"I was fascinated by today's Washington Post," Hersh continues. "There's about 88 pages of coverage on Libby and then, way in the back, there is about a 10-inch story: `Five GIs killed in Iraq; Shia family found slain.' One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine graphs. Oh man. Five Americans killed and it's not even a story. It's a tagline.
"There is an irony in this."
Tonight, Seymour Hersh comes to Toronto to speak at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression International Press Freedom Awards. Probably, all things considered, a better representative for press freedom than Judy Miller.
Anotnia Zerbisias of the Toronto Star interviewed Mr. Hersh in advance of his appearance.
More below on the man Richard Perle once called "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist."
The interview touches on a number of topics. Hersh speaks about being "connected" in Washington and why, unlike the WHPC, he doesn't feel the need to be "connected" to those he knows are only going to lie to him:
"That's the one difference: I don't want that connection," he admits. "I am not interested in what people who are dishonest would say to me. I talk to people in the government, but the people who I talk to don't agree with everything being done."
On Plamegate, Hersh offers this view:
"You got reporters saying they're willing to go jail to defend the right of somebody to lie to them about something that leads to the deaths of thousands of people," Hersh says. "Do you understand the crazy value system? It's pretty bad."
But for me, the money paragraph in the whole article is Hersh's final quote, where he lets loose on Bush and the Bush administration's record on rights, post-9/11:
"Who in the hell is (President George) Bush?" he demands. "My parents came here to get away from stuff that he's recreating. Who is he to deconstruct 250 years of the constitution? If you were a Muslim in America after 9/11, you were presumed guilty of something. He prosecuted 2,000 Muslims -- and not one conviction for terrorism. They got a couple of guys on credit card fraud and a couple of guys on overstayed visas. Right now this government is going around and anywhere in the world we think there's a member of the `global war on terrorism' we can snatch him and take him somewhere where the sun don't shine on him."
The article also talks briefly about Scott Ritter and his book Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein for which Hersh wrote the foreward.