Seymour Hersh according to Wikipedia: “Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award. He first gained worldwide 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. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh ).
Seymour Hersh on press complicity in the post-9-11 overthrow of democratically accountable American government (2011) : “And so, I did know people in that process, and I couldn't write much about it. How to describe the Bush-Cheney years would be... I was telling a group of faculty people earlier -- and the book I'm doing isn't published, I don't want to talk too much about it -- but just to give you an idea of how differently they thought... As many dark thoughts as you may have about what America did after 9/11, whatever the justification was... I would argue that, what I'm really writing about is, about how eight or nine neoconservative whackos, if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over. And it's not only that. It's not only that the neocons took it over, it's how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced. And all of us, I guess, in the sense of payback and rage and fear, tremendous amount of fear in America, and we all sort of signed on to what we call now the global GWOT, the global war on terror which, for this government, [inaudible] still exists.” [1].
Seymour Hersh on the US Navy Seals raid in 2011 that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden (2013): “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true.” [2, 3].
Seymour Hersh on US journalism (2013): “Do you think Obama’s been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What’s going on [with journalists]?... Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It’s journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a packaged journalism, so you pick a target like – I don’t mean to diminish because anyone who does it works hard – but are railway crossings safe and stuff like that, that’s a serious issue but there are other issues too. Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren’t we doing more? How does he justify it? What’s the intelligence? Why don’t we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don’t we do our own work?” [3]
Seymour Hersh (2015): “Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no” [4].
[1]. Seymour Hersh, “Transcript: “The Obama/Bush foreign policies: why can’t America change?””, Foreign Policy, 22 January 2011: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/22/transcript_the_obamabush_foreign_policies_why_cant_america_change?page=0,0 .
[2]. Lisa O’Carroll, “Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the “pathetic” American media”, Guardian, 27 September 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media
[3]. Lisa O’Carroll, “Seymour Hersh on the death of Osama bin Laden: “It’s one big lie, not a word of it is true’””, Guardian, 27 September 2013 via The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/27/seymour-hersh-on-death-of-osama-bin-laden-its-one-big-lie-not-one-word-of-it-is-true/ .
[4]. Seymour Hersh, “The killing of Osama bin Laden”, London Review of Books, 21 May 2015: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden .