Seymour Hersh Quotes

The newspaper of today far too often rush into print with stories that are essentially little more than tips, or hints of something toxic or criminal. For lack of time, money or skilled staff, we are besiege with "he said, she said".

There have been extensive human rights violations by American psychiatrists over the last 70 years. These doctors were pad by the American taxpayer through CIA and military contracts. It is past time for these abuses to stop, it is past time for a reckoning, and it is past time for individual doctors to be held accountable. The Manchurian Candidate Programs are of much more than "historical" interest. ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH are precursors of mind control programs that are operational in the twenty first century. Human rights violations by psychiatrists must be ongoing in programs like COPPER GREEN, the interrogation program at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Such programs must be carried out within CIA units like Task Force 121 (The Dallas Morning News, December 1, 2004, p. 1A). Information pointing to ongoing human rights violations by psychiatrists is available in publications like The New Yorker (see article by Seymour M. Hersh, May 24, 2004). Yes the indifference, silence, denial, and disinformation of organized medicine and psychiatry continue. One purpose of The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists is to break that silence.

The government of Brazil had publicly proposed brokering a settlement between the United States and Cuba; Raskin, never afraid to speak his mind, suggested that the White House consider the offer. “Oh, no,” Bundy said. “It’ll take just one detachment and he’ll be out of there.

The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the “court histories” that sprang up after the president’s assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.

According to a review of Seymour Hersh’s book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Option and American Foreign Policy:

In the New York Times, Seymour Hersh later reported that "Israel and American Intelligence officials acknowledged that weapons, ammunition, and spare parts worth several billion dollars flowed into Iran each year during the early 1980's

El misil antimisil Patriot, del que se hizo tanta publicidad, según dijo la Oficina General de Contabilidad, destruyó sólo el 40 por ciento de los misiles Scud que tenían como objetivo Israel y el 70 por ciento de los que dispararon contra Arabia Saudí. De hecho, tal como revelaría Seymour Hersh,11 esa bendición para el periodismo, la fuerza aérea israelí afirmó en un informe que «no hay pruebas claras de ninguna interceptación realizada con éxito» de un Scud iraquí gracias a un Patriot sobre Israel.

President Nixon’s first reaction when he heard the story was to investigate those who reported the killing. He demanded to know who was backing them: “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it,” he was sure of it. He instructed his aides to “discredit witnesses,” investigate Seymour Hersh and Mike Wallace, “get ring-wingers with us,” and “get out the facts about [communist] atrocities at Hue.

A more venomous opponent, Christopher Hitchens, made the charge, all too familiar on the left, that Kissinger was a war criminal—what else could he be if his lethal policies had no other aim but his personal advancement? Hitchens drew up a “Bill of Indictment” that charged Kissinger with crimes in such places as Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor. International relations, Hitchens wrote, were treated “as something contingent to his own needs.” One Kissinger defender, his authorized biographer Niall Ferguson, has argued that every postwar administration before Nixon’s—Truman’s, Eisenhower’s, Kennedy’s, and Johnson’s—“could just as easily be accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity.” He pointed out that Eisenhower’s policies in Guatemala had led to the deaths of about 200,000 people. Causing or condoning death, even of innocents, was the price of being a superpower with a global role. Yet perhaps with the exception of Truman (because of his decision to use atomic weapons against Japan), no one was put in the leftist dock as a war criminal so often or to the same degree as Kissinger, not John Foster Dulles, not Dean Rusk. Why, Ferguson wondered, did Kissinger’s accusers subject him to a “double standard”? The left, however, didn’t see a double standard. Kissinger, alone among postwar policymakers, was charged with making decisions out of personal interest, not national or global concerns. According to his critics, he “believed in nothing,” though it would be more accurate to say that what he believed in was weighing means against ends, a kind of situational, pragmatic ethics that rejected the left’s moralistic strictures. What he didn’t believe in were absolutes. “There is no easy and surely no final answer,” he said. To be sure, valid objections could be raised against specific Kissinger policies, even in his own terms of weighing means against ends—the invasion of Cambodia, for example, or the tilt toward Pakistan during the Bangladesh crisis—and there is certainly truth to Seymour Hersh’s assertion that “Nixon and Kissinger remained blind to the human costs of their actions.” Callousness has always been the besetting sin of Realpolitik, and it is not difficult to find examples of almost brutal coldness in Kissinger’s record. “It’s none of our business how they treat their own people,” he said of Moscow’s policy toward Soviet Jews. “I’m Jewish myself, but who are we to complain?” Actual human beings could get lost as power was being balanced.