Talk:Seymour Hersh

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"These public claims have not been independently verified, nor appeared in print under Hersh's byline in the pages of his current employer, The New Yorker, which fact checks its writers, and as Hersh himself has admitted may be distorted to protect sources or for other reasons. [10]" This seems like a horrible run-on to me. At least, I can't figure out what the intent of this sentence is. --Kluge 04:57, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm a bit confused: Did Seymour break the Abu Ghraib story first, or did 60 Minutes? I haven't found a good reference for this question. --NightMonkey 10:31, Nov 20, 2004 (UTC)

According to the Washington Post, it was 60 Minutes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37860-2004May18.html

- Also in "Chain of Command" the Introduction mentions that CBS News recieved the photos prior to when Seymour did and agreed to hold them at the Pentagon's request however Seymour had obtained the photos as well as the report written by (Aguando?). But Hersh being the guy he is decided to publish anyway at which point CBS News cleared with the Pentagon their report so it's kinda like the USANews and Matt Drudge thing with Clinton..oh well. -

• Stefanomie and others: it's ridiculous to take a quote from a hatchet job about this respected investigative journalist and put it into his opening paragraph. Like what's done with the George W. Bush article however, please notice I'm leaving it as part of Wikipedia, just a few pages deep under a separate "criticisms" heading.

Brodo 04:18, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Seymour Hersh last night on an interview with John Stewart stated the US forces will more than likely be withdrawing from Iraq in the future. He stated that the insurgency is working at a dull moment currently and is going to escalate attacks in the near future. He said his New Yorker piece came out a few days ago, anyone have a link to this? -- Nick August 16, 2005.

Looks like his newest article was dead on, Tehran is now reporting two US unmanned aircraft were found, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1108-07.htm.

Contents 1 Hersh and the Clinton Administration 2 redirects - shouldn't basic article be Seymour Myron Hersh? 3 Confused 4 Vanunu and Maxwell 5 Foreign Appreciation 6 Common Sense 7 Iraq 8 Criticism 9 Iran anonymous edit 10 Sources

[edit] Hersh and the Clinton Administration

Lately, Hersh has gotten undue flack for being anti-Bush. It isn't true -- if anything, he's completely non-partisan. One reason people buy into the criticism is that, of Hersh's stories in the last ten years, only those regarding Abu Ghraib -- and more recently, Iran -- are cited.

What gets lost in the shuffle is that Hersh was equally merciless on the Clinton Administration.

An addition that might reflect this, and also highlight one of Hersh's less-cited achievements, is a mention of his story "The Missiles of August," about the bombing of the Khartoum pharmaceutical factory (there were two targets; the other was a suspected bin Laden training camp).

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020114fr_archive02

This was a controversial move, despite Sandy Berger's assurance that the Administration knew "with great certainty" that the factory produced "essentially the penultimate chemical to manufacture VX nerve gas."

Why?

At the time, the Lewinsky scandal was at its peak.

As Hersh wrote:

"Almost every aspect of the Administration's planning for the Tomahawk raids has been challenged, in more than a hundred interviews conducted over the past six weeks with past and present officials in the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the C.I.A. The men and women who make American foreign policy believe Osama bin Laden to be an extreme threat to American well-being. No one disputes that Sudan has systematically violated human rights, and permitted bin Laden and other terrorists to operate with impunity inside its borders, at least until 1996, when he and some hundred of his followers were expelled at the request of the United States and Saudi Arabia. Many certainly would have applauded his death if he had been slain, as was hoped. Nevertheless, there is a great degree of disquiet and dissatisfaction over the raids—and widespread concern over the President's possible motives for ordering them. There is also widespread belief that senior officials of the White House misrepresented and overdramatized evidence suggesting that the Tomahawk raids had prevented further terrorist attacks."

History has proven Hersh correct.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory

(comment by: 23:20, 12 January 2006 User:Misterbones)

Part of your comment is appropriate for the discussion page, but with material as strong and clearly NPOV as this - there's no controversy as to whether or not Hersh criticised the Clinton attack on the medicine factory, there might be controversy whether his criticisms were valid or not, but nobody serious can discount the fact that he made the criticisms, there's no need to be shy - just add it to the article itself! i've added a section with a couple of sentences to get started. Boud 17:35, 8 April 2006 (UTC) )

[edit] redirects - shouldn't basic article be Seymour Myron Hersh?

i don't know what the chances are of someone else with the name Seymour Hersh eventually becoming "notable", in the wikipedia sense, but since we already have a redirect from Seymour M. Hersh to Seymour Hersh, wouldn't it make sense that the basic article is Seymour Myron Hersh and that the others redirect to it? On the other hand, most people probably won't use his middle name either in full as an abbreviation (M.), so if the criterion for choosing the "best" name is frequency, maybe Seymour Hersh is the best choice? Well, as you can see, i'm too lazy to search for the wikipedia naming policy, so i'm unlikely to be active about the issue - but i'm just a bit worried about some future ambiguity occurring if another Seymour Hersh (singer, actor, ...) sooner or later pops up... (Incidentally, physicist Jorge E. Hirsch writes somewhat related stuff regarding the threats to Iran, but his name only sounds the same (i presume) as Hersh, there's no spelling ambiguity :P.) Boud 17:17, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Confused

Shouldn't the Perle Hersh be reversed with respect to who was going to sue who, i.e. wouldn't Hersh sue Perle for calling him close to a terrorist and not the other way around?

