Hersh
ligt onder vuur vanwege de vragen en kritiek die hij heeft over het officiële verhaal aangaande de gevangenneming en moord op Osama bin
Laden. Het bewuste artikel van Hersh over deze zaak vind je als
vierde link in het begin van het artikel dat Tyler Durden schreef
over Hersh (de link vind je onder de volgende woorden 'Osama bin
Laden death narrative' >> lezen mensen!!)
Hersh
schreef een biografie waarin hij tien onthullingen doet, o.a. -het
plan van de VS om hegemonie van de VS in het Midden-Oosten te vestigen, -de eerste plannen
voor een VS invasie van Syrië, -de zogenaamde manipulatie van de VS
presidentsverkiezingen door de Russen (waar de NSA zelfs toegeeft niets te weten >> lees het artikel bij onthulling nummer vier) en -de 'vergiftiging van de Skripals'.
Ondanks
dat veel zaken al bekend waren is dit artikel en de biografie die
Hersh schreef, 'Reporter: A Memoire' (klik op de eerste rode link met
die titel in het Anti-Media artikel* hieronder voor de gegevens over dat boek)
uiterst verhelderend (en wat mij betreft zijn een paar feiten zelfs
schokkend), bovendien hoe meer bevestigingen voor de enorme terreur die de VS her en
der uitoefende en uitoefent, hoe beter!
10 Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh’s New Autobiography
August
8, 2018 at 10:11 pm
Written
by Tyler
Durden
(ZHE) — Among
the more interesting revelations to surface as legendary
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh continues a book tour and
gives interviews discussing his newly published
autobiography, Reporter:
A Memoir, is
that he never set out to write it at all, but was actually deeply
engaged in writing a massive exposé of Dick Cheney — a
project he decided couldn’t
ultimately be published in the current climate of aggressive
persecution of whistleblowers which became especially intense
during the Obama years.
Hersh
has pointed out he worries his sources risk exposure while taking on
the Cheney book, which ultimately resulted in the famed reporter
opting to write an in-depth account of his storied career
instead — itself full
of previously hidden details connected with major historical
events and state secrets.
In
a recent wide-ranging interview with the
UK Independent, Hersh
is finally asked to discuss in-depth some of the controversial
investigative stories he’s written on Syria, Russia-US
intelligence sharing,
and the Osama
bin Laden death narrative, which
have gotten the Pulitzer Prize winner and five-time Polk Award
recipient essentially blacklisted from
his regular publication, The New Yorker magazine,
for which he broke stories of monumental importance for decades.
Though
few would disagree that Hersh “has
single-handedly broken more stories of genuine world-historical
significance than any reporter alive (or dead, perhaps)” — as The
Nation put
it — the
man who exposed shocking cover-ups like the My Lai
Massacre, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the truth
behind the
downing of Korean Air Flight 007,
has lately been shunned and even attacked by the American mainstream
media especially over his controversial coverage of Syria and the bin
Laden raid in 2011.
But
merely a few of the many hit pieces written on this front
include The
Washington Post’s “Sy
Hersh, journalism giant: Why some who worshiped him no longer
do,” and
elsewhere “Whatever
happened to Seymour Hersh?” or “Sy
Hersh’s Chemical Misfire” in Foreign
Policy — the
latter which was written, it should be noted, by a UK blogger who
conducts chemical weapons “investigations” via YouTube and Google
Maps (and this is not an exaggeration).
The Post story begins
by acknowledging, “But
Sy Hersh now has a problem: He thinks 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
lied about the death of Osama bin Laden, and it seems nearly everyone
is mad at him for saying so” — before
proceeding to take a sledgehammer to Hersh’s findings while
painting him as some kind of conspiracy theorist (Hersh
published the bin Laden story for the London
Review of Books after
his usual New
Yorker rejected
it).
Seymour
Hersh broke the story of CIA’s illegal domestic operations with a
front page story in the New York Times on December 22, 1974.
However,
the mainstream pundits piling on against his reporting of late ignore
the clearly establish historical pattern when it comes to Hersh:
nearly all of the biggest stories of his career were
initially met with incredulity and severe push back from both
government officials and even his fellow journalists,
and yet he’s managed to emerge proven right and ultimately
vindicated time and again.
