winter in Moscow

In the story, its claims cross-checked by the famed fact-checking department of the New Yorker, Mr. Hersh has argued that the first draft of the classic was actually written in English by Jane Austen which was later translated and worked upon by Leo Tolstoy. According to the report, the English author had made an incognito trip to the smoldering ruins of Moscow in 1812, following Napoleon's invasion. The lady was in her quest of possible ideas for a future novel, a work which she wanted to be radically different from her earlier books.

This trip was undertaken by Jane Austen one year after the publication of her novel Sense and Sensibility. Her most celebrated work — Pride and Prejudice — would only be published next year. The author was said to be in a wintry state of mind due to the rejection of a marriage proposal. Her compsoure was further saddened on witnessing the post-war desolation of the Russian city. It is believed that she completed the entire first draft in this gloomy mood before departing back to England.

It is still not clear just how the draft landed in Tolstoy's family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow, few years later. The Russian novelist was born 11 years after Jane Austen's death. Despite several calls, New Yorker was unavailable for queries.

However, according to sources working in the magazine, the story carefully details how Tolstoy translated Austen's draft into Russian and also filled in several war scenes which were not originally intended .

How Did Hersh Do It?

Reportedly, Mr. Hersh had gained access to dozens of letters that Jane Austen received from sister Cassandra while residing in Moscow. These letters are carefully stored in a high security iron bunker in the KGB headquarters in Lubyanka Square.

The unearthing of the hoax, certain to trigger a series of disbelief — outrage and dismay in Russia, while generating delight, pride, and swagger in England — was written by Mr. Hersh after journeying to countless cottages and dachas scattered in both countries. He is said to have interviewed more than 375 people during his impeccable research.

A Tolstoyan Deception

Until now everyone believed that War and Peace, considered to be the greatest Russian masterpiece, was an original idea of Leo Tolstoy. It was a myth whose lie was diligently shielded and kept secret by an extremely unlikely gang of players – Tsarist courtiers, Communist politburo members, and the present cabal of corrupt Putin-style Kremlin democrats.

But now literature’s biggest fraud is all set to be exposed.

Strangely, the New Yorker editorial team continue to be evasive about the exact date of its publication. It is interesting to note here that the magazine editor, Mr. David Remnick, is a Russian by origin. A last-moment rejection of the revelations cannot be ruled out. After all, what's at stake is Mother Russia's reputation.
Written by Mayank Austen Soofi
Published November 19, 2006