Wednesday, November 01, 2006
The meltdown of a once great reporter is nearly complete
Sy Hersh is now saying that today's U.S. military is the most violent and murderous in our country's history.
But they support the troops.
Hot Air predicts the video he cites, portraying a massacre at a soccer game, will never surface.
Will the New Yorker keep this dinosaur around? I don't see why he's entitled to a job at the premier writer's mag in the country anymore.
Their major advertisers on their Web Page right now are American Express and Sony. I'm sure their marketing departments would love to hear from you. You can call American Express marketing at (800) 297-8378 and opt out of any marketing materials you recieve. Tell them precisely why. Ask to be forwarded to John Hayes, the head of Marketing and Advertising for American Express. (I'm still looking for direct contact info.)
You can write the New Yorker publisher here and let him know what you think of Sy.
Notice Sy Hersh feels he's above getting at the five Ws. THere's no Who. No what. No where. No when. There's nothing any editor or reader could use to verify his story. Journalism without a culture of verification is worse than useless. It's a cancer on the body politic. Hersh has become such a cancer. He cares for nothing except bringing down this Administration. He doesn't care a whit about the truth. He spits in the face of his readers. And he obviously loathes the troops.
I'm returning the favor.
I demand he produce the other three W's. If it happened and Hersh doesn't reveal his information, then he's accessory to murder. If not, then Hersh is nothing more than a liar and propagandist. We ought to be giving this the Rathergate treatment. Let this be a career-ender for Hersh.
Where is the evidence?
Splash, out
Jason
If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said.
“In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation,” he said. “It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you – there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.”
But they support the troops.
Hot Air predicts the video he cites, portraying a massacre at a soccer game, will never surface.
Will the New Yorker keep this dinosaur around? I don't see why he's entitled to a job at the premier writer's mag in the country anymore.
Their major advertisers on their Web Page right now are American Express and Sony. I'm sure their marketing departments would love to hear from you. You can call American Express marketing at (800) 297-8378 and opt out of any marketing materials you recieve. Tell them precisely why. Ask to be forwarded to John Hayes, the head of Marketing and Advertising for American Express. (I'm still looking for direct contact info.)
You can write the New Yorker publisher here and let him know what you think of Sy.
Notice Sy Hersh feels he's above getting at the five Ws. THere's no Who. No what. No where. No when. There's nothing any editor or reader could use to verify his story. Journalism without a culture of verification is worse than useless. It's a cancer on the body politic. Hersh has become such a cancer. He cares for nothing except bringing down this Administration. He doesn't care a whit about the truth. He spits in the face of his readers. And he obviously loathes the troops.
I'm returning the favor.
I demand he produce the other three W's. If it happened and Hersh doesn't reveal his information, then he's accessory to murder. If not, then Hersh is nothing more than a liar and propagandist. We ought to be giving this the Rathergate treatment. Let this be a career-ender for Hersh.
Where is the evidence?
Splash, out
Jason
Comments:
If Americans knew the full extent of Sy Hersh's depraved conduct, they'd treat him like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and poop on heeem.
I do not keeeed.
Were there any notion of honor remaining in our society, many of us would have sore hands from slapping all the people who desperately merit it.
I do not keeeed.
Were there any notion of honor remaining in our society, many of us would have sore hands from slapping all the people who desperately merit it.
I just want to know what "Armed vehicles" have a crew of 8.
Can't be a Hummvee, unless you're just packing people in the back.
M113? Possible, but I haven't seen very many pictures of M113s. Who actually uses them anymore?
Bradleys? Strykers?
Its also very vague.
This also seems to be a bit of rehash of similar charges Hersh was making in 2004--that US troops were just indiscrimiately killing Iraqis. Then, he claimed to have spoken with a Marine Officer, no less.
Hersh is just spouting garbage, and anybody who can actually think knows it.
Can't be a Hummvee, unless you're just packing people in the back.
M113? Possible, but I haven't seen very many pictures of M113s. Who actually uses them anymore?
Bradleys? Strykers?
Its also very vague.
This also seems to be a bit of rehash of similar charges Hersh was making in 2004--that US troops were just indiscrimiately killing Iraqis. Then, he claimed to have spoken with a Marine Officer, no less.
