An hour with Seymour Hersh

From Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union, KPR presents an hour with Seymour Hirsch. I'm Kay McIntyre. Hirsch received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 for exposing the Miele massacre of innocent civilians and resulting cover-up during the Vietnam War. In 2004, he exposed the Abu-Gray prison scandal in a series of pieces in the New Yorker magazine. The abuse of prisoners at Abu-Gray is the focus of his eighth and latest book, Chain of Command. Hirsch appeared at the University of Kansas as part of William Allen White Day, sponsored by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he was presented the 2008 William Allen White Foundation National Citation. And now here is Seymour Hirsch. In my count, the bad news is there's 347 days left in the reign of King George II. And the good news, and there is good news, is that when we all wake up tomorrow morning,

there'll be one less day. I'll tell you, it's intractable. I don't think that I know the candidates, we have one that says we're going to fight for 100 years, the other two say we're going to get out, it's not that simple. It's going to be, I don't know. The analogy I use about Iraq, I was saying to some students earlier, is simply the only way to look at it, all this talk about a surge. Just consider Iraq to be a corpse. And the job of General Petraeus, who trained over here at Leavenworth, and the very fine ambassador, Ryan Crocker, they're both honorable people, their job, they're sort of undertakers. And their job is to keep on putting rouge on the body for the next six or seven months so we get past the selection. And then, you know, it's going to all go to hell, because there's no way out there's going to be, you know, the Shi'a was killed as soon as he's in, when they're all done, right now, they're collecting arms on both sides, when they're all done, they'll turn on us. I don't know how we can avoid it. A couple years ago, I had some optimism, maybe something could happen.

I think we're in for long hard time, unless maybe the next president does what this president won't do, which is start talking immediately to the Iranians and to the Syrians and to everybody else, since it's trying to do something collectively. Maybe then, I got a cold, so if I start wheezing, I'm going to drink water. Anyway, look, it's a mess, and it's not, it's intractable. It's going to go on for years, how we get out of it, we don't know. It's not as simple as pulling out, and it's not just a question we can't pull up because of American honor. American honor has pretty much been deviled in the last seven years. It's just, how do you do it? You're looking at a potential civil war. I don't have an answer, but let me tell you what the downside, the other way. There's an analogy from me between Iraq and Vietnam, and that is a simple one. Our guys don't see an enemy in the Vietnam War. They were fighting guerrillas. The cliche used to be, farmers by day, Viet Cong, guerrillas at night, in this war, there's no send-up army, they're fighting insurgents, who wouldn't run and get them.

There's no, you drive along, you get blown up, you lose somebody's, you shoot people, you don't know what to do. In both cases, what happens inevitably is the people become the target. This is inevitable. It's just the way the war is. We don't fight wars. Any better, we now know that in America, anybody else, you have to dehumanize the other people, the other side, you can't kill people if you don't do that. And eventually, when you're not able to find a soldier or an enemy, you take it out against the people. I know young officers who have spent their, a year tour being essentially the good ones, in local parenthesis. They've got a bunch of 18 and 19-year-old scared kids with a weapon who don't know the language, don't know the culture, and you just try and lose buddies to people they don't see from minds they don't know about, and explosions they don't know about, and snipers they can't predict, and inevitably they want to strike out against the people. So you spend most of your one-year tour or 11 months as a platoon leader or a company commander trying to keep the kids from doing grievous damage to themselves, as I say in local

apprentice, by killing somebody stupidly. And off they go, one year, the next thing they know, most of the young kids I know that are bright enough, they're out of there, they want to go into special forces, Rangers, no more troop duty. It's just too complicated, too hard. So given this analogy, let me take you back to Vietnam, and I'll take you back. To me lie, and I'll do this as quickly as I can because we do have a 230, right deadline. I'll see if I can do this in the impossible. And I do want some questions because I'm often, I'm in Lala Land here what I'm telling you about, it's not about current events, but it's, you know, the business I'm in is an amazing business, and I hope you young people understand the young journalists, there's nothing quite like what we can do if we do it right. We have an amazing ability to change things. I felt that way, there's nothing special, I came out of, I was an editor of the, America's a very special place, I was an editor of the Yale Daily News of the Harvard Crimson, my parents were from the old country, they were lower class, middle working class people,

my father died when I was 16, it's just turned 17. I graduated from college, was an editor, was not editor of this student newspaper, didn't know one end from the other, 11 years later I'm doing the Mielei story. I'm sticking two fingers into the eye of a Republican president, Richard Nixon, fame fortune glory, I mean, not many places in the world, you can do that. This is a very special country, and yes, the press have gone off track, I really am, like a lot of you, I wish we'd done better on the Iraqi war, I think it was, I think Thomas Jefferson would be turning in his grave, that we didn't challenge Bush more carefully on the misstatements he made, I think Bush believed what he believed, you actually, I never know what Bush thinks, you know, I don't know whether he did what he did because his father didn't do it, or because God told him, or it's a step 13 and a 12 step recovery program, you know, I just don't know, I have no idea what's on that guy's mind, but you know, I've been studying him and chaining for the longest time and I can tell you it's a nil, I mean, I can't figure out how that White House works, and I don't think they'll be much history.

