{"id":828,"date":"2011-06-11T10:41:27","date_gmt":"2011-06-11T00:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wildcard.gnubies.com\/?p=828"},"modified":"2011-06-11T11:46:03","modified_gmt":"2011-06-11T01:46:03","slug":"is-hersh-right-or-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=828","title":{"rendered":"Is Hersh right or wrong?"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE well-respected American investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has come under a lot of fire from conservatives recently after he published an article<\/a><\/strong> in the New Yorker, saying that there was no conclusive evidence that Iran was making any moves towards building a nuclear bomb.<\/p>\n

Hersh is a legendary figure in journalistic circles; he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and, more recently, was responsible for exposing the abuse by American forces in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.<\/p>\n

Some of the criticism came from the Wall Street Journal which was very careful to avoid citing Hersh’s credentials but, instead, concentrated on pointing out where he had gone wrong in the past. For an investigative report, getting it right 50 percent of the time is better than most and Hersh is far better than that.<\/p>\n

The WSJ piece, written by a cantankerous gent named Bret Stephens (partial article here<\/a><\/strong>; the skinflints at WSJ charge for rubbish like this) dwells heavily on what Hersh has got wrong in the last four or five years. It does not give the reader any idea about the major triumphs that this intrepid man, one of the few newspapermen in the US with even a shred of integrity after the Iraq invasion of 2003, has recorded.<\/p>\n

Other criticisms dwell on Hersh’s characterisation of the Iraq invasion as a “mistake”; this is correct as the march to control Saddam’s oil was a deliberately planned mission by Dubya and his cronies. The possibility that Sy indulging in sarcasm appears to have escaped people.Hersh, more than anyone else, knows the background of what led up to the Iraq invasion.<\/p>\n

If Hersh is right in pointing out that Iran is nowhere near a nuclear weapon, then a huge amount of the fear factor that is being drummed up by Israel and its cohorts in the US dissipates immediately. Even Israelis, such as the former Mossad chief, Meir Dragan, have gone on the record, saying that Iran poses no danger at the moment.<\/p>\n

But if the fear that hangs over the Middle East is lifted, then it becomes difficult for Israel to continue to get the support it does in the US. Support which translates into lobbying muscle, aid and diplomatic support. Hence anybody who writes an article like Hersh did will be targeted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE well-respected American investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, has come under a lot of fire from conservatives recently after he published an article in the New Yorker, saying that there was no conclusive evidence that Iran was making any moves towards building a nuclear bomb. Hersh is a legendary figure in journalistic circles; he broke the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Is Hersh right or wrong?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,15,31,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-iran","category-israel","category-middle-east"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4825,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=4825","url_meta":{"origin":828,"position":0},"title":"AFR's Aaron Patrick shows us what gutter journalism is all about","date":"March 31, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Australian journalists often criticise each other, with those on the right tending to go for those on the left and vice versa. But, generally, in these stoushes, details of people's private lives are not revealed. But there are exceptions, and one of those was witnessed on March 31, when Aaron\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Australia"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/sams-blog.com\/wp-content\/sams-blog.com\/2021\/03\/blah_blah.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5476,"url":"https:\/\/sams-blog.com\/?p=5476","url_meta":{"origin":828,"position":1},"title":"ABC reduced to running American propaganda on Four Corners","date":"July 5, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"The level to which Australia's government-funded media corporation, the ABC, has sunk is illustrated by the fact that in a slot reserved for its main investigative stories, it ran an American propaganda documentary from the American publicly-funded outlet PBS on 3 July. 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