Hersh Calls It Like It Is

Steve Clemons writes about Seymour Hersh, who I think is the best journalist in the U.S. at the moment. Clemons, too, values the role that Hersh is playing in American society at the moment:

I am convinced that America does not have enough hard-working investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh, James Fallows and Ron Suskind. Josh Marshall and some bloggers are picking up some of the slack left in a mostly complacent media today -- but it occurred to me that Hersh is the kind of guy who develops vast human networks, digs into issues that no one else will touch, and takes the kinds of risks serious journalism rarely takes any more.

It should be a national priority -- in order to promote and protect the checks and balances in our civil society -- to cultivate a hundred more Seymour Hersh type journalists. Clearly, if Congress will not play its oversight function over the Executive Branch, the media have to weigh in, highlight, and embarrass what Members of Congress have been unable or unwilling to do.

Recently, Hersh has been doing the rounds, partly in promotion of his recent release, Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraiband a couple of weeks ago gave an interview at Berkeley, where he said some pretty amazing things.

On the Bush administration and their (how can I put it?) rather lax standards of veracity:

"I think it's real simple to say [Bush] is a liar. But that would also suggest there was a reality that he understood," explained Hersh. "I'm serious. It is funny in sort of a sick, black humor sort of way, but the real serious problem is, he believes what he's doing." In effect, Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other neocons are "idealists, you can call them utopians." As Hersh understands them, they really believe that the solution to global terrorism began with invading Baghdad and will end only with the transformation of the last unfriendly government in the Middle East into a democracy.

"No amount of body bags is going to dissuade [Bush]," said Hersh, despite the fact that Hersh's sources say the war in Iraq is "not winnable. It's over." As for Kerry's war plans, Hersh said he wished he could tell him to stop talking as if the senator's plan for Iraq could somehow still eke out a victory there. "This is a disaster that's been going on. It's a civil war, the insurgency. There is no 'win' anymore in this war," he argued. "As somebody said, 'We're playing chess, they're playing Go.'"

And on some extremely disturbing reports of war crimes being commited by U.S. forces in Iraq:

There was more — rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.

"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'

"It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts," Hersh continued. "You know what I told him? I said, 'Fella, you blamed the captain, he knows that you think he committed murder, your troops know that their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Complete your tour. Just shut up! You're going to get a bullet in the back.' And that's where we are in this war."

This anecdote begs the question: How often are Coalition soldiers fragged in Iraq?

Read Hersh's new book, or go through the New Yorker archives and read the articles in their original form. Hersh is simply the most clued in and sane reporter writing about war and politics.