Our Guy Sy

Over at MilBlogs, Andi's been on a roll lately. She introduced the blogosphere to John Kerry's now infamous comments the night he made them, and followed up a couple days ago with a look at an article about Seymour Hersh.

Money quote:

If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.

“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”

Her post on the topic led to several response posts from other contributers, and several more from me. I'm pulling my scattered posts together "under one roof" here.

When Seymour Hersh writes, he uses facts (albeit selectively and sensationally). Here's an example regarding an incident alleged to have occurred at Abu Ghraib:

His book Chain of Command would deliver the authoritative Seymour M. version: “An attorney involved in the case told me in July 2004 that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy by a foreign contract employee who served as an interpreter at Abu Ghraib,” Hersh wrote. “In the statement, which had not been made public, the lawyer told me, a prisoner stated that he was a witness to the rape, and that a woman was taking pictures.”

What we have here is third hand information about a horrifying (if true) event. But Hersh probably isn't lying when he says "an attorney involved in the case" told him he had read a document in which "a prisoner stated that he was a witness to the rape" of a young boy by "a foreign contract employee".

But when Seymour does a public speaking engagement, he tends to (ahem) expand. For instance, here's how he described the event to the annual membership conference of the American Civil Liberties Union:

“Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. Okay? Videos,” he said. “And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has. They’re in total terror it’s going to come out.”

All that's from this April, 2005 New York Magazine profile of Hersh: Sy Hersh Says It’s Okay to Lie (Just Not in Print).

The author provides another example of one of Hersh's "crowd pleasers":

He tells me a long tale of the ghastly killing of some Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers. He frames his account as a hypothetical set piece: “You’re a soldier on a patrol . . . and you see people running, and you open fire, okay? . . . Maybe they were bad guys, but then they run into a soccer game.” He gradually modulates the story to its climax: “You’re a bunch of young kids. And so maybe you pull the bodies together and you drop RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and you take some photographs about it because you’re afraid you’re gonna be investigated. And maybe somebody there tells me about what happened.”
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Did this event happen? Who knows? Hersh never subjects these sorts of stories to any kind of public truth test, but he bandies them in his lectures, as part of the ongoing effort to bring his speaking audiences closer to that other reality of the Iraq War. He does it so frequently, in fact, that it’s hard to accept that he’s only doling out information for its own sake. In part, one senses, Hersh’s stump performances are of a piece with the sort of one-upping bravado that makes up many conversations journalists have with their colleagues—only done here in public and for hire. Again, Hersh is refreshingly candid about the showman aspect of his anecdotage: “I get paid to do speeches. . . . And I’m not there to be on straight."

“Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,” he began. “Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.”

“Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,” Hersh continued. “[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.”

“About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,” he said.

Returning to the New York Magazine piece, here's a final word from Sy on that screaming rape fable - one that to this day is cited in comments by some folks right here on this blog:

Many who blogged the revelation believed that Hersh was talking about multiple rapes committed by American soldiers. Nearly everyone took it for granted that Hersh had seen the videotapes himself because he’d described their horrifying soundtrack. And everyone did assume that there were in fact videotapes, which there may not be. (“Was it a video camera or a digital camera? Nobody was quite sure,” Hersh told students at Tufts later in the year.) The speech was so widely blogged that the ACLU says Hersh asked it to remove part of the video—including the sodomy allegation—from the organization’s Website, which it proceeded to do.

That was Hersh’s first encounter with streaming online video, something that makes a spoken remark as replicable and as easy to distribute as the written word. He’d never heard of it before. “I actually didn’t quite say what I wanted to say correctly,” Hersh now says. “It wasn’t that inaccurate, but it was misstated. The next thing I know, it was all over the blogs. And I just realized then, the power of—and so you have to try and be more careful.”

If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.

“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”

Iraq and Vietnam - Hersh is certainly well positioned to compare the two.

Robert Elegant was a reporter in Vietnam. This is from his 1981 retrospective How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam:

Not even the "old hands" were necessarily well qualified to cover the conflict—who could have been? Arthur Waley?—but, considering our divergent backgrounds and political convictions, the old hands' general agreement about the nature of the war was remarkable. Most deplored the ineffectiveness and the corruption of successive South Vietnamese governments, but judged native (i.e., Southern) disaffection incapable of mounting an armed rebellion without direction, reinforcement, and weapons from the North. Most concurred with the thesis Robert Shaplen advanced in The Lost Revolution (1966), agreeing that ineffectual leadership had failed to foster latent nationalistic and reformist enthusiasm in the South, by default ceding those dynamic forces to the North. We did not deceive ourselves that the South enjoyed even marginally good government; but we believed that Northern rule would be much worse for the mass of the people.¹³ We knew that the North and the South, though not necessarily two separate countries, were distinct entities because of the strong regional feelings of the Vietnamese. Although most of us had opposed major U.S. involvement, we saw no way the United States could withdraw unilaterally.

13. Worse in every way, economically as well as politically, although there were those—from Messrs. Tom Wicker and Seymour Hersh to Mmes. Frances Fitzgerald and Mary McCarthy for the New York Review of Books—whose steadfast ideology led them to believe that Revolutionary Liberation would mean Social Progress. They had a vision of the Viet Cong future, and it would work.

By their very nature, some groups attract unusual members.

Fire departments attract arsonists, though the vast majority of fire fighters are not.

The military attracts some violence prone, sadistic individuals - though the majority of those serving are not.

The priesthood attracts some individuals with various sexual proclivities, though the majority are following a dedicated calling.

The "news business" attracts those who would use the platform for "getting their message out" or advancing a cause rather than simply reporting news .

The examples cited for the first three groups are the exceptions, not the rule. But I'm not sure whether or not the last profession I listed has passed a tipping point in that regard. Regardless, Hersh is demonstrably no seeker of truth.

Finally, for an introduction to some of Hersh's methods used in fabricating the Abu Ghraib story, read this (to inlude the links).

I need to update that link some day soon. Much more information has come to light since then (some of which we've seen here, or some near here), information that makes the actions of Hersh and Mapes even more disgusting in hindsight...