* *
*
Here
are ten bombshell revelations and fascinating new details to lately
come out of both Sy Hersh’s new book, Reporter,
as well as interviews he’s
given since publication…
1) On a leaked Bush-era intelligence memo outlining the neocon plan to remake the Middle East
(Note:
though previously alluded to only anecdotally by General Wesley
Clark in
his memoir and in a 2007 speech,
the below passage from Seymour Hersh is to our
knowledge the
first time this highly classified memo has been quoted.
Hersh’s account appears to corroborate now retired Gen.
Clark’s assertion that days after 9/11 a classified memo outlining
plans to foster regime change in “7
countries in 5 years” was
being circulated among intelligence officials.)
From Reporter:
A Memoir pg.
306 — A
few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas
with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I
was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American
dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but
one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I
was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained
by someone in the local CIA station. There
was reason to be rattled: The
document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to
begin “with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this…
is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle
East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones,
as it were, the seriousness of American intent and
determination.” Victory
in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the “defanging”
of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat’s Palestine Liberation
Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America’s enemies must
understand that “they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is
on its way, which implies their annihilation.” I and the foreign
general agreed that America’s neocons were a menace to
civilization.
* *
*
2) On early regime change plans in Syria
From Reporter:
A Memoir pages 306-307 — Donald
Rumsfeld was also infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to
permit America’s Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from
its territory, and the division, with its twenty-five thousand men
and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq until mid-April, when
the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that
Rumsfeld had asked the American military command in Stuttgart,
Germany, which had responsibility for monitoring Europe, including
Syria and Lebanon, to
begin drawing up an operational plan for an invasion of Syria. A
young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning
applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career.The
plan was seen by those I knew as especially bizarre because Bashar
Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to 9/11 by sharing
with the CIA hundreds of his country’s most sensitive intelligence
files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the
planning for 9/11 was carried out… Rumsfeld eventually came to his
senses and back down, I was told…
3) On the Neocon deep state which seized power after 9/11
From Reporter:
A Memoir pages 305-306 —
I
began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were
political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially
overthrown the government of the United States — with
ease.
It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The
intellectual leaders of that group — Dick
Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle — had not hidden
their ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but
depicted themselves in public with a great calmness and a
self-assurance that masked their radicalism.
I had spent many hours after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that,
luckily for me, helped me understand what was coming. (Perle and I
had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke
off relations in 1993 over an article I did for The New Yorker
linking him, a fervent supporter of Israel, to a
series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a
multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia.
Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue me and characterizing
me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.
Meanwhile,
Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he
did all he could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a
great deal from the inside about his
primacy in the White House,
but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of
betraying my sources…
I
came to understand that Cheney’s goal was to run his most important
military and intelligence operations with as little congressional
knowledge, and interference, as possible. I was fascinating and
important to learn what I did about Cheney’s
constant accumulation of power and authority as vice president,
but it was impossible to even begin to verify the information without
running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a
good idea from whom I was getting the information.
4) On Russian meddling in the US election
From
the recent Independent
interview based
on his autobiography — Hersh
has vociferously strong opinions on the subject and smells a rat. He
states that there is “a
great deal of animosity towards Russia. All of that stuff about
Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous.” He
has been researching the subject but is not ready to go public…
yet.
Hersh
quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have
high confidence, it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq. He points out that the NSA only
has moderate confidence in Russian hacking. It is a point that has
been made before; there has been no national intelligence estimate in
which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. “When
the intel community wants to say something they say it… High
confidence effectively
means that they don’t know.”
5) On the Novichok poisoning
From
the recent Independent
interview — Hersh
is also on the record as stating that the official version of
the Skripal
poisoning does
not stand up to scrutiny. He tells me: “The
story of novichok poisoning has not held up very well. He
[Skripal] was most likely talking to British intelligence
services about Russian organised crime.” The
unfortunate turn of events with the contamination of other victims is
suggestive, according to Hersh, of organised crime elements
rather than state-sponsored actions –though this files in the face
of the UK government’s position.
Hersh
modestly points out that these are just his opinions. Opinions or
not, he is scathing on Obama – “a
trimmer … articulate [but] … far from a radical … a middleman”.
During his Goldsmiths talk, he remarks that liberal critics
underestimate Trump at their peril.
He
ends the Goldsmiths talk with an anecdote about having lunch with his
sources in the wake
of 9/11.
