Top 15 Seymour Hersh Quotes

Former NSA whistleblower Snowden has gone on record accusing the US government of engineering the "balloon wars" scare to detract attention away from Seymour Hersh's explosive investigative report detailing how the US White House plotted and blew up the Nord Stream pipelines - an act of terrorism or war against Russia and Germany.

We have corroboration now from Gil Doctorow in Brussels, Larry Johnson in Tampa, it’s coming in. And so I applaud the source that told Sy Hersh all this information. I believe it implicitly. Sy has never been wrong on really important issues like this. As I say, he’s meticulous... He and... my mentor, Robert Parry, Consortium News – used to commiserate... Can The New York Times and the major media suppress this indefinitely?... The fact that that Sy had to go on Substack to do this is really a lurid manifestation of the fact that not even the most prized, the most meticulous investigative reporter in the United States, could not get this published elsewhere. That speaks volumes.

Well, all I can say is that Sy Hersh has proven for about 40 years now that he is a trusted journalist. And when someone – and I suspect it aptly pertained to this particular source – when someone sees that an act of war has been has been committed by our government against all the… well, against the Constitution, maybe not against the U.S. designed “rules based order,” but, you know, we all swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Now this guy took that seriously. I suspect he went to that little corner in that bar where Sy...meets his sources and told him this whole story. Sy said it only took him three months. I believe that. And American people… it’s eminently believable. The question is the fallout and whether the mass media can prevent this story from sneaking into the consciousness of Americans who have been taught...over the last seven years...to hate Russia.

Now, this was an act of war, pure and simple... against Germany. And... President Joseph Biden, at a press conference in the presence of the chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, said this is going to happen if Russia invaded Ukraine. And, of course, he was asked, well, how do you do this? I mean, how can you how can you be so confident that Nordstrom will be killed and Biden said, well, just, you know, trust me, it’s going to happen. <br \> And so she, bilingual, the Reuters reporter, turned to Scholz – and this is not widely available now for obvious reasons – and she said, well, I mean, do you agree with that? I mean, hello, how do you feel about this? And this hack, this political hack said: we do everything together. We do everything together. We will be together on this now. So... that interview is available in Germany.

I know him [Hersh] to be a meticulous reporter, winner of five Polk Awards, Pulitzer Prize, you name it. Back in the day when honest reporters were so honored. This piece has all the earmarks of Sy’s meticulous approach, and he clearly has a very good source who felt a, well, he felt a constitutional obligation to honor his or her oath to the Constitution of the United States, which is the supreme oath any of us take.

Hersh is a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. More than 50 years ago, his report that exposed the US military's massacre of Vietnamese civilians significantly pushed the anti-war movement in the US. He was also behind the investigation of the notorious incident of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse in 2003 and contributed to revealing the Watergate scandal, one of the most disgraceful political scandals in Washington's history. Hersh's latest report is not comparable to conspiracy theories in public opinion, nor are they something Washington can just gloss over.

Hersh in 1969 exposed the massacre of South Vietnamese villagers by U.S. troops in the hamlet of My Lai. His syndicated report was credited with helping end the Vietnam War... His reporting for the New York Times on President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal led to an award-winning book on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Hersh wrote critically acclaimed books on the 1983 Soviet downing of a South Korean passenger jet, Israel's nuclear arms program, and abuses of inmates at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison... during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He ignited a storm of controversy with a 2013 article in the London Review of Books blaming a sarin nerve agent attack that killed hundreds of Syrian civilians in a rebel-held Damascus suburb on rebels acting under Turkey's direction... He attracted more controversy with a May 2015 London Review of Books article quoting Pakistani and U.S. sources as saying the U.S. and Pakistani governments lied about details of the 2011 U.S. commando raid that killed al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan. Both governments denied Hersh's allegations that Pakistan had been holding bin Laden prisoner and knew about the raid in advance.