I have a marine friend, senior officer, I have a lot of stars who recently did a, made a trip to Afghanistan, did a special off the record survey for a member of the Joint Chiefs. He's just an old friend and he trusts me enough and he was telling me about it early one morning when he came back, and I'm, you know, partly his buddy, partly also a journalist and his name is Jack, and I said, Jack, when you have time to write it, thinking maybe there's a report I can get my hands on, and he looked at me, this is about six months ago, and he said, sigh, he said, write a report for this government, nothing gets written. This is a government, we don't put things in writing here, and that's, I will tell you the historians are going to have a hell of a time with that, because I do think this is a government in which a lot of stuff is not documented. Anyway, 68, the Warren Vietnam is going, Charlie Company. This is MeLi, Charlie Company was the company that was involved in MeLi, a famous lieutenant in William Calley, they come from Hawaii, they land in Vietnam in late 1967, maybe the first week of 68, they spent the next three months like our guys in Iraq walking around

on, you know, getting a shower once a week, a hot meal once a week, humping it in the boonies, maybe there are a hundred men strong in the company after three months of walking around, snipers, landmines, they're down to about 78, they've lost about 20 people, not all dead, but many of them were dead. Nobody to strike out, nobody to get back, they never have, they've never seen the enemy, they're told March 15, 1968, they're told by their bosses, tomorrow is it, got the 48th Vietnamese battalion, it's a uniform military, a bunch of commies, let's go get them, we're going to really fight the enemy, this is payback. Those kids did then, what they did then, the kids, the enlisted kids, they took it up, and the officers and the senior enlisted men, they drank it up, but by God, four o'clock, three thirty to morning, they got up and they put on their boots and they grabbed their guns and they were ready to kill and be killed in the name of all of us, got on choppers, they went to this village, they were ready to fight the enemy, scared to death, landed

five hundred and fifty people, old men, old woman, children, no enemy, and for some inexplicable reason, this group, a place called Pinkville, me live for now, called, they gathered everybody in three big groups and put them in ditches, they were ditches, just natural ground depressions and began next to good, one by one. The Tena Cali took a group of young men and they would put a clip in their M1, I think the fire is 16 rounds, semi-automatic, I remember that, I used to fire that, and you had to keep my press in the trigger, and the young boys would just shoot and shoot and shoot, got them in three ditches, don't ask me how, why, maybe it was an inevitable result, and they're shooting and shooting, the Hispanic and Black kids, by and large, I shouldn't say, these are generalities, but they're real generalities, I think I talked to 60, spent the next year, I talked to 60 of the 80s or 80s, so kids that were there, the Spanish and Black kids fired, but they fired high.

This is why these were, they all said the same thing to me, they're not interested in killing these people, but they sure were not interested in also being seen as not shooting. They wanted to be seen as shooting because they were afraid that they would get us lug themselves if they didn't participate, or look like they were, I'm just telling you what the reality is, in fact, the Hispanic and Black kids made about 30% of the unit, they were some of the more Black, our bands, our own bands, for the next couple weeks, sort of a protest to what happened, it wasn't as if everybody was completely blazing, they say about it, they shoot and shoot, everybody seems to be dead, at one point they stopped and ate their MRE, K-rations, and they hear a noise, a keening, and from in the bottom of the ditch some mother at the bottom had tucked a little boy, two or three years old under her stomach, and he began to crawl his way up, screaming louder or louder, when he got to the top, what I'm telling you was told to me in real time, by some of the soldiers as I unravel the story, this is in the fall of 69, by gun, almost word for word the way they told it to me, showed up in all the official records, so this is empirical stuff.

In other words, it's in the transcripts of the court martial, Lieutenant Kelly court martial. So the kid got up and began full of other people's blood, he began to start running, the cliche is across a patty who knows, rice patty, and Lieutenant Kelly, one of the boys had done most of the shooting, was named Paul Miedlow, from small rural boy from southern Indiana, New Goshen, which is below terror hot, which is below Indianapolis, which is below Chicago. I mean, I had no idea what it was. Anyway, Miedlow just fired a clip after clip, like it was an automatic, just fired clip after clip. And so Kelly says to Miedlow, other boys had objected at some point, he said plug-up, and Miedlow couldn't do it somehow, one kid, so Kelly with a great motion of disdain ran up behind the kid, offices then carried a carbine, smaller rifle, ran up behind the kid and plugged them. And every, you know, it was out of his great day. Next morning, they're walking on a patrol, Miedlow steps on a landmine, they're a couple miles away, three clicks away, three kilometers away, just on a patrol, it's just another

day at the office, maybe, I don't know what they thought. And they, Miedlow steps on a landmine, blows off his right leg at the knee, they call him a chopper, a medevac, to get him out, to call him a medevac. And he starts uttering a curse, God has punished Miedlow, Lieutenant Kelly, and God is going to punish you, God has punished me, he's doing it again and again, and all the kids in the unit are saying get him out of here, get him out of here. This is an oath, and they're all freaked out by finally the chopper comes, takes him away. I'm pursuing this story a year and a half later, I must have talked to six or seven kids, totally repressed memory, finally one person told me about that, was something everybody was on the tip of their tongue, but I had, I've been writing stories, freelancing as they are on this story, as a freelance writer, you know, this is the stuff I want a little prizes for, but I really didn't learn about Miedlow until midway, a couple weeks into it, a couple months into it. So I go looking for the guy, and I get the spelling, M-E-A-L, M-E-A-D-L-O-POL. And there's a shot, I think, this is long before search engines, Google, cell phones, guys,

