Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh (born April 8, 1937)
About
- Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed Operation Menu, the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award.
- Hersh has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, and disputed the claim that Bashar al-Assad's regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War.
Background
Hersh was born on April 8, 1937 in Chicago to Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian Jewish parents who emigrated to the US from Lithuania and Poland and ran a dry-cleaning shop in Chicago's Austin neighborhood. After graduating from the University of Chicago with a history degree, Hersh found himself struggling to find a job. He began working at Walgreens before being accepted into University of Chicago Law School but was soon expelled for poor grades.
After returning for a short time to Walgreens, Hersh began his career in journalism as a copyboy, then police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago in 1959. He was editor-in-chief of The Southwest Suburbanite in Oak Lawn, Illinois. He next began a short-lived suburban paper, The Evergreen Reporter. He then decided to move to Washington, D.C. He later became a correspondent for United Press International in South Dakota.
In 1963, he went on to become a Chicago and Washington correspondent for the Associated Press. While working in Washington Hersh first met and befriended I. F. Stone, whose I. F. Stone's Weekly would serve as an initial inspiration for Hersh's later work. It was during this time that Hersh began to form his investigative style, often walking out of regimented press briefings at the Pentagon and seeking out one-on-one interviews with high-ranking officers. After a falling out with the editors at the AP when they insisted on watering down a story about the US government's work on biological and chemical weapons, Hersh left the AP and sold his story to The New Republic. During the 1968 presidential election, he served as press secretary for the campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy.
After leaving the McCarthy campaign, Hersh returned to journalism as a freelancer covering the Vietnam War. In 1969, Hersh received a tip from Geoffrey Cowan of The Village Voice regarding an Army lieutenant being court-martialled for killing civilians in Vietnam. His subsequent investigation, sold to the Dispatch News Service, was run in 33 newspapers and exposed the My Lai massacre, winning him the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
Hersh's 1974 article claiming the CIA had violated its charter by spying on anti-war activists is credited as contributing factor to the formation of the Church Committee.
Disinformation expert?
Originally posted on The AlterNet June 28, 2017 by Ken Klippenstein.[1]
- Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who famously exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and more recently, the U.S. military’s abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.
- This weekend, Hersh reported that the alleged chemical attack in Idlib, Syria, this March was not perpetrated by the Syrian military, as the Trump administration has claimed. Relying on a high-level adviser to the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency as his source, Hersh punched holes in the official narrative of the chemical attack, reporting that the Syrian bombing had actually targeted a high-level jihadi meeting with conventional munitions and warned the U.S. government of the strike beforehand, using a deconfliction channel. The strike hit a facility that may have contained chemicals such as chlorine and fertilizer that would have produced a cloud as well as neurological symptoms in victims that could be mistaken for sarin.[2]
Orlando Letelier connection
Seymour Hersh received the Letelier-Moffitt Award in 2004. He knew Orlando Letelier very well. He received a letter from Letelier after he was killed.
He was interviewed by Phyllis Bennis on the 2016 awards.[3]
50th Anniversary of the Institute for Policy Studies
50th Anniversary of the Institute for Policy Studies, Fri, Oct 11, 2013 through Sun, Oct 13, 2013.
Who: Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!; Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation; Ai-jen Poo, National Domestic Workers Alliance; Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research; George Goehl, National Peoples Action; Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist; Ariel Dorfman, Argentine-Chilean writer, scholar, activist; Harry Belafonte, American actor, artist, activist; John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies; over 600 activists, students, and scholars.
Where: Liaison Hotel, 415 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington DC; Union Station, 50 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington DC.; Busboys and Poets, 5th and K Sts. NW.[4]
IPS connection
Seymour Hersh was a member of the Institute for Policy Studies 20th Anniversary celebrations committee which organized an April 5, 1983, reception at the National Building Museum attended by approximately 1,000 IPS staffers and former staff.[5]