Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hershis an American investigative journalist and political writer based in Washington, D.C. He is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine on national security matters and has also written for the London Review of Books since 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth8 April 1937
CityChicago, IL
CountryUnited States of America
bush hell intelligence matter matters people scares washington
It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community.
american-journalist bombed bush care line people police stand talk wanting willing work
Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family.
It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts.
american-journalist
I'm a better American than 99% of the guys in the White House.
iraq issues people
And then, of course, Bush won reelection, with everything out there, all of our complaints, all of the issues, all of the troubles with Iraq. So where are we? Bush certainly sees himself as having been given an endorsement. He was asked about accountability in an interview, about why Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz have been promoted, these people who led us into the debacle in Iraq. Bush said there was accountability - it was the election. So there we are.
cutting loss israel
If Bush had gone into Iraq for cynical reasons, we could cut our losses now. What's frightening is that he did it for ideological reasons, and therefore he's not going to get out. So it isn't ultimately about oil or about Israel, it's about a belief.
father believe trying
I don't know whether God talks to him or whether he's trying to undo what his father did. But he believes in the mission. The body bags aren't going to deter him. Public dissent isn't going to deter him. He's going to go ahead. And that's more frightening.
fields open-minded debate
The National Security Adviser is supposed to be an arbiter of policy and open minded in internal debates. But the playing field was never balanced. It was always tilted toward Rumsfeld's position, which is obviously the same as Bush's.
reality years two
The reality is that Qaddafi has been trying to talk to us about his weapons system for years, and we ignored him. The Libyans even came to me about two years ago and offered me a chance to go through their facilities because they couldn't get anybody's attention here.
grief thinking media
The general assumption, which I think is a valid one, is that a lot of the major media were on their heels a little bit and prone to share the grief of the nation and to give Bush all the support it could.
wmd iraq numbers
Similarly, the press never tested many of the assumptions about WMDs. One of the great myths about the WMD issue is that everybody believed Iraq had them. Well, that's not true. There were a number of people in the intelligence community and the State Department who were skeptical, and many analysts in the Department of Energy were dubious about Iraq's nuclear capability. There were also people like Scott Ritter who were saying quite accurately what was going on.
hands circles guy
The neoconservatives are a small circle, and they're all sort of holding hands as they develop their policy, and outsiders aren't allowed. If you agree with the guys on the inside, you're a genius. If you disagree, you're a traitor, a pariah, you're an apostate, and you're not allowed in.
thinking years iraq
Few knew in 2000 that Bush was going to end up with neoconservatives all over the place. And once 9/11 happened, I think it's fair to say that eight or nine neocons have had an enormous influence. The whole solution to every problem was to go after Iraq. This had been a neoconservative mantra for ten years. There was no secret about it.
integrity inspiration america
Where would we in Washington and we in America be without the Center? We would know much less about the workings of our Congress, and our tax dollars. We would know much less about the powers of the Executive, and its ability to hide wrong doing behind secrecy and classification. The Center takes the notion of integrity very seriously, and its investigations are a model for today's good journalism and, we all hope, an inspiration for the mainstream press to do more.