I'm in a, I was in Oram, Utah, I went to Salt Lake to the airport, and at that time you could, uh, pay phones, you could dial, you could get information for free and have the dumb quarters in. I start calling every exchange, and finally I find a Miedlow in this place called New G ocean. I call up in rings, and I get a southern voice, this deep southern voice, and a twang, Missouri twang, or if you will, Indiana twang, I don't know, and, and it's the right family, and I say, can I come see the boy? And the mother says, I don't know if I'll talk to you, I says, I'll be there tomorrow. I little I know, I fly to Chicago, get down to Indianapolis, Renekar, and again, no map quest. I mean, it took me hours to find the damn place. I finally get there. It's been a day and a half of traveling. This is, some of you might remember, the Norman Rockwell iconic photographs or portraits used to do for Saturday, evening post of rural life in America. This is not that. This is a rundown chicken farm, no man around clearly, maybe the chickens are all over.

It's a way, it's right near the wall of Esh River, real deep south, OKKK land. We in white would appreciate that. And I pull up in front, probably wearing the same ratty suit, who knows, and try to look very serious, a little tie, and I get out, and this is the house is dilapidated, it's wood, and she comes out, she's maybe 50, look 70. This is hard scrap of life, and I say to this woman, is your son around? She said, well, he's in there. I said, is it all right if I go see him? She said, I don't know if we'll talk to you, but he's there. And I said, is it OK? And she said, go ahead. And then this woman, this woman on the banks of the wall batch, this rural southern woman says to me, I'm not kidding, quote unquote, she says, I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer, OK, flash forward, 35 years, I'm doing, I'm doing Abu Ghraib for the New Yorker.

And you don't know, you can't know how, the New Yorkers, it's, I did three stories in three weeks for anybody knows anything about the New Yorker. The last person you deal with in the New Yorker is a chmerian, and you have long conversations as you're closing a piece on deadline, you've been writing like crazy, and to get the stuff checked is a lot of fact checking involved, and everything has to be verified independently. And then you're talking about comma faults and parallelism with somebody from Oxford. And they mean it. You could be wrong, but you have to be consistent about whether or not you're going to have how many semicolons before you get to a comma, anyway, and it doesn't matter. It's a difficult, and so I'm in the middle of running these stories, I did three in three weeks about Abu Ghraib because it was just a great story, and it was a little bit like the me-lie. The rest of the press call was sort of just watching to see what I was going to do. And we're talking 1969, our 2004. And so in the middle of it, because I'm a good soldier for the New Yorker, I gone radio home television, and you know, pimped out the stories, like I'm supposed to.

And I'm on some NPR story talking about this incident, the pictures, and I get a call, there's a call in show, and a woman calls up, and she said, I have a child in this unit, the unit that's responsible, and nobody will talk to me, and there's a lot of trouble. I don't know what to do. I thought about it for a second, and I said, you have a pen, and a pencil, this is one of those, not Terry Gross, but something like that, after New Talk shows. And I said, I gave her my office number, and I figured I would get, I didn't get that many calls because a lot of people don't watch, listen to the radio, you know, with a pen and pencil in hand. I got some calls, but a couple days later she called back, and I fly, I ended up somewhere in Northeastern America, I took a plane and a car ride, I go meet her in one of these, thank God it's Friday, or TGY, whatever, it's one of those places for lunch. Here's the story. Let me give you a chronology. The war, we invade Iraq, the statue goes down, Saddam goes down, and this is March, April of 03, victory is at hand.

By the summer there's some trouble, some of our guys are getting ambushed, Donald Rumsell, the Secretary of Defense is talking bitterly about what he calls, there's 5,000 dead-enders, he calls them, we don't get the message. The reality is, by the way, and our government's not being straightforward about this, is one of the things Saddam did, from the very beginning, was panic or real war. That's just the reality. He said it in motion, long before we invade it. I don't think he really thought we'd do it, but if we did, he was going to make sure we paid a price. And we have collected documents to show it, they're just not eager to put them out because I guess that's sort of so obvious, you would have to think that perhaps this might happen. There's a long history of people trying to invade along the Euphrates, and they come in, and the outsiders come, and a year later, or two years later, the rivers read with their blood when the whole Christian war, a thousand years ago, in any case. So in the summer, there's trouble.

