Seymour Hersh: "After 9/11 We Became a Different Country"

By Faisal Abbas, Asharq Al-Awsat. Posted December 25, 2008.

Let me give you an interesting example regarding sources. In May 2000, I wrote an article of approximately 25,000 words for The New Yorker. It was about Barry McCaffrey, a division commander at the end of the first Gulf War, who attacked a retreating Iraqi tank brigade and killed 800 people and executed 400 prisoners of war.

A lot of generals talked to me very bitterly about McCaffrey and about what he did and how he got away with it, but my editor wanted me to get everything on the record. So, I went back to a dozen generals who were very critical and they all agreed to talk, but spoke moderately on the record. The result was a terrible package, and it made no real difference.

Asharq Al-Awsat: You wrote story a while back stating that the U.S. had actually already invaded Iran, and many people questioned the credibility of that story. What was the story behind it?

SH: Well, not that it had invaded but that it was running covert operations. I wrote that last summer. The story was that a lot of money had been appropriated by Congress secretly, and a presidential finding was made that lethal force could be used. The idea was to begin to spread and increase the amount of internal violence within Iran, but mostly with the Kurds, the Armenian Kurds and other groups, to create internal chaos.

Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, who has been tracking this, sent me copies [of a report] and the amount of internal violence over the past seven or eight months had gone up and even the Iranians themselves had announced this. There is no question that there has been an increase in internal violence.

Asharq Al-Awsat: You visited Syria recently. Assuming that you are going to write a piece about it, would you be able to criticize Syrian President Bashar al Assad in the same way you criticize President Bush?

SH: You'll have to wait to see ... Tell me, is everything perfect in Syria?

Asharq Al-Awsat: Of course not, so?

SH: So, why would I not say that?

Asharq Al-Awsat: Because you risk the possibility of returning to Syria in the future to say the least, right?

SH: I am not trying to dodge the question but I can not talk about something I have not written yet. There certainly are problems in Syria.

Asharq Al-Awsat: In light of the Tribune Group recently filing for bankruptcy, how do you evaluate the future of the business, particularly the type of reporting that you do, since it is quite costly?

SH: In America, it is collapsing. Economically it's a disaster. I have an easy fix for the problems regarding reporting in America; I would get rid of 70 per cent of the editors. You see it is always the more cautious people that get promoted and the more aggressive people who do not because they are harder to control.

Above and beyond that, the newspapers have been very slow in coping with the internet and we are dying. One of the great things in America is the first amendment; we can publish any top secret document we can get, there is nothing like that in Britain or anywhere else.

Let us assume I obtain some highly sensitive material, It is my call whether to publish it or not. Of course, one wouldn't want to jeopardize his colleagues or fellow Americans etc, but what I am saying is that we are failing despite this incredible press freedom.

I am lucky at The New Yorker, but even at here there is a huge crunch in advertising just as the case is across the industry.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, vietnam, journalism, new york times, seymour hersh, abu ghraib, syria, new yorker, barry mccaffrey, my lai

Faisal Abbas is Asharq Al-Awsat's Media Editor.

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