The Empire Strikes Back
THE BAFFLER
The Empire Strikes Back
Scott Beauchamp May 14, 2015
The story itself has a dreamlike aura.
Seymour Hersh is a pioneer of investigative journalism, the modern iteration of which he fashioned almost singlehandedly by uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, during the Vietnam War. Americans had opposed the war before My Lai—everyone knew what the American government was capable of, and many suspected that it was concealing the true extent of the horrors in Vietnam—but Hersh’s 1969 dispatches gave them coordinates to navigate their outrage by. Hersh presented the facts in black and white. After Hersh’s revelations, skeptics on the left didn’t have to feel like paranoids anymore. It turned out they had been right all along.
Hersh’s work in the aughts had much the same effect. In 2004, he exposed torture at Abu Ghraib. In 2008, he found that U.S. Special Forces were operating in Iran. The list goes on, with each discovery providing a single fleck of color. Take a step back to widen your field of vision, and you’ll be able to make out Hersh’s pointillist masterpiece: a painting of the lies the American elite have told to mask the lawless violence of pursuing their imperial ambitions.
Because of the penetration and scope of Hersh’s work, it is as much an indictment of the American media’s coverage of elites as it is one of the American government. To engage with Hersh properly, even to criticise him, the media would necessarily have to break from its day-to-day reporting of political horse races and its slavish echoing of official narratives. It would have to expose the government to shrewd interrogation in the process. That being the case, Hersh’s work is important, even if parts of it do turn out to be inaccurate...
SNIP
...Predictably, many in the media have rushed to the government’s defense. Hersh’s anonymous sources rankle them. The story itself, which is so far removed from the official narrative and implicates corruption at the highest levels of government, has a dreamlike aura. Never mind that the account the government gave has been deteriorating from the start, and the glaring contradictions between the official versions as related by the Pakistani and American governments. Put aside the fact that someone else using different sources reported a version of Hersh’s story in 2011, or that NBC, within a day, had already confirmed a key point of Hersh’s narrative. If Hersh’s critics actually did submerge themselves in a detailed re-reporting of his allegations, the process would subjugate the American ruling class to deeper scrutiny than usual...
http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/empire-strikes-back/
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lawless violence of pursuing their imperial ambitions." 