Dead-enders, the U.N.M. member of the United Nations, a mission is blown up, the villa, the wonderful charming leader is killed, 40 or 50 people killed, the Jordanian Embassy is blown up, we're getting ambushed like crazy. What are we going to do? We don't know anything about the insurgency, we've got 12,000 people we've captured, let's turn the screw on them, let's get more intelligence out of them. So this is the intellectual foundation, if that's the right word, of Abu Ghraib, and what happens is in September, a bunch of kids, the kids who were involved in the unit, they were mostly from a unit in Virginia, West Virginia, who would reserve unit. Kids would join the army to get the extra 200 bucks a month or whatever it is, so they can go to the beauty school, or junior college, or just have money. And they're called, they were traffic cops, they were in the traffic unit. They were called, initially they were sent to monitor traffic and bagged out, eventually they had given a couple of weeks of training and sent off to Abu Ghraib prison, this fetid prison that had been the horror of the prison life on Saddam, I don't know why

we didn't just burn it down, but we didn't, we said we built it and made it more modern, anyway, one of the great choices we made. These guys are there, and the funding game started in September, and they go on through January, when one of the kids in the unit rats out the others and comes in with a CD, one of the things you have to know about this war is every kid that goes to war, soldier, brings a CD, brings a little portable computer with a CD, that's just because there's no R and R there, there's no place to go and have a drink, it's just nothing, you're always on duty, there's no downtime, so everybody has, they watch movies, they will play games, et cetera, et cetera, and so the CDs are circulating like crazy, these photographs that showed up were all over the place. He goes into the army cops, with it in January, they begin an investigation in March before anybody knows anything, the unit's sent home, not, you know, about six or seven are arrested, but the others are sent home, this woman, the one who called me, the child shows up in March, she'd gone off before she went to the war six months earlier, seven months earlier,

she'd been just newly married, vivacious, bright, she comes back totally different. Clum, sullen, leaves her husband, leaves the family, goes to another city, takes a night job, won't talk to anybody, nobody knows what's going on. But this is not a very sophisticated family. And Abu Ghraib gets in the news, all over the newspapers. The woman goes and knocks on the child's door late at night, shows her a photograph, door slams, doesn't want to talk. So then she tries to get people to talk, the government, 60 minutes, New York Times, nobody can answer, and she's, reduced to listening to me on the phone, calling me on the radio rather, calling me up, and so I go see her at this restaurant, and she tells me the following story, that after the stuff about Abu Ghraib came back, came into play, she suddenly remembered the child had come back with a computer. And she claims this is not somebody who's interested in, this is not somebody who's into much introspection or Freud, or if you will, no unconscious.

She claimed, for no reason, she said, decided to take a look at the child's computer, maybe she was going to use it in our office, she worked as a sales clerk. I still kid her, that she doesn't even understand herself, but anyway. She opens up the computer and she starts deleting files, and there's a file called Iraq. She hits that file, and out comes 80 photographs, no mother, stepmother, whatever she is, I'm fudging a little bit about what she was, because it doesn't matter, should ever see. The one we published in the New Yorker was the iconic photograph of the naked man in front of bars, Jail, hands behind his head, two Belgian shepherds, not German shepherds, two Belgian shepherds at each side, fangs barred, three feet away. And in the sequence, that's the one we published, in the sequence that she saw, and nobody should ever see this, the dog attack the man in a sensitive place. He wasn't even allowed, he had to keep his hands here, and not where he wanted to them. That's the instinct is to go down, protect your generals. Anyway, the dog attacked him, and there was blood all over.

And at the last scene, there's a soldier, I think a woman, trying to so up the wounds from the dog bites. And at the New Yorker, the thought was, you know what, there's no sparing America anymore. We've been, this is so horrific for us around the world. The issue there was how much you want to humiliate the Arab man, that, you know, I was talking earlier to the students in the Quran, you have to understand, modesty is such an important part of life. In the Quran, the man is not allowed to be seen by another man, nude, frontally nude. You go to a sports club in Cairo, and you know, play tennis or racquetball, either take a shower separately or wear shorts. It's just the way it is. It's just a very modest society. We operate on shame, they operate on, we operate on guilt, they operate on shame. In any case, and so devastating stuff. Stuff was worth, the pictures were worth, at this time, what, $100,000, who knows from a network?

Anything. She didn't want no money. And a lot of ethical problems for me, because if you will, the child's clinically depressed, probably suicidal. And yet I have to get her permission. So I have a lot of power in the relationship. I had to figure out some way to get her permission without leaning on the, you know, it's complicated. She needed to be in a hospitalized right away. And of course, that would give me enormous influence on the family to do that. But anyway, I did, we got her permission first before I told the family, my personal advice which is get her in the care immediately. You're on the edge of something very, very sad. And so we made tame friendship, I am this lady. We published the photographs. Nobody really knew who gave them to us. There were a lot of people in the unit. It was horrible, added to the horror of the whole story. And I stayed friendly with her. And about six or eight months later, I was back in that area, Northeast in America. And we had dinner. She told me then this, what she hadn't told me was when the child came back, besides leaving everybody, including her husband and the family, every weekend, she was going

off and getting tattooed. And she began to fill a body from top to bottom, up to the top of the neck with dark, black, and dark blue tattoos, elaborate tattoos filling up the arms and the trunk. It was as if this woman said she was trying to change her skin. And so what you come away with is this horrible notion that's what Ted was talking about as a brother. We haven't begun to understand what's going to happen to us with these children coming back, these young people coming back who have been exposed to a war in which they really don't have any choice. I don't find them as guilty. I don't count the ones who do horrible things. I don't hold it against them. I think those who do horrible things are as much victims as the people they do horrible things do. And the numbers are staggering. The numbers inside the VA that are suppressed by this administration because why not? My friends inside the VA, as of two years ago, something like 40% of those coming back

