GEORGE BUSH SAYS TO STEVEN HARPER "SO YOU FOOLED THEM, EH !!! SO NOW A NEW AGE DAWNS ! Posted by Picasa
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PHOTO OF MY LAI MASSACRE BY US FORCES 1968 MURDERING 350 MEN,WOMEN, CHILDREN & BABIES...LT. CALLEY SAYS "WELL, AS YOU KNOW BABIES WILL GROW UP TO BE COMMUNIST "Posted by Picasa
PHOTO FROM MY LAI MASSACRE 1968 VIETNAM
NEOCONS SAY KILL'EM ALL !!!Posted by Picasa
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST SEYMOUR HERSH WHO FIRST REVEALED HORROR OF MY LAI MASSACRE IN VIETNAM 1968. BLOWS THE WHISTLE ON " AGENT ORANGE "& TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB ETC.Posted by Picasa
“To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful. ”
Edward R. Murrow
“ How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”
Adolf Hitler
“ The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. ”
Adolf Hitler
“ The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.”
Adolf Hitler
“The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category. ”
Adolf Hitler
“ When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."
Adolf Hitler
“ Who says I am not under the special protection of God? ”
Adolph Hitler
Anyway getting back to the issue of journalistic integrity & Edward R. Murrow’s belief that the goal of journalism is to seek out the truth , to inform & enlighten not just to entertain or to uncritically support the status quo. Recently in the controversial case of the Danish cartoons of The Prophet Mohammad there has been much written about the Freedom Of The Press & the Media & the notion of a clash of civilizations & cultural values. Yet , even those who claim to support the Freedom of the Press & Freedom of Expression few seem to extend this ideal to criticisms of the now dominant philosophy & policies of the Neoconservatives in power in the United States & Britain & Canada & elsewhere in the West . Many Journalists & media personalities, for instance, saw nothing wrong with being “ Embedded” with the US military or her allies in the invasion of Iraq & thereby having their stories controlled by those conducting the invasion . Nor were most of these jounalist interested in stories about detainee abuses & often accepted without comment the Bush administration’s official statements about these abuses. Some felt they had to report on this matter once the evidence kept mounting & the infamous photos began streaming across the Internet . This to some extent is nothing new .
During the Vietnam War the US administration & those who supported the war did not take kindly to any criticisms of the rationale for going to war in Vietnam or of how the Americans were conducting the war . It was & has been argued that because the war was somehow righteous its goal being to stop the spread of Communism & to, in effect, spread the Western ideals of Democracy & Freedom, therefore, all that was done by the military & politicians to bring about this desired end was therefore justified .
So those in power went out of their way to defend “Carpet Bombing ”, “ free-fire Zones ” the indiscriminate & reckless use of Napalm & the widespread use of defoliants ( agent orange) & the ruthless reprisals of the American military against villages or towns which the American military believed were harboring Viet Cong enemy guerrillas as in the Massacre of 350 men, women & children of the Vietnamese village of Mi Lai in 1968. Throughout the decade or more of America’s involvement in Vietnam there seemed to be little interest in supporting any real democratic reforms in South Vietnam .
Anyone who pointed out any of these unsavory facts about the Vietnam War were painted as unpatriotic & as being Pro-Communist ,at least, according to the US administration whether it be The White House or the Pentagon or the CIA & FBI or the administrations staunch & hawkish supporters including many members of the mainstream media .
But in our own time there are a few journalists who are willing to confront the powers that be & are willing to question their policies & actions & to point out where they are mistaken in their beliefs & the results of those beliefs one such journalist is Seymour Hersh who is a reporter for the New Yorker. So I just want to take a brief look at the career of Seymour Hersh & his analysis of what is happening now.
He is well respected by many & hated by others. Neocons do not care for Hersh’s style of investigative journalism & they have various arguments for this but what it boils down to is that he uncovers or reveals the truth about events which they believe should remain secret & that the official accounts of such events are the only acceptable versions of these events whether it is the massacre at Mi Lai or the torturing taking place at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay or the Massive bombings of Fallujah or Samarra.
