Seymour Hersh: Confusing Fantasy with Reality
Is Seymour Hersh confusing scenes from a movie with reality?
During his hour-and-a-half lecture – part of the launch of an interdisciplinary media and communications studies program called Media@McGill – Hersh described video footage depicting U.S. atrocities in Iraq, which he had viewed, but not yet published a story about.(Source: McGill Daily)He described one video in which American soldiers massacre a group of people playing soccer.
“Three U.S. armed vehicles, eight soldiers in each, are driving through a village, passing candy out to kids,” he began. “Suddenly the first vehicle explodes, and there are soldiers screaming. Sixteen soldiers come out of the other vehicles, and they do what they’re told to do, which is look for running people.”
“Never mind that the bomb was detonated by remote control,” Hersh continued. “[The soldiers] open up fire; [the] cameras show it was a soccer game.”
“About ten minutes later, [the soldiers] begin dragging bodies together, and they drop weapons there. It was reported as 20 or 30 insurgents killed that day,” he said.
It is eerily similar to this scene from the anti-Semitic, anti-American Turkish movie “Valley of the Wolves”:
Marshall raids an Arab wedding on the pretext of hunting terrorists. When the usual celebratory gunfire starts, one soldier says: “Now they are shooting, now they are terrorists.” They attack a wedding party. A small child named Ali sticks a branch up the barrel of one of their guns. The soldier fires as a reflex response, shooting the child Ali dead in front of his parents. The rest of the soldiers panic and begin firing on the wedding guests, beat up the bride, shoot the the groom at head in front of the bride, shoot the guests and children. (see controversy, below) The survivors are captured and forced into a airtight container truck and sent to Abu Ghraib prison (the infamous prisoner mistreatment is then depicted later). Enroute an American soldier complains that the prisoners might be suffocating in the truck. One of Marshall’s men then fires on the truck, spraying the detainees with bullets. Claiming he is providing them fresh air. “I’m helping them breathe. They’re not going to die of suffocation anymore.” he says. When the soldier threatens to report the incident, he is promptly shot.(Wikipedia)
Given the details he cites, it would be fairly easy to find out a case where an ambush resulted in “30-40 insurgent” fatalities. So far I have not come up with any references to such a skirmish – beyond the similarities to Valley of the Wolves.
Is Hersh losing it? All that hard living in the ‘60s may have finally caught up with him.
UPDATE:
This appears to be an urban legend that Hersh has been trying to peddle for over a year.
For example, in July 2005, the counter-misinformation team researched the allegation that U.S. soldiers in Iraq had killed innocent Iraqi boys playing football and then “planted” rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) next to them, to make it appear that they were insurgents.Using a variety of search terms in “Google,” a researcher was able to find the article and photographs upon which the allegations were based. Because weapons did not appear in the initial photographs, but did appear in later photographs, some observers believed this was evidence that the weapons had been planted and that the boys who had been killed were not armed insurgents.
The researcher was also able to find weblog entries (numbered 100 and 333, on June 26 and July 15, 2005) from the commanding officer of the platoon that was involved in the incident and another member of his platoon. The weblog entries made it clear that:
the teenaged Iraqi boys were armed insurgents;
after the firefight between U.S. troops and the insurgents was over, the dead, wounded and captured insurgents were initially photographed separated from their weapons because the first priority was to make sure that it was impossible for any of the surviving insurgents to fire them again;
following medical treatment for the wounded insurgents, they were photographed with the captured weapons displayed, in line with Iraqi government requirements;
the insurgents were hiding in a dense palm grove, where visibility was limited to 20 meters, not a likely place for a football game, and they were seen carrying the RPGs on their shoulders.
Thus, an hour or two of research on the Internet was sufficient to establish that the suspicions of the bloggers that the weapons had been planted on innocent Iraqi boys playing football were unfounded.