and we've had millions come back, millions have gone and come back. The amount of psychological damage we're going to see and the cost of this country is incalculable. Not only in a whole generation of young men and women who are not going to be functioning, but just the medical costs. And so we've got real serious problems and part of the fact that we as journalists and it's sort of our function and the way I always look at what I do is nothing heroic. The heroism or those people, believe me, those people, the journalists in Africa whose lives are threatened if they keep on reporting and the journalists in actual combat zones. There's nothing heroic about writing in Washington, but I'll tell you something that is what I think is in the core issue. And it's a bad deal, I think. I think we have a very bad deal. All of us in our personal lives, all of us as parents or as children, want to be straight

and honest. That's the whole core of any relationship. You want your children to be honest to you. You don't want lighter children. You don't want your children to lie to you. I was joking with a friend of mine last night with the exception of 14-year-old girls, maybe. Gotta be realistic. But basically, the core of life, you have a relationship with whatever, you know, with your wife, your concert, your friend, your lover, whatever. It's based on trust and love is core, but trust and respect. And we all, this is what we need to live. This is how we live our life. Nothing special about it, the same thing all over the world. And yet when you think about the deal in America, it's the same thing we need so much in our own life. The same thing we need, a sense of values, a sense of trust, a sense of being there. We no longer expect from our leadership. We've been going on since the Kennedy years with the manipulations about the missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam, Johnson, Nixon. We go right along, this President.

We go along one after the other, the things that we need so much in our life. We as citizens don't even begin to expect of our leadership. It's a bad deal. It's a bad, bad deal for the common wheel. We accept it because we don't have much choice. So what I try and do, given, I think it's a bad deal, given that it's very hard for articulated, as a journalist, there's something we can do, which is hold people in public life to the highest possible standard. And that's the simple goal. That's all I try to do. And it's very difficult and awkward. You lose friends, but you just have to do that. And you can't compromise on these things. And that's what makes journalism so exciting. And that's why America is such a special place, and why I'm really happy to get this award, because he could be cranky, Mr. I read a lot about him, but he would know what I was talking about. He would know. And so let's do a few questions, and then I don't mean to. I promise you I'm not selling uppers in a corner. We'll survive this.

I was talking to somebody in Syria recently, and they were under tremendous pressure from the Israelis and the Americans, and this official said, oh, he said, Syria's been here for 10,000 years. It'll be for another 10,000 years. You can win the award, take over Damascus, but then you have to occupy it. We're not going into place. We will survive this. We'll survive the crisis in Iraq. I hope we learned something. One of the things about America that's very depressing is it doesn't seem to be much of a learning curve, and a big deal. Liberty from Passos, they excuse me, wrong culture, and we're not very good at that. But let's do some questions, and then I'll let you get out of here by 230. I'll let you make it. Let's go. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. And during TET in 1968, the offensive, the communist viet con over ran the northern city of Huay in South Vietnam. Some weeks later, when the Marine Corps liberated the city from the communists, they discovered a mass grave with 2,000 people in it, people who had been bound with barbed wire.

There were proxies of 2,000 or so more people missing, not in that mass grave. So here you have a massacre by the viet con of almost 5,000 people, yet at the time the American press hardly covered that story at all, especially by contrast with me, lie later on. I wonder if you could speculate as to why that did not get the coverage that it would seem as a watchdog, the press ought to be reporting, why it is, and what that might say about American journalism during viet not. Well, first of all, I think you're wrong about one thing. I don't know about your numbers. They're greater than I remember. There certainly was an awful lot of media attention paid. We didn't know about the massacre at the time because nobody was there, but once the Marines liberated way, there was a lot of talk about it. It's not as if it wasn't unknown, it was not known in real time. But again, if you're suggesting that there, I'm not saying you are, but if the implication is somehow that because they do it, that somehow diminishes the significance of what we do,

I totally disagree. I think the notion of Americans, we aren't in this because we don't see ourselves as people that condone massacre. And that's just not who we are. So I think there's a huge difference between us and what the expectations we have. But I actually disagree, I think if you go look now, you're so lucky, look at Google, look up way massacre. You'll see there was a lot of coverage of it at the time. Maybe not as much as you want, but certainly not in real time. Nobody knew about it in real time. But that there were a lot of abuses by the Vietnamese communists, my God. I'll go on. Hitler was a minor leagueer compared to Mao, Mao probably put away 35 million, what Stalin put away 15 to 20 million, you know, but it's knowing when you know it, I disagree with the notion. And I'm not saying you say that, but you don't really aren't suggesting that we should somehow diminish me, I because of the excesses of the enemy, you're not saying that, are you?

Certainly not, but great. The point is you made a lot of money on me, I nobody made the money on Hoi and I was just wondering why. Oh, you don't really mean that, I mean that's, that's, that's, you don't really mean that, I know, you know, I know you don't mean that, that's, that's, you know, in our profession, we're not investment bankers in the newspaper business, you know, we're not, we choose our business because we really have a notion of public service, we really do. Of course, fame, fortune, glory, everybody wants to do that and that's all part of it. It says otherwise, everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame, but we're not in the business because it's a money, money issue. So I'm going to, I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, yes sir, yes ma'am. Hi Mr. Hersh, my name is Corva Murphy and I had some correspondence with you early in this war, I'm from Kansas City, I don't know if you remember that.