The problem , if you like, that Seymour Hersh has is that he seems to actually believe in the Democratic ideals which the Neocons claim to espouse but mainly just pay lip service to . And of course this stance on the part of Neocons is better understood once we see their relationship to the political philosophy of Leo Strauss who claimed society is best served by an elite who are permitted to use “Noble Lies” to promote their own agenda & to promote peace & security for America & ,at the least , prosperity for themselves. But more on the shadowy figure of Leo Strauss at another time.
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Here is a short Bio of his work from the website of The Lavin Agency
http://www.thelavinagency.com/college/seymourhersh.html
SEYMOUR HERSH
“ Seymour Hersh is one of America's finest investigative journalists. His work has challenged abuses of power and held the privileged to account in the court of public opinion.
Seymour Hersh has uncovered some of the most important news stories of our times, and in the process shown America that power, and the exercising of that power on the international stage, comes with a price. Nowhere is that more true than in his most recent bestseller, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, which has made him once again a subject of national and international attention. Hersh's work has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and four George Polk Awards.
He told the world of the CIA's complicity in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile; of the secret B-52 bombing of Cambodia; of the unconstitutional wiretapping of newsmen and White House aides authorized by Henry Kissinger; of the CIA's illegal spying on American antiwar activists and other citizens (which led to the widely publicized Senate investigations into the CIA).
In the 1980's Hersh revealed the CIA's illicit sale of U.S. weapons to Libya; the drug-running, vote-stealing, and other criminal activities of Panama's General Noriega; the CIA's complicity with South Africa's spying on the African National Congress; the deceit and incompetence of the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada; and the growth of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal... His reporting goes far beyond headlines to the core problems of ideology and personal intrigue that drive so much of American foreign policy. ”
___________________________________________________________
And from the website SALON.COM in BRILLIANT CAREERS David Rubien has this to say about Seymour Hersh
http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2000/01/18/hersh/
“ The man who broke the story of Vietnam's My Lai massacre is still the hardest-working muckraker in the journalism business. ”
And he continues:
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh must feel like he's howling into the darkness sometimes. His eighth and latest book, "Against All Enemies," which gruesomely details the extent of Gulf War Syndrome and the government's attempts to pretend it doesn't exist, has been selling indifferently and has been ignored by a surprising number of reviewers. His 1972 "Cover-Up," a report on the Army's cowardly investigation of the My Lai massacre -- the bloodbath Hersh had previously exposed in his blockbuster "My Lai 4" -- also sold poorly. When he revealed in 1991's "The Samson Option" that Israel was secretly stockpiling nuclear weapons, the response was yawns.
And as Lakshmi Chaudhry says in an article posted at AlterNet. October 27, 2004 about Seymour Hersh .
See: AlterNet: The Mix is the Message/MediaCulture
Seymour Hersh: Man On Fire
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20309/
“ For when Seymour Hersh speaks, he does so with unparalleled insight, passion, and candor. He is willing to say what most other star journalists rarely permit themselves to even think in this era of celebrity journalism, when image is king. When Hersh speaks, it's for two simple reasons: it's important and he cares. It's why we care to listen.
Be it his coverage of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War or his recent work exposing the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, Hersh has been a dedicated watchdog for democracy. His latest book, ""Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," builds on his reporting as a staff writer at The New Yorker. The book – among other things – reveals how National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was made aware of human rights abuses in Guantanamo Bay two years before the torture in Iraq took place. It is a searing indictment of the Bush administration for its willful ignorance, ideological agenda, and above all, a profound failure of leadership. ”
Past Peak: Cause for Alarm
HOME PAGE : http://www.pastpeak.com/
http://www.pastpeak.com/archives/2004/07/post_1.htm
July 15, 2004
Seymour Hersh's ACLU Keynote Speech Transcribed
On July 8, Seymour Hersh addressed the ACLU's 2004 Membership Conference.