Note how Hersh’s story has grown with age from “a bunch of kids” to “30-40 insurgents”. Also, the still pictures of the soccer playing insurgents become animated in the McGill University speech. However he doesn’t forget that the American troops pulled the bodies together.
Hersh is blaming the college newspaper for misquoting his speech. Hersh seems to be very good at blaming everyone but himself for spinning lies.
ligneus:
Not a word from Hershey Nutbar about the Palis and Hezbollocks’s staged massacres of ‘civilians’ I suppose. It’s the smugness of these lefty propagandists that really gets up my nose.
7 November 2006, 6:47 pmBrian:
Hersh, and all of his US-hating Liberal friends, continue to publish anything that makes America look bad, whether it is true or not, and ignoring the atrocities committed by our enemies. Sometimes they even attribute those atrocities to the US military.
They all hate America for one reason or another. Some for the invasion of Iraq, some for just fighting back against terrorism, some because they hate capitalism and true democracy, and some just because they hate George Bush.
But they all choose to live in America. Why? Because of the protection of their rights to say and publish these things, for the stability of the country, for the peaceful and luxurious lifestyle they are accustomed to, and for the money they make publishing this trash.
If they truly wanted to live by their convictions, they’d move to Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, or Gaza. They all make me sick.
2 April 2007, 10:56 pmJawad De Morosini:
A prime example is the writing of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who is a constant reference for the progressives. In his latest article (New Yorker, 11/27/06), Hersh excludes any mention of the Jewish Lobby and its powerful role as the only major national organization in support of a war with Iran. In his earlier texts on the Iraq war planning and execution, he pointedly omitted identifying the long-standing and deep ties of top Pentagon policymakers (Wolfowitz, Feith, Rubin, Perle, Shumsky, et. al.) with the Israeli state. By systematically omitting mention of the Zionist power configuration in pushing US policy toward a war with Iran, he undermines any effort by his readers in the peace movement to act against the principal architects of a pre-emptive war on Iran. Even worse, in his article, Hersh repeats Israeli (and Lobby) fabricated propaganda about Iran’s imminent nuclear bomb threat together with his reportage on a CIA detailed study discounting those very claims. In a word, Hersh gives legitimacy and credibility to Israeli-Lobby war propaganda, while sowing doubts about serious studies by the UN-sponsored International Atomic Energy Agency, which refutes Israeli claims. What is laughable about Hersh’s ‘investigative’ reporting is his breathless references to ‘anonymous high placed sources’ who provide ‘highly confidential’ information, which has already been public knowledge for weeks and sometimes months and reported on web-sites, in public documents and even by news services. Whatever ‘inside dope’ that Hersh cites which has not been public is based on anonymous sources which can never be double checked or verified and whose analysis incidentally coincides with Hersh’s peculiar penchant for blaming the Gentiles (WASPS) and exonerating the brethren.
27 May 2007, 10:44 amAdministrator:
Jawad
Interesting to see that you see Hersh as a tool of the so-called “Zionists” “pushing US policy towards a war with Iran.”
What’s “pushing US Policy towards a war with Iran” is finding Iranian shrapnel in our dead and wounded soldiers, Iran’s aggressive sponsoring of Hamas and al-Qaeda (yes, I know that the latter is anti-Shi’a, but the Iranian regime isn’t as pro-Shi’a as it would have you believe. They take the old Arab saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” to heart) – plus Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
If you want to blame anyone for a possible war with Iran – one that I myself believe has next to zero odds of happening in the near future – blame Iran’s president Ahmadinejad. Had he kept his mouth shut about Israel and kept Iran’s imperialistic ambitions in check – at least until the bombs were ready – he could have gotten the nukes he desired without damaging Iran’s international standing or terrifying it’s neighbors into the arms of the Americans.
Hersh is a stooge – just not for the reasons you believe. Perhaps his Jewish last name makes you believe that he is a zionist. I’ve learned that Israel’s greatest detractors – like Noam Chomsky – are Jews, and it’s greatest supporters are often not.
27 May 2007, 1:35 pm