Oh, last time you talked to me, you were in green I think. I, I have, oh there's so many things I want to talk to you about. But why don't you ask me a question because I know I, I don't have a lot of time, well we do, I guess. I want to, I want to thank you so much because you can't believe how depressed I was at the beginning of the Bush administration and yours was when I, but I do need a question, I really do. I'm sorry. Okay. Okay. You can come talk to me later over there. Okay. So my question is, what can we do about George Bush and Cheney? Are they just going to, are they just going to waltz off the stage and not have to pay for any of these? Oh, I just hope so. Let them just go. Oh. Do you really want trials? Do you want a trial or trial of George Bush for the next 10 years? I want George Bush to have 30 to life.

No. Look, you know, surprisingly because I don't have much use for George Bush, but I think let's just get him out. Let's just go and move on because I think, you know, it's not a question of, it's not a question as a candidate to say we must go forward. I just think we're going to have such very difficult times and next president whoever he is, I don't know how McCain can sustain it if he keeps on thinking he can say we try to win the war and the surge is on. I don't know what's going to happen, but whoever he is, he or she is, they're going to have such a mess. And I think the real thing would be to figure out some way to clean it up without the recriminations. I do believe that George Bush believes what he did, which is much more frightening to me than the fact that he was lying about it. That's all. I think the fact that he believes, I think he truly was probably the most revolutionary president we've ever had in the most radical. And there's nothing quite as dangerous as a revolutionary or radical who is uneducable who cannot be changed.

And so you had that situation where he simply, he, I de-e-fix-a, I don't think he lied about the WMD. I think he believed it. Let's do one or two more if you're there. That's sir. So, my name is David Leon from a little town called Ottawa where Gary Hart went to high school. Gary Hart? Yeah. I also remember some of your former associates, Mary Lou Oedson, when I worked for Allard Lowenstein in the 50s. Oh my God. That's the ancient history. I'm, that's right. I mean, I had lunch with Hart the other week. He still, he still thinks he should have been president. Well. He's a very, he's a very smart kid. He's a very bad person. He was in kindergarten, I was sure. This is a real and genuine question. Treaty of Parcy is who used to be the AA or this chief staffer for Bob Nia, the congressman. He wrote a book recently called I believe the Inholy Alliance is that it between the U.S. Iran and Israel. And I've got to the point in the book where he makes the point that after the first Gulf

War, the Israeli military establishment, especially in the labor department, our labor party, began to get extremely nervous that the United States might be losing its commitment to Israel and that accordingly, they decided out of whole cloth, they'll blow up some kind of huge conflict with Iran and terrorism in order to keep the American people stirred up so that we would make sure that our commitment to Israel to precedence overall or all our other commitments. And I'm not going to take all kinds of time to elaborate on this point and I'm certainly not in any seamite because my great grandpa was a Jew, but I'd like to hear you respond to that. Thank you. Well, I know the book, I think I mentioned, I read the last couple of chapters of it only because it had to do with the current impasse. So I don't know, I didn't read that section you were talking about, he's a very competent man, he's an Iranian who's a very moderate American, American born of Iranian parent. I would just say off the top of my head and this is, Israel doesn't have to worry about

American support, which is unfortunate, I think we should be much more critical of Israel. I think it's for its own safety because they're in a dangerous, a very dangerous time and it's a very dangerous place because everybody's making serious misjudgments. I will tell you, my friends in the Middle East say they've never seen it as bad as it is right now. It's very, very dangerous. We're on the edge, you know, we have a disaster going in Iraq that we know about. We're still not clear, it's not clear that we're out of the woods in terms of Iran because the Vice President certainly wants to bomb it. So the Israelis, in Syria, there's no interest in really dealing seriously with these Syrians. We keep on thinking we can get Bashar Assad, the President of Syria, to somehow walk away from his support of Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas and that's not going to happen. We won't touch Lebanon's amests because the United States refuses to permit any compromised, political compromise to go in Lebanon that would empower Hezbollah. But just to show you how crazy the world is in their world, they see this.

I just did a piece a little bit about this week about the Israelis and their attack on Syria last fall. Remember, they bombed what everybody called a nuclear reactor, but nobody said so officially. In the Middle East, here's the way they see the world. In the summer of 2006, Hezbollah, that's the Shiite Lebanese group, headed by Hassan Asrohla, who's probably the most important leader in the Middle East right now, much more important than Akmadi Dijon, the President of Iran, about what you know nothing because the American press almost never covers what he says, which is incredibly stupid because he's very important. Anyway, his people grabbed two Israelis soldiers and captured them. The response you, if you remember, was 34 days of bombing by Israel with the United States looking off in the Sunshine. In the sunset, that my government, which always wanted to cease fire, any time there's an action like that, stood for 34 days and refused the confidence to cease fire. This was Bush and Condoleezza Rice because they clearly wanted Israel to bomb Hezbollah,

the smitherees who didn't work out that way. In any case, that was the response. Israel loses two soldiers, they get 34 days of bombing. Syria gets bombed by Israel last fall. No provocation, it's an act of war, they cross the border, they bomb, nobody cares. That's the way the Israelis see it. Not the Israelis, that's the way the Middle East and people, the Arab Sea, the Muslim World Sea, is a terrible double standard that, yes, two Israelis means 34 days of bombing, Israel comes and bobs something and nobody cares. And so I can tell you, we really are misunderstanding a lot of us, the depths of the despair about American policy in the Middle East and it's not going to change for this president. And here's where the press also, I really think there's this collapse of this, all this talk about profit and cutting back foreign coverage is so counterproductive. It seems to me, I know in Pollyanna, the way to make people go back and read your newspapers is to give them better news.