As Hersh comments on the lack of critical media coverage of political affairs in America:
“ … The truth is, it's so ironic… the best information we may get about this election may come from a combination of The Control Room, Fahrenheit 9/11, John Sayles, the nightly news from Jon Stewart if some of you watch that. At the height of the prisoner abuse stories, [Jon Stewart] had one of his mock news broadcasters say very seriously to the camera, on the Stewart show, he said, "The important thing is not that we commit torture and abuses, it's that we're a country that doesn't condone torture and abuses" [laughter] — that's a wonderful line. ”
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And as for what’s been happening since the Invasion & Forced Take-over of Iraq in April of 2003 here are some of his observations:
See website: The Shalom Centre
http://www.shalomctr.org/
SEYMOUR HERSH on Being Honored by SHALOM CTR, December 2005 with the MENORAH AWARD for bringing new light into dark places.
SEYMOUR HERSH:
“ About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing.
He is absolutely committed... George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can.
I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. .. because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much.
It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us...”
And further he comments about the concentration & abuse of power that there are many in the Intelligence Community & in the military who do not support the policies of the administration but there is little they can do about it ...since...“ the amazing thing is we have been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. ”
You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were-- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. ”
And goes onto more disturbing observations about the Bush administration & the War In Iraq which he claims has become a “ free- fire zone ” & “a turkey shoot ” & “ bombing the country into the stone age”...
“ ...Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically ‘Saddam-lite’.
...every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids..., and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country.
“...which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turned into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner ...to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. ”
On the “Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home., and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it. ”
And in another article in The New Yorker magazine Seymour Hersh uncovers the secret operations for renditions & torture:
THE GRAY ZONE
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
as he states the case:
"The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision... by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.
"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation ...encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official ...said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld ’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A."
See:
Hersh, Seymour M. : CHAIN OF COMMAND: THE ROAD FROM 9/11 TO ABU GHRAIB, PUB. 2004
Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
Graduation 2003
Journalism Commencement Address by Seymour Hersh
(audio is available at the website)
http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/students/graduation2003/hersh.asp
THE NEW YORKER
THE COMING WARS
What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31
Posted 2005-01-17
From DEMOCRACY NOW
Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"
http://www.democracynow.org/article
By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 11 October 2004
Watch the Webcast: Seymour Hersh
UC BERKELEY
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases
PBS.org NOW
2.21.03
Politics and Economy
Transcript: Jane Wallace Interviews Seymour Hersh
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_hersh.html
Then there are a couple of interviews of Seymour Hersh by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now :
Monday, May 17th, 2004
Rumsfeld Knew: Iraq Prison Abuse Part of Pentagon-Approved Black Ops Program
http://www.democracynow.org
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004
Seymour Hersh: Israeli Agents Operating in Iraq, Iran and Syria
interview of Seymour Hersh by Amy Goodman for Democracy Now
See for instance New York Times editorial:
Restoring Our Honor
May 6, 2004, Thursday
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT); Editorial Desk
(reprinted at Peace Corp Online: http://peacecorpsonline.org
"I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today"
see for instance on Mi Lai
CUSP
JOANNA BOURKE, Men and Killing
23 February 2000
Kingston University
http://www.kingston.ac.uk/cusp/Lectures/bourke.htm
Also see comparisons of Mi Lai to Torture at ABU GHRAIB
COUNTERPUNCH
Weekend Edition
May 1 / 3, 2004
An Army Vet on Prisoner Torture in Iraq
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
By DIANE REJMAN
http://www.counterpunch.org/
And from PORTLAND INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTER
April 15, 2004
imperialism & war
Falluja = My Lai Massacre revisited
Bring the criminals to justice. NOW!
My Lai Massacre
On attrocities in Iraq see:
website: NOT IN OUR NAME
http://www.notinourname.net
Wasting Fallujah & THE HIDDEN MASSACRE
US used white phosphorus in Iraq
BBC. November 16, 2005
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