No. Perle threatened to sue Hersh over what Hersh wrote in the New Yorker. --82.35.240.214 07:43, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

That is a hell of a way to defend freedom and liberty and all that crap. LamontCranston 00:27, 02 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vanunu and Maxwell

This passage is terribly POV. From the israeli point of view (which is absolutely not respected !), Vanunu was a traitor and a major threat to national security. Here, his actions are portayed in an unequivocally sympathetic light, though. RCS 17:14, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. Thise passage does not portray anything sympathetically, its just telling the story of what happened, though not as expansively as it could. There is no question from reading this that Israel considered Vanunu a traitor. What is missing is the overall context of the crisis over Israel's development of nuclear weapons, which at the time filled much of the world with dread and speculation about a coming nuclear holocaust in the mid-east. The collaboration with South Africa's apartheid gov't (whose nucelar ambitions were subject to several security council decisions vetoed by the US) made matters worse.

However, I do think the "perhaps coincidentally..." bit at the end is less appropriate.

If you had signed your comment, your disagreement could have been a little more believable. The version you are talking about has already been de-npoved a little. RCS 19:32, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Please remember that this is a biographical article on Sy Hersh. This section is covering what he, as an investigative journalist and commentator, wrote about that crisis. It should not contain a complete discourse on the entire issue of the contreversy, which should be covered well in other articles on the subject. I replaced "revealed" with "wrote" which should be more encyclopedic, but there doesn't appear to be much more to do to make it NPOV. Yes, it could probably use more info with respect to his findings and opinions, but you can add info yourself, too, as long as it sticks to the official policies. ;) You don't really make any Wikipedia policy-based criticisms, other than you apparently disagree with what Hersh wrote, which isn't enough to merit a NPOV tag. If you or other editors aren't more specifc in their policy-based objections, I'm going to remove the NPOV tag on this section in 3 days. Thanks. --NightMonkey 07:52, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

You are welcome ;). As it is now, the section is way better than before, anyway. RCS 08:07, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Done. However, this section, and the article as a whole, could definitely use some TLC. --NightMonkey 07:38, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Foreign Appreciation

What a load of crap. Brodo 22:31, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

His reports may be somewhat valuable to foriegn governments that oppose us, but I doubt that he is "worth his weight in gold." I would rather know than remain ignorant as a voter.

Ronduck 16:21, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Common Sense

It's too bad that User:IzaakdeMaker's sentence had to be deleted. He was explaining that the military plans for all possible situations. In so doing, they wisely consider all possible responses. He wrote:

I am sorry about the removal (i did it twice). The problem is that it's not allowed in wikipedia to editorilize. If the edits are accompagnied w/ sourced material, i believe nobody would remove them. -- Szvest 01:14, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Iraq

Deleted quote:

On November 2, 2006, at McGill University, Hersh said, "… there has never been an army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq."[8]

Two major problems with it: (1) It omits the bracketed word "[American]": "there has never been an [American] army ...", which is how the cited source rendered it, and this radically changes the meaning by taking away the context provided in the cited source. (2) Even if the source were properly quoted, a one-off remark like this is not encyclopedia material, as it isn't an effective illustration of any point made in the article. It functions only as an inflammatory soundbite with clearly POV intent. RickDC 22:16, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Lestrade, Regarding the brackets, they seem necessary to convey the speaker's meaning (at least the original reporter thought they were, and so do most others who've picked up on the quote on the Web) Regarding the relevance of the quote to the article, I'll admit a bias: I often see Wiki articles laden down with "gotcha" quotes and anecdotes that make the articles resemble political campaign ads rather than objective, neutral accounts. (I don't suggest this was your intent!-- only that I sense in the case of the Hersh article that the extensive citations of some of his speeches/interviews sort of overwhelms the importance of these in evaluating his body of work) However, if the comment in question is included in the article, it needs to be tethered better to a point. I've restored it and tried to put it in a context. My own sense of balance would be to give less importance and space to the informal speeches--but we all have different senses of balance. Cheers, RickDC 01:23, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism

Sorry, I fail to understand the "criticism" section. There are a couple a quotations by Hersh, but hardly any sourced criticism. For instance, "Those who criticize Hersh's credibility especially point to allegations Hersh has made in public speeches and interviews, rather than in prin" ; really ? Who, when, where said this ?

"Some of Hersh's speeches concerning the Iraq War have described violent incidents involving U.S. troops in Iraq..." ; that is evidence of criticism of the behaviour of the US troops in Iraq, not criticism of Hersh. And so on.

I would almost be under the impression that someone exhibits these quotes, assuming that they will automatically trigger indignation and criticism; I fear that this is not how we work here. Rama 19:57, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Lestrade, did you read the question ? Rama 09:33, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Iran anonymous edit

I wasn't the editor, but this seems to be a link relevant to what an editor earlier today was writing ("CIA analysis finds no Iranian nuclear weapons drive") Schissel | Sound the Note! 02:49, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sources

Deleted section. It describes a common journalistic practice of protecting sources who require anonymity. The practice is far from unique to Hersh. Newspapers do it every day. To single out Hersh's use of it to suggest his sources are unreliable is misleading. RickDC 00:23, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, sorry, but I fail to see what is peculiar or noticeable in this. This is a common journalism practice. Rama 08:02, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

It is true that Hersh gets criticized a lot for his use of anonymous sources. I agree that the section above, though, at least in its current form, doesn't belong. That's because it's pure original research. If you can cite someone making a similar point, that would be much better. I found some examples here and here. Korny O'Near 13:50, 28 November 2006 (UTC)