And so they're cutting the news hole, cutting budgets and running for cover because they want to make that 25 to 35% profit for the corporate owner. And it's just, I don't know how long it's going to stay this way, it's completely suicidal. Instead of making it better, there is an attraction, young people don't read the papers because they're interested very much in the internet. And you can get them, you can cover local sports, you can beef up the coverage of high school stuff, you can do a lot of stuff to make it interesting, instead you cut staff. I'll do one more question then I'll sign some books and we'll go home. Yes. I wanted to ask, it's a related question about the future of journalism. And it just seems to me that the written word doesn't carry the same impact that it perhaps had 50 years ago and we can read about all these horrible reports. And I just wonder in this age of digitization from your perspective, does the written word what people read is it's still carrying the same weight because I scratched my head and I wonder why failed policies continue on and on and on even though we know they're failed.

Well, I mean, you know, if you want to know my answer, it's Hannah Hello, I know, but, you know. But given that premise that I don't have a, there's no statistical or analytical measurement, I would argue, of course it does. What you do have is this amazing noise from the 24 hour cable news channel, it sort of suffocates everything. But I still think, my God, a story is still a story and it still carries weight. I think you see in the way the young people are supporting Obama, who they see as somebody represents change, rightly or wrongly, you see there's a great yearning for something different in America and that's comes, these are people that it does, it's not just coming from the airwaves, the media is still very important. I had lunch, there's a wonderful old timer at the New York Times name, Russell Baker, the great Russell Baker.

And I hadn't seen him in a long time and we had lunch on some restaurant in 18th of Washington about six months ago. And he told me before he joined the Times, and what are New York Times I joined in 1972, Tom Wicker, Tony Lewis, I mean, it's pretty amazing people, Scotty Weston. He told me before he joined the Times about a year or two before he joined the Times, one afternoon, Scotty Weston had come down, he's a member of the board of directors of the Times. Weston had come down from New York and he was shuffling around, he used to walk around the newsroom in his sneakers, in slippers, and sometimes you could have a little, you could have a belt too in his room. He was not a bash like the bourbon, anyway, actually vodka. And so, oh fashion, newspaper man maybe, in any case, he was walking around very depressed and the reason he was depressed, he just come from the board of directors meeting. This is 1970, and they had discovered they made a million dollars more profit than they thought they would.

The family at that point, the Salzburger family, 1% was plenty enough, they didn't care. The idea was the paper was a public trust, and they found a million dollars and they didn't know what they were sort of ashamed, they thought they should have put it back in the paper in some way. They put it in one of the foundations and it was just like an amazing conversation. I said you got to be kidding Russell, he said no, he said that's the value system then, and that's what we've lost in this business. This whole notion of money, driving venture capital, this whole greedy apparatus we've become, it'll sort out, because newspapers are too important. And I think the fact that the internet is there, the blogs are there, and email are there, is all positive. People are looking and more interested in news, there's more available, and a lot of it's pretty awful. And things like this have to sort out. Blogs, 24 hour news cycles, cable TV with the lowest common denominator, that'll all sort out. But we have what really is troubling is you go at 10 o'clock at night, you have a hard time finding anything amounting to international news in America, and that's sort of amazing, but that'll sort out too.

Goodbye. You're listening to investigative reporter Seymour Hirsch speaking at the University of Kansas, February 8, 2008. First, Hirsch will receive the William Allen White Foundation, 2008 National Citation from Anne Brill, Dean of the KU School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The National Citation reads Seymour Hirsch, who exemplifies William Allen White ideals in service to his profession and to his community, the William Allen White National Citation to Mr. Seymour Hirsch. Thank you very much. That was Anne Brill, Dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas, giving the William Allen White, 2008 National Citation to Investigative Reporter Seymour Hirsch.

Hirsch won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, exposing the Meal Eye Massacre and Cover Up during the Vietnam War. In 2004, he uncovered the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Next, we hear from a woman who worked as a guard at Abu Ghraib, and then went on to work as a guard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We'll call her Alex Anderson, not her real name because of death threats against US interrogators. Alex Anderson submitted this essay for This I Believe, Produced by Jay Allison. Alex Anderson heard our series on the radio while working at the prison at Guantanamo during a time of crisis for her. She said that this project gave her a way to organize her thoughts about her core convictions in a way that helped her make sense of her actions, as you will hear in her essay for This I Believe. I believe in the power of redemption. I was an interrogator at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

I don't have any torture stories to share. I think many people would be surprised at the civilized lifestyle I experienced in Guantanamo. The detainees I worked with were murderers and rapists. You never forgot for a moment that given the chance, they'd kill you to get out. Some committed crime so horrific that I lost sleep wondering what would happen if they were set free. But this was not the only reason I couldn't sleep. I had spent 18 months in Iraq just before my arrival in Cuba. First I served as a soldier for a year, and then returned as a civilian contractor because I felt I hadn't done enough to make a difference the first time. After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, I left because I felt I couldn't make any difference anymore. Those events simply undermined all of our work. I felt defeated and frightened and tired, and I hoped I could redeem myself by making a difference in Guantanamo.

