Max Boot, whose column is one of the few reasons to check out the LA Times, writes scathingly and convincingly on Seymour Hersh, whose writings could give yellow journalism a bad name.
Hersh . . . is the journalistic equivalent of Oliver Stone: a hard-left zealot who subscribes to the old counterculture conceit that a deep, dark conspiracy is running the U.S. government. In the 1960s the bogeyman was the "military- industrial complex." Now it's the "neoconservatives." "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military!" Hersh ranted at UC Berkeley on Oct. 8, 2004.
Hersh has a track record of conspiracy theories based on unnamed sources and unfounded speculations. I remember him first from a piece that Boot describes here:
In 1986 he published a book suggesting that the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner because they mistook it for a U.S. spy plane — a claim debunked by the opening of Soviet archives.
That was vintage yellow left journalism. The Soviet shoot down an airliner full of innocent people and who is to fault? The Reagan administration of course.
But it is not Hersh's irresponsible imagination that is most appalling. Its his stupidity.
Hersh has also compared what happened at Abu Ghraib with Nazi Germany. (Were American MPs gassing inmates?)
If you compare the Abu Ghraib scandal with reasonable standards of interrogation it looks pretty bad, not only because the treatment of prisoners was so nasty but because it was, as far as anyone can tell, useless. But when you compare it with Auschwitz, the Americans come off as angels. Can you imagine any inmate of a death camp who would not regard it as divine deliverance were he to be transported to Abu Ghraib?
Hersh's pieces are indeed an indictment of such journals as the New Yorker, who might as well be printing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for all the journalist integrity that Hersh's writing brings.
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