So sad to see what's happened to the once great Sy Hersh

[whatchamacallit]

It happened the moment he wrote something I don't like. Pathetic nutbar...

[babylonsister]

1. No, he went off...

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden

[whatchamacallit]

2. Thanks babs

but that piece didn't really put everything to rest.

[BeyondGeography]

3. That line in the OP

Is what the New Yorker said when they fired him.

Just kidding. But they didn't touch this piece. Hersh wrote this My Lai retro in March:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/the-scene-of-the-crime

[The Second Stone]

4. I hope he is wrong

but either way, this country and the world owe the man a debt of gratitude for his work on Mai Lai.

[KittyWampus]

5. It happened somewheres after his 3rd warning siren about the USA attacking Iran… during Bush years.

[Thinkingabout]

7. When a journalist loses their reputation for the truth then future material becomes suspect.

[HereSince1628]

14. Yes, I think he sacrificed his reputation on that...

but I'm not sure he wasn't played by one or more governments as a 'useful tool'.

[grasswire]

6. the talking point has already gotten stale here today

once great Sy Hersch.

once great Robert Parry

[Hobo]

8. Once Great?

Yeah Maybe 50 years ago now not so much.......

Hobo

[closeupready]

9. lol - yup. you nailed it.

K&R

[PeteSelman]

10. Right?

It's hilarious how everything he wrote about BushCo was gospel but dare to tell some truth on Obama and he's lost it.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

11. Axtually, it was durring Bush's tenure

that he went downhill. We still haven't bombed Iran (he started writing about us doing that during Bush), we didn't bring Iranian death squads to the US for training in the mid-west, and Cheney didn't have his own assassin-squads, either.

Sy Hersh was once a great investigative journalist, without whom we may have never known the atrocities of My Lai or Abu Ghraib, but much of what he writes now is pretty out there. His sources aren't vetted anymore. Even the New Yorker let him go. That's telling.

[ProfessorGAC]

13. Define Truth

How do you know his version is the truth? I know the government never tells the whole truth, and they lie much of the time. But so could Hersh's sources be lying, or just flat out misinformed.

You can tell from your armchair that he is telling nothing but the truth? I sure can't.

[randome]

12. Life is simple, isn't it? Just like people.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[Octafish]

15. He wrote a book in which he repeated rightwing lies about two revered Democrats.

Last edited Tue May 12, 2015, 11:20 AM - Edit history (1)

Hersh reported JFK and RFK were involved in the death of Marilyn Monroe, among other things as detailed by DUer James DiEugenio:

The Posthumous Assassination of JFK Part II

Sy Hersh and the Monroe/JFK Papers:
The History of a Thirty-Year Hoax

By James DiEugenio

On September 25, 1997, ABC used its news magazine program 20/20 to take an unusual journalistic step. In the first segment of the program, Peter Jennings took pains to discredit documents that had been about to be used by its own contracted reporter for an upcoming show scheduled for broadcast. The contracted reporter was Seymour Hersh. The documents purported to show a secret deal involving Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, and President John F. Kennedy. They were to be the cornerstone of Hersh’s upcoming Little, Brown book, The Dark Side of Camelot. In fact, published reports indicate that it was these documents that caused the publisher to increase Hersh’s advance and provoke three networks to compete for a television special to hype the book. It is not surprising to any informed observer that the documents imploded. What is a bit surprising is that Hersh and ABC could have been so naive for so long. And it is ironic that ABC should use 20/20 to expose a phenomenon that it itself fueled twelve years ago.

What happened on September 25th was the most tangible manifestation of three distinct yet overlapping journalistic threads that have been furrowing into our culture since the Church Committee disbanded in 1976. Hersh’s book would have been the apotheosis of all three threads converged into one book. In the strictest sense, the convergent movements did not actually begin after Frank Church’s investigation ended. But it was at that point that what had been a right-wing, eccentric, easily dismissed undercurrent, picked up a second wind—so much so that today it is not an eccentric undercurrent at all. It is accepted by a large amount of people. And, most surprisingly, some of its purveyors are even accepted within the confines of the research community.