Still, I couldn't sleep. I was plagued with dreams of explosions and screaming. After being sleepless for more than 48 hours, I began to hallucinate. I thought people were planning bombs outside my house in Guantanamo. That was the night my roommate brought me to the hospital. When I returned to work, I began to meet again with my clients, which is what I chose to call my detainees. We were all exhausted. Many of them came back from a war having lost friends too. I wondered how many of them still heard screaming at night like I did. My job was to obtain information that would help keep US soldiers safe. We'd meet, play dominoes, I'd bring chocolate and we'd talk a lot. There was one detainee, Mustafa, who joked that I was his favorite interrogator in the world. And I joked back that he was my favorite terrorist. And he was. He'd committed murders, and did things we always take to take back. He asked me one day, suddenly serious, to out of Kulshayani, like in Latakrani.

You know everything about me, but still you do not hate me. Why? His question stopped me cold. I said, everyone has done things in their past that they're not proud of. I know I have, but I also know God still expects me to love him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. That means you. Mustafa started to cry. That's what my God says too, he said. Everything Mustafa helped me accept myself again. My clients may never know this, but my year with them helped me to find the Lee Heel. My nightmares stopped. I don't know what kind of difference I made to the mission in Guantanamo, but I found redemption in caring for my clients, and I believe it saved my life, or at least my sanity.

People say, hate the sin, not the sinner. This is easier said than done. But I learned that there is true freedom in accepting others unconditionally. I believe we help to redeem each other through the power of acceptance. It is powerful to those who receive it, and more powerful to those who give it. With her essay for this, I believe Alex Anderson, a pseudonym to protect her identity because of death threats on U.S. interrogators. Anderson has left Guantanamo, but is still working in intelligence. We end today with another This I Believe essay. This one from conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr.

Buckley died last month at the age of 82, after a life full of writing and publishing. He founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955, hosted more than 1400 weekly episodes of the political talk show Firing Line, and wrote more than 50 books, including a series of spy novels. He recorded his This I Believe essay in May of 2005. Again, here's This I Believe producer, Jay Allison. Generally, the language of media is simple, short sentences, accessible vocabulary. Those are not, however, the trademarks of William F. Buckley Jr. If you are slouching in the back of the classroom, this would be a good time to sit up. And you might want to keep your thussaurus handy. There'll be bonus points for defining enema diversion. Here's William F. Buckley, with his essay for This I Believe, which considers nothing less than the fundamental intellectual decision to believe in a God.

I've always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said, grandly to the elderly scholar, how is it possible to believe in God? The impertible answer was, I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop. That rhetorical bullet has everything wit and profundity. It's more than once reminded me that the skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious. Indeed they're opiate, according to historical cosmologists most profoundly dead, granted that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief. How can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration near infinite of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily

traceable to nature than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle the raising of a dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died, and the witnesses who swore to his revival? The eschatics get away with fixing the odds against the believer mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable, by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet, or St. Matthew's passion? What is the cause of inspiration? This I believe, that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous conjuries of nature. As a child I was struck by the short story, it told of a man at a bar who boasted of his rootlessness, derisively dismissing the jingoistic patrons to his left and to his right.

But late in the evening, one man speaks an animate version on a little principality in the Balkans, and is met with the clenched fists of the man without a country who would not endure this insult to the place where he was born. So I believe that it is as likely that there should be a man without a country as a world without a creator. William F. Buckley Jr. reading his essay for this I believe. At our website npr.org you can read and listen to all our essayists, along with many who wrote them in the 1950s. You will also find guidelines for writing your own three-minute statement of the principles that guide your life, but this I believe I'm Jay Allison. You've been listening to KPR Presents. The Recording Engineer was Chubby Smith. I'm Kay McIntyre, KPR Presents is a production of Kansas Public Radio at the University of Kansas.

Arthur, Elaine, Mordred, they are all gone, among the raptured galleries of bone. Next time on KPR Presents, we continue our celebration of National Poetry Month with poet Paul Muldoon. Join us eight o'clock Sunday night on Kansas Public Radio as this acclaimed poet talks about and reads poetry, his own and others, including this poem about a tattoo artist. We watch through the shop front while blacky drawn stars, an equal concentration on his and the youngster's faces. The hand is steady and accrued. KPR Presents poet Paul Muldoon Sunday night at eight o'clock on Kansas Public Radio. KPR Presents poet Paul Muldoon Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock

Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock Sunday night at eight o'clock

KPR Presents poet Paul Muldoon Sunday night at eight o'clock