Scott Beauchamp at The Baffler writes—
The Empire Strikes Back:
Seymour Hersh is a pioneer of investigative journalism, the modern iteration of which he fashioned almost singlehandedly by uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre, during the Vietnam War. Americans had opposed the war before My Lai—everyone knew what the American government was capable of, and many suspected that it was concealing the true extent of the horrors in Vietnam—but Hersh’s 1969 dispatches gave them coordinates to navigate their outrage by. Hersh presented the facts in black and white. After Hersh’s revelations, skeptics on the left didn’t have to feel like paranoids anymore. It turned out they had been right all along.
Hersh’s work in the aughts had much the same effect. In 2004, he exposed torture at Abu Ghraib. In 2008, he found that U.S. Special Forces were operating in Iran. The list goes on, with each discovery providing a single fleck of color. Take a step back to widen your field of vision, and you’ll be able to make out Hersh’s pointillist masterpiece: a painting of the lies the American elite have told to mask the lawless violence of pursuing their imperial ambitions.
Because of the penetration and scope of Hersh’s work, it is as much an indictment of the American media’s coverage of elites as it is one of the American government. To engage with Hersh properly, even to criticise him, the media would necessarily have to break from its day-to-day reporting of political horse races and its slavish echoing of official narratives. It would have to expose the government to shrewd interrogation in the process. That being the case, Hersh’s work is important, even if parts of it do turn out to be inaccurate.
Hersh’s latest is a ten thousand-word piece in the London Review of Books in which he explains that everything the government told you about the killing of Osama bin Laden is a lie. A few of the highlights are: (1) The government of Pakistan knew exactly where Bin Laden was, (2) Saudi Arabia was paying Pakistan to keep Bin Laden in his safe house compound, (3) America found out where Bin Laden was not by tracking an Al Qaeda courier or by torturing people, but because a disgruntled Pakistani intelligence officer wanted to claim the $25 million dollar reward, (4) America was going to make it appear as if Bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike, but switched courses at the last minute after one of the SEAL’s helicopters crashed, (5) The American and Pakistani government colluded to lie to the public about how Bin Laden was found and killed.
Predictably, many in the media have rushed to the government’s defense. Hersh’s anonymous sources rankle them. The story itself, which is so far removed from the official narrative and implicates corruption at the highest levels of government, has a dreamlike aura. Never mind that the account the government gave has been deteriorating from the start, and the glaring contradictions between the official versions as related by the Pakistani and American governments. Put aside the fact that someone else using different sources reported a version of Hersh’s story in 2011, or that NBC, within a day, had already confirmed a key point of Hersh’s narrative. If Hersh’s critics actually did submerge themselves in a detailed re-reporting of his allegations, the process would subjugate the American ruling class to deeper scrutiny than usual. [...]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—60 Minutes: Despite damaged blowout preventer, BP cut corners immediately before explosion:
Last night 60 Minutes broadcast a stunning report on the Deepwater Horizon disaster featuring an eyewitness account from crewmember Mike Williams and analysis from Dr. Bob Bea, a UC Berkeley engineering professor asked by the White House to help figure out what went wrong.
According to Williams, several weeks before the explosion, the blowout preventer was damaged but despite the damage, BP ordered the rig operator to ignore critical a safety measure when sealing the well. BP wanted the rig operator to seal the well without using drilling mud, a heavy liquid used to keep oil and gas from burbling up as cementers completed the seal.
According to Professor Bea, the accident would not have occurred had the drilling mud been used. Instead, BP cut corners in an attempt to save money, and now we're left with this enormous economic and ecological disaster.
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