The three threads are these: 1) That the Kennedys ordered Castro’s assassination, despite the verdict of the Church Committee on the CIA’s assassination plots. As I noted last issue, the committee report could find no evidence indicating that JFK and RFK authorized the plots on Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, or Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. 2) That the Kennedys were really “bad boys,” in some ways as bad as Chicago mobsters or the “gentleman killers” of the CIA. Although neither JFK nor RFK was lionized by the main centers of the media while they were alive, because of their early murders, many books and articles were written afterward that presented them in a sympathetic light, usually as liberal icons. This was tolerated by the media establishment as sentimental sop until the revelations of both Watergate and the Church Committee. This “good guy” image then needed to be altered since both those crises seemed to reveal that the Kennedys were actually different than what came before them (Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers) and what came after (Nixon). Thus began a series of anti-Kennedy biographies. 3) That Marilyn Monroe’s death was somehow ordained by her “involvement” with the Kennedy “bad boys.” Again, this was at first a rather peculiar cottage industry. But around the time of Watergate and the Church Committee it was given a lift, and going back to a 1964 paradigm, it combined elements of the first two movements into a Gothic (some would say grotesque) right-wing propaganda tract which is both humorous and depressing in its slanderous implications, and almost frightening in its political and cultural overtones. Egged on by advocates of Judith Exner (e.g. Liz Smith and Tony Summers), this political and cultural time bomb landed in Sy Hersh’s and ABC’s lap. When it blew up, all parties went into a damage control mode, pointing their fingers at each other. As we examine the sorry history of all three industries, we shall see that there is plenty of blame (and shame) to be shared. And not just in 1997.

As we saw in Part One of this article, as the Church Committee was preparing to make its report, the Exner and then Mary Meyer stories made headlines in the Washington Post. These elements—intrigue from the CIA assassination plots, plus the sex angles, combined with the previous hazing of Richard Nixon over Watergate—spawned a wave of new anti-Kennedy “expose” biographies. Anti-Kennedy tracts were not new. But these new works differed from the earlier ones in that they owed their genesis and their styles to the events of the mid-seventies that had brought major parts of the establishment (specifically, the CIA and the GOP) so much grief. In fact we will deal with some of the earlier ones later. For now, let us examine this new pedigree and show how it fits into the movement outlined above.

CONTINUED...

http://ctka.net/pr1197-jfk.html

To learn a great reporter could be manipulated by the Powers that Be made me sad.

Yet, if anyone wants to know why I still think Hersh is an oustanding journalist, there's this:

Remember Richard (PNAC/Another Pearl Harbor) Perle? Just after September 11 and the Washington-Wall Street axis of war profiteering was heating up, Perle hit up Adnan (Iran-Contra/BCCI) Khashoggi for $100 million to make his new "Trireme Partnerships" take off.



Khashoggi's money would help launch the Carlyle Group-like investment group Perle founded. The petromoney was not for arms, directly. It was for investing in companies that were going to be making a killing off of homeland security related areas.

Interesting selling point: Perle already had secured financing from in from Boeing and some other bigwigs like Henry Kissinger.

One of the most important articles The New Yorker ever published:

Lunch with the Chairman

by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact

A bit on the new TRIREME business...

At Hollinger, Big Perks in A Small World

By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page E01

It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and is quickly slipping from Conrad Black's control.

Let's start with the board of directors, which includes Barbara Amiel, Conrad's wife, whose right-wing rants have managed to find an outlet in Hollinger publications.

And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.

Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.

CONTINUED (archived nowadays)...

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-309818.html

Sorry to post such a big post. Those interested in driving the narrative want to make certain this particular story about the death of bin Laden gets examined through a smudged lens by attacking the messenger. Don't want you to get accused of serving gish gallop, whatchamacallit, but it needs to be said:

THE JOURNALIST'S JOB IS TO REPORT THE NEWS AS ACCURATELY AND FAIRLY AS POSSIBLE. EVEN IF INCOMPLETE, JUSTICE, DEMOCRACY, WAR, PEACE, AND MORE MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH DEPEND ON THE TRUTH.

[Blue_Tires]

16. Hersh went off the rails long before this...

I'm still waiting for a retraction for his Syria story...And for DUers to tell me I was right when I called it out as bullshit from the start...