He vents his anger at the agencies for not sharing information. One
of his CIA sources fires back: “Sy
you still don’t get it after all these years – the FBI catches
bank robbers, the CIA robs banks.” It
is a delicious, if cryptic aphorism.
*
* *
6) On the Bush-era ‘Redirection’ policy of arming Sunni radicals to counter Shia Iran, which in a 2007 New Yorker article Hersh accurately predicted would set off war in Syria
From
the Independent
interview: [Hersh]
tells me it is “amazing
how many times that story has been reprinted”.
I ask about his argument that US policy was designed to neutralize
the Shia sphere extending from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon
and hence redraw the Sykes-Picot boundaries for the 21st century.
He
goes on to say that Bush and Cheney “had it in for
Iran”, although he denies the idea that Iran was heavily
involved in Iraq: “They were providing intel, collecting intel
… The US did many cross-border hunts to kill ops [with] much more
aggression than Iran”…
He
believes that the Trump administration has no memory of this
approach. I’m sure though that the military-industrial complex has
a longer memory…
I
press him on the RAND and Stratfor reports including one
authored by Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in which they envisage
deliberate ethno-sectarian partitioning of Iraq.
Hersh ruefully states that: “The
day after 9/11 we should have gone to Russia. We did the one thing
that George Kennan warned us never to do – to expand NATO too far.”
* *
*
7) On the official 9/11 narrative
From
the Independent
interview: We
end up ruminating about 9/11, perhaps because it is another narrative
ripe for deconstruction by skeptics. Polling shows that a significant
proportion of the American public believes there is more to the
truth. These doubts have been reinforced by the declassification of
the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 commission report last year
undermining the version that a group of terrorists acting
independently managed to pull off the attacks. The implication is
that they
may well have been state-sponsored with
the Saudis potentially involved.
Hersh
tells me: “I
don’t necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was
responsible for 9/11. We really don’t have an ending to the story.
I’ve known people in the [intelligence] community. We don’t know
anything empirical about who did what”.
He continues: “The
guy was living in a cave. He really didn’t know much English. He
was pretty bright and he had a lot of hatred for the US. We respond
by attacking the Taliban. Eighteen years later… How’s it
going guys?”
8) On the media and the morality of the powerful
From
a recent The
Intercept interview and book
review — If
Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred
and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, he describes
his coverage of
a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991
after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America’s
indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, “a reminder of the
Vietnam War’s MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it’s a murdered or
raped gook, there is no crime.” It was also, he adds, a reminder of
something else: “I had learned a domestic version of that rule
decades earlier” in Chicago.
“Reporter”
demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that
rule:
1.The
powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including
mass murder.
2.The
powerful lie constantly about their predations.
3.The
natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with
it.
* *
*
9) On the time President Lyndon B. Johnson expressed his displeasure to a reporter over a Vietnam piece by defecating on the ground in front of him
From Reporter:
A Memoir pages
201-202 — Tom
[Wicker] got into the car and the two of them sped off down a dusty
dirt road. No words were spoken. After a moment or two, Johnson once
again slammed on the brakes, wheeling to a halt near a stand of
trees.
Leaving
the motor running, he climbed out, walked a few dozen feet toward the
trees, stopped,
pulled down his pants, and defecated, in full view. The President
wiped himself with leaves and grass, pulled up his pants, climbed
into the car, turned in around, and sped back to the press
gathering. Once
there, again the brakes were slammed on, and Tom was motioned out.
All of this was done without a word being spoken.
…”I
knew then,” Tom told me, “that the son of a bitch was never going
to end the war.”
10) On Sy’s “most troublesome article” for which his own family received death threats
From Reporter:
A Memoir pages
263-264 —
The
most troublesome article I did, as someone not on the staff of the
newspaper, came in June 1986 and dealt with American signals
intelligence showing that General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the
dictator who ran Panama, had
authorized the assassination of a popular political opponent.
At the time, Noriega was actively involved in supplying the Reagan
administration with what was said to be intelligence on the spread of
communism in Central America. Noriega also permitted American
military and intelligence units to operate with impunity, in secret,
from bases in Panama, and the Americans, in return, looked
the other way while the general dealt openly in drugs and arms. The
story was published just as Noriega was giving a speech at Harvard
University and created embarrassment for him, and for Harvard, along
with a very disturbing telephone threat at home, directed not at me
but at my family.
* *
*
===============================
* Het originele artikel werd op Zero Hedge gepubliceerd.