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my lai
Whitewashing War Crimes Has Become the American Way
What sort of society would America be if its soldiers were free to rape, pillage and plunder in current and future wars? A venal empire, that’s what—which this country resembles more and more.
Jun 07, 2019
Just after dawn on March 16, 1968, a company of U.S. Army infantrymen, led by Capt. Ernest Medina and spearheaded by Lt. William Calley, entered the small hamlet of My Lai in Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam. The villagers, mostly women and children, had no idea what was coming that day. If they had, they'd have fled.
Despite facing zero resistance and finding only a few weapons, Calley ordered his men to execute the entire population. In all, some 500 Vietnamese civilians were executed, including more than 350 women, children and babies. Other senior leaders in the chain of command had advised the soldiers of Charlie Company that all people in the village should be considered either Viet Cong or VC supporters. Medina and Calley were ordered to destroy the village. They did so with brutal precision and savagery.
The Army covered up the massacre for more than a year, until journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story in November 1969. Now obliged to conduct a public investigation into what was no doubt a major war crime, the Army's investigating officer recommended that no fewer than 28 officers be charged in the killings and subsequent cover-up. Medina, Calley and most other participants in the slaughter chose to plead--just as Nazi soldiers had--that they were only following orders.
That may well have been true. Still, military regulations--then and now--oblige a soldier or officer not to follow illegal or immoral orders. Nonetheless, in subsequent trials, all but one of the defendants were acquitted by sympathetic juries. Only Calley, the ringleader, received a life sentence. On appeal, that sentence was reduced to 20 years; later, President Richard Nixon ordered Calley transferred to house arrest at his quarters in Fort Benning, Ga., until finally, the lieutenant was paroled in 1974.
More than 500 innocent Vietnamese lives were apparently worth naught but three years and a stint of cushy house arrest for a single Army lieutenant. No colonels or generals were held seriously accountable. This is typical; the burden of responsibility generally flows downhill, and junior leaders are left holding the proverbial bag. A staggering 77% of Americans polled felt that Calley was scapegoated; a popular song supportive of the defendant, titled "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley," was even released. It included such absurd lyrics as:
My name is William Calley, I'm a soldier of this land
I've tried to do my duty and to gain the upper hand
But they've made me out a villain, they have stamped me with a brand.
I got to thinking about this, the worst (reported) American massacre in the criminal Vietnam War, when California Rep. Duncan Hunter recently defended a Navy SEAL, Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, who was accused of committing murder and other horrific crimes during a 2004 tour in Afghanistan. According to reports, President Donald Trump is considering a pardon for Gallagher and other convicted war criminals from the so-called war on terror. This would be, to say the least, a morally reprehensible act, one likely to encourage more American servicemen to abuse their power and break internationally recognized rules of war. That the story has garnered so little attention is a tragedy of the first order.
Still, Hunter's comments and Trump's consideration should come as little surprise. The U.S. military and the government in Washington have rarely held accused American war criminals accountable. And with a sympathetic populace here at home--one that trusts primarily the military among public institutions--expect current and future U.S. war criminals to get a pass (or what Hunter called "a break"). This is not only ethically repugnant, it further sullies what's left of America's reputation abroad and will only increase terrorist recruitment and endanger the U.S. homeland.
In the case of Gallagher, the Navy chief stands accused of shooting civilians and murdering a teenage Islamic State captive with his knife. Afterward, Gallagher allegedly posed for photos with the corpse, texted the images to friends and even held a re-enlistment ceremony over the body. Rep. Hunter, himself facing federal corruption charges, brushed off Gallagher's actions, admitting that as an artillery officer in Fallujah, Iraq, he'd "killed probably hundreds of civilians" and had "[p]robably killed women and children." Hunter wondered aloud, "So do I get judged too?" He should--but he undoubtedly won't.
Hunter went even further, stating that "I frankly don't care if [the captive] was killed, I just don't care," and adding, "Even if everything that the prosecutors say is true in this case, then, you know, Eddie Gallagher should still be given a break, I think." Such a despicable statement, and Hunter's admission of his own criminal acts in Iraq, should stagger us all. But again, it won't have that effect. Here's the kicker: Gallagher wasn't railroaded by a dovish press or "liberal" legal system--his fellow SEALs turned him in. Apparently, many American soldiers don't agree with Gallagher, Hunter or Trump; they actually possess an independent moral compass.
War crimes of this magnitude, while rare, do occur in the "war on terror." In some cases, the perpetrators have been held accountable, but they've just as often been let off. Few were punished for rampant prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and essentially no high-ranking military or government officials were held accountable. Nor was any senior official charged with torture for the post-9/11 CIA practice of waterboarding--a crime for which Japanese military leaders were executed after World War II. Generals hardly ever go to jail here in the "land of the free."
Neither--or not for long--do war criminal mercenary contractors, apparently. Trump is also reportedly considering a pardon for Blackwater employee Nick Slatten, who was twice convicted of shooting to death dozens of Baghdad civilians in 2007. I was in that chaotic city when Slatten opened fire on a crowded square, and my unit had to deal with the consequences. Understandably, Iraqis didn't distinguish between us soldiers and the similarly clad contractors, over whom we had no control. To the Iraqi populace, Americans were Americans, and it is highly likely that support for the insurgency and the killing of U.S. troops increased after the Blackwater shooting and Abu Ghraib scandal. I was told as much by many Iraqis in the ensuing months.
In terms of Hunter, Trump and Gallagher, let us be clear: The logical extension of a pardon would be that there becomes essentially no such thing as an American war crime. That would overturn everything I learned regarding the laws of war in my 18-year military career. Hunter may claim that photographing corpses was commonplace and that "a lot of us have done the exact same thing," but that's patently false. Most of my fellow officers did follow the rules of war, didn't parade enemy or civilian corpses, and did everything they could to avoid noncombatant casualties. We were ethically and legally obliged to do so.
Admittedly, the ill-advised, illegal and immoral American invasion of Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilians' deaths--killed by all sides, including our own. I'm not excusing that loathsome and unnecessary war; not by a long shot. I remain haunted by my own participation in the conflict and the likelihood that my unit accidentally killed civilians during various and confusing firefights. Still, there must be some standard of conduct for America's "warriors," my own included. What sort of society would America be if its soldiers were free to rape, pillage and plunder in current and future wars? A venal empire, that's what--which this country resembles more and more.
That Trump would consider pardons for Gallagher, Slatten and other accused or convicted murders also reflects the nepotism that informs his administration. Gallagher's defense attorney also represents the Trump organization, and Slatten's former boss at Blackwater, Erik Prince, is the brother of Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos. A Trump pardon, moreover, would relieve the enormous U.S. war machine of any responsibility to wage war morally or legally. It would set a dangerous precedent, encourage other potential murderers in uniform and champion the notion that the U.S. military has the right to do as it pleases the world over.
Hunter's reprehensible verbal nonsense and Trump's potential pardons reflect a military chauvinism that infuses the American vernacular in the 21st century. The dangerous doctrine of American exceptionalism applies, apparently, to this country's so-called exceptional right to commit war crimes with impunity. Thinking back to My Lai, though, it seems that whitewashing, excusing and apologizing for criminal military behavior is as American as apple pie. Hunter and Trump just say as much out loud.
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Seymour Hersh's Anonymous Sources
Like Carl Sagan’s undetectable fire-breathing dragon, we must take