Seymour Hersh Quotes

Then there’s a crisis, whatever the president says about what’s going on with the chemicals in Syria or whatever, it’s immediately jammed into a headline on the cable news! CNN, Fox News––immediately it’s "the president says this!" And whether they screw it up or not doesn’t matter. It’s there. It’s a bully pulpit, and he uses it very effectively because he sets the agenda. And so we’re really in trouble now.

Here’s the White House that, you have a president that’ll do a 20 minute interview and somebody will sum up what he said, and he’ll say, "I didn’t say that!" The reporter will say, "No, you just said that 15 minutes ago!" "No, I didn’t!" You have a president that does that.

There’s a limit to what I could do. But sure, if I had my way, there would've been much more awful stuff about oil companies too. How they manipulate information. And I don’t have my way. I have to work within the confines.

Young kids still see journalism as a viable way of dealing with the problems of society––particularly with a president who’s tone deaf on so much stuff.

I just flunked out of law school. I worked all the time through college, and I got into law school because the father of one of my good friends was a professor there... But anyway, the bottom line is I bummed around and I finally heard about a job as a police reporter. The requirements were a BA and you were alive and willing to work for $40 a week or something like that. It was 1960... So that’s how I started. Sheer serendipity. And I learned my own way. I assume that I was a better reporter for having worked as I did for w:United Press InternationalUnited Press International and then for the AP. And come up being a police reporter in Chicago. I thought I was more equipped to deal with the dirty world that existed than some guy that was editor of Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News... On the other hand, I met a lot of people who were editors of the Harvard Crimson or worked for David Halberstam [editor of the Crimson] who were great reporters... I’d like to think that being on the street like I was for years helped.

I've been a freelancer since 1979. There’s something good about it, because I can pick what I want to do, within limits, assuming I can turn in enough good stories and my ideas are good enough. I’m not at the mercy of an editor. When I did it, you could do long-form reporting as a freelancer. Once I began to get connected with The New Yorker, everybody assumed I was working for it, but I was always on contract. I wanted to be. I could have changed it, but then I would have had the editors have control over me, so I didn’t want that. On the other hand, they still had control over me, because I would do an assignment. They were the editor and they paid the bills. I don’t know if I was being silly or not, but whatever happened, it turned out that it was all fine. Serendipity, I guess.

There is no middle ground anymore. There’s no standard. If you like Trump, you watch Fox. If you don’t like Trump, you watch CNN] or MSNBC, or read The [New York] Times.

Seymour Hersh I respect a lot. He broke the My Lai story. I know him, and he’s got great intelligence. People talk to him from all over the world. It’s like the JFK killing. You cover this sh*t up, man...There’s a lot of other lies going on. Read the book, The Killing of Bin Laden by Seymour Hersh.

'When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad

The idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’ This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012)], Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know].

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army sta, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani Official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani Officials, and went no further.

It's been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

My own preference and my own view is: Things are more complicated than you think.

There will probably always be a New York Times. And The New York Times, for all my kvetching, it’s still the paper. And it still does great investigative reporting. I can’t stand some of its foreign coverage because it’s instinctively anti-Russian, anti-Iran, anti-Syrian. I don’t like that.