Hersh is just spouting garbage, and anybody who can actually think knows it.
Could be a Bradley. Six infantry in the back, plus a TC, gunner, and driver, means a crew of nine.
A Cargo Humvee can carry two in the front and 8 or so in the back, depending on how much other crap they're carrying.
A Cargo Humvee can carry two in the front and 8 or so in the back, depending on how much other crap they're carrying.
From this article in New York magazine:
It doesn’t take much prompting for Hersh to supply an example of the sort of story he keeps out of The New Yorker’s pages but will discuss freely elsewhere. He tells me a long tale of the ghastly killing of some Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers. He frames his account as a hypothetical set piece: "You’re a soldier on a patrol . . . and you see people running, and you open fire, okay? . . . Maybe they were bad guys, but then they run into a soccer game." He gradually modulates the story to its climax: "You’re a bunch of young kids. And so maybe you pull the bodies together and you drop RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and you take some photographs about it because you’re afraid you’re gonna be investigated. And maybe somebody there tells me about what happened."
Moving back into straight, declarative talk, Hersh lays out how this no-longer-quite-so-hypothetical scenario shaped his on-the-job news judgments. Investigating the tip, he discovered that, even though the photographs he obtained of the incident could suggest a terrible lapse of responsibility in the field, there was nothing here to qualify it as a Hersh story. "It was stupid, it was wrong, it was terrible, but it wasn’t murder. Do I write that? No. I don’t write that. Because then six, eight, ten American kids who did nothing but panic, and did what anybody would, would get in trouble. Do I have some photographs that are interesting? Yes. Do I publish those? No."
But does he talk about it? Sure. Did this event happen? Who knows? Hersh never subjects these sorts of stories to any kind of public truth test, but he bandies them in his lectures, as part of the ongoing effort to bring his speaking audiences closer to that other reality of the Iraq War. He does it so frequently, in fact, that it’s hard to accept that he’s only doling out information for its own sake. In part, one senses, Hersh’s stump performances are of a piece with the sort of one-upping bravado that makes up many conversations journalists have with their colleagues—only done here in public and for hire. Again, Hersh is refreshingly candid about the showman aspect of his anecdotage: "I get paid to do speeches. . . . And I’m not there to be on straight. I’m there to tell, you know, give somebody, exchange views with people."
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It doesn’t take much prompting for Hersh to supply an example of the sort of story he keeps out of The New Yorker’s pages but will discuss freely elsewhere. He tells me a long tale of the ghastly killing of some Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers. He frames his account as a hypothetical set piece: "You’re a soldier on a patrol . . . and you see people running, and you open fire, okay? . . . Maybe they were bad guys, but then they run into a soccer game." He gradually modulates the story to its climax: "You’re a bunch of young kids. And so maybe you pull the bodies together and you drop RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and you take some photographs about it because you’re afraid you’re gonna be investigated. And maybe somebody there tells me about what happened."
Moving back into straight, declarative talk, Hersh lays out how this no-longer-quite-so-hypothetical scenario shaped his on-the-job news judgments. Investigating the tip, he discovered that, even though the photographs he obtained of the incident could suggest a terrible lapse of responsibility in the field, there was nothing here to qualify it as a Hersh story. "It was stupid, it was wrong, it was terrible, but it wasn’t murder. Do I write that? No. I don’t write that. Because then six, eight, ten American kids who did nothing but panic, and did what anybody would, would get in trouble. Do I have some photographs that are interesting? Yes. Do I publish those? No."
But does he talk about it? Sure. Did this event happen? Who knows? Hersh never subjects these sorts of stories to any kind of public truth test, but he bandies them in his lectures, as part of the ongoing effort to bring his speaking audiences closer to that other reality of the Iraq War. He does it so frequently, in fact, that it’s hard to accept that he’s only doling out information for its own sake. In part, one senses, Hersh’s stump performances are of a piece with the sort of one-upping bravado that makes up many conversations journalists have with their colleagues—only done here in public and for hire. Again, Hersh is refreshingly candid about the showman aspect of his anecdotage: "I get paid to do speeches. . . . And I’m not there to be on straight. I’m there to tell, you know, give somebody, exchange views with people."
