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Thought some of you might be interested in these candid remarks from investigative reporter Sy Hersh (writes for the New Yorker...appears frequently on virtually every major electronic outlets..). He has lately been extremely active in reporting on the 'war on terror' -- out of Afghanistan and his Washington homebase. This morning I rec'd this transcript from someone who carried a tape recorder into the Kennedy School at Harvard last night (3/11) where Hersh rec'd a lifetime achievement award. There were about 20 other reporters receiving awards, as well. Excerpt from Hersh's remarks:
So much for e-mail. I'm also really happy, this procedure, tonight, didn't begin with a prayer. It's great. We are not a theocracy, folks, believe it or not, and unfortunately we may end up in a holy war, but tell that to the White House.
Like everybody, I'm enormously impressed by the awards, the people who won and didn't win. It is remarkable that we have such good reporting. It's also so interesting to me that none of the stories really are out of Washington, because I think it's a very tough time for us in Washington. I've been around, let's see, 35 or so years. I make the joke that I haven't been so afraid since I watched "The Wizard of Oz" with my six-year-old daughter. These guys scare me. They're insulated. They're tough to get to.
The Perle story...his counterattack is beyond belief. He's been calling me a terrorist, and it's just because I wrote a story well within the bounds of what we do for a living. If anyone doesn't think Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Kashoogi, the middle man in Iran Contra, in a secret lunch in Paris or in Versailles in France is a story, and that's what we do for a living. But these guys are really special.
This is a crowd that's going to put us into something. I don't know what information the president has. I have a lot of friends in the government. I've never seen my peers as frightened as they are. It's almost a waste to be a line officer in the State Department and in many of the bureaucracies. There's just despair about the inability of people to get to meetings, to have an impact on meetings. It's very hard for the press.
In Washington, they try hard. I was mortified by the news conference, a programmed president. There were some very good questions. Just to show you what an awful...the president turned the press corps into puppets because he read from the list and bypassed an excellent reporter from the Washington Post, Dana Milbank, who got the president mad. I know what I would have done if I had been there. I would have stood up and said, I give my question over to Dana, and see what happened. But you can't do that. And that's why I'm going crazy, I guess, because I would have done that. But somebody should at some point, because we can't get away with orchestrating us like the president did. We're not seals. I don't know what we can do about it. Mendacity passes for daily occurrences with the press secretary.
There is no real standard anymore of integrity and truth because the White House doesn't have any, and so we're all left on our own to sort of stagger around and try to figure out what's going on. He is the president, and he does have the power to send our children to commit murder in the name of democracy, and we respect that, we do, but a real crisis coming, and I can tell you, I wish there was better reporting out of Washington. I know how hard it is. I know how tough it is.
And I also know, even if we end up in a 100-year religious war, I don't get any sense that this is a White House that deals in a lot of self-introspection, a lot of thinking. I don't think the president after 9/11 asked for a briefing on the Koran, what do we have here, what's really going on here. Having gone through the Vietnam War, having seen what we can do, wrongly, and for good reasons, for honest reasons, we just did it, but I think the job of reporters is to hold people in public life to the highest possible standard. And that's the simple way to look at it. You simply have to do it. You can't compromise.
There have been serious questions raised about some of the probity of some of the statements that Mr. Powell made, the Secretary of State, an honorable man, so one of the stories I'm looking at is how do you get some of the information he gave out. Who briefed him? Who told him it was okay? What does he feel about it now? Because he's smart enough to know that some of the stuff he put out wasn't good. I'm sure he was told it was, through State, the Secretary of State, and why.
And these are horrible stories to try to report. I guess one of the things I always think about, and just to show you how hard it is right now, I'll tell you a couple of stories..."
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Drop Bush, Not Bombs!
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"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." George Orwell
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