Ishaan Tharoor, a foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Post, wrote on Twitter that while he is "not going to wade into debates over the sourcing and reporting" in Hersh's story, "it is without a doubt a bit odd how this whole story quietly went away once it became clear it didn't make any sense as an act of Russian sabotage... And of course, when the explosion actually happened, some folks in the transatlantic, anti-Kremlin space cheered it happily as a successful act of anti-Russian sabotage," Tharoor added, an apparent reference to a European member of Parliament's since-deleted tweet thanking the U.S. for the Nord Stream explosions.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a story Wednesday alleging that the United States was behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline system last year... Hersh... over the course of his decades-long career has famously exposed U.S. forces' massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians and shined light on the torture of detainees at the U.S-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.'''

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has alleged US Navy divers laid bombs that destroyed the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea last September, drawing a denial from the Pentagon Wednesday... Hersh, who scooped journalism’s top award more than five decades ago for exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in 1968... [reported in Feb 8, 2023] that Americans planted remotely triggered explosives that wrecked three of the four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe... Hersh, a former reporter for the Associated Press and New York Times as well as a longtime contributor to the New Yorker... previously drew the wrath of the US government when he claimed in a 2013 interview that the official story of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden was “one big lie.” Two years later, Hersh published an account in the London Review of Books that claimed the Al Qaeda kingpin was a prisoner of Pakistani authorities at the time he was killed and that the CIA was tipped off to his whereabouts by a member of the country’s powerful intelligence service — rather than bin Laden’s courier, as the Obama administration claimed.

Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has claimed that US deep-sea divers, using a Nato military exercise as a cover, planted mines along the pipelines that were later detonated remotely.

The press’s reluctance to report such discomfiting realities became even more glaring as Hersh pursued his next big story, which makes up the dramatic centerpiece of Reporter. In the fall of 1969, while working out of a small office in the National Press Building, he got a tip from a young lawyer named Geoffrey Cowan about a soldier who was being court-martialed for the murder of 75 civilians in My Lai, a village in South Vietnam. Cowan didn’t give the name of the perpetrator, an Army lieutenant, but Hersh, running into a colonel at the Pentagon, asked if he’d heard about the mass murder of civilians in Vietnam. “This Calley is a madman, Sy,” the officer said, noting that he’d even killed babies. “There’s no story in that.” But Hersh knew there was and, now supplied with the name of the officer, set out to track him down...

When his book on chemical and biological warfare appeared, The New York Review of Books ran an excerpt, and The Washington Post covered the findings on its front page. Hersh spent the summer promoting the book in talks on campuses and at bookstores. With the US military’s defoliation program in South Vietnam gaining attention, the debate became ever more emotional. Congress held a hearing, and in November 1969 President Nixon announced that the United States would end the production of offensive biological-warfare agents and destroy its existing stockpiles. Without lobbying anyone in Congress or the White House, Hersh writes, he had helped “force a change [through] persistent reporting on an issue that needed public exposure.”

One night, when Hersh was on duty at police headquarters, he overheard two cops in the parking lot discussing a robbery suspect who’d been shot dead. “So the guy tried to run on you?” one of the cops asked. “Naw,” said the other, “I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.” Leaving the scene undetected, Hersh called an editor at City News and told him what he’d heard. The editor urged him to ignore it; it would be his word against theirs, and the cops would accuse him of lying. Hersh decided to wait a few days and ask for the coroner’s report; it showed that the man had been shot in the back. With a feeling of unease, Hersh let the story drop. It was, he recalls in Reporter, a shameful example of a practice he would witness time and again throughout his career: self-censorship...

After attending a two-year junior college, he transferred to the University of Chicago, where his ability to write helped him get his degree and eventually earned him a position at City News, which covered the courts and police for Chicago’s newspapers. According to Hersh, the mob ran the city, the cops were on the take, and reporters mostly ignored the corruption in return for access to crime scenes and the right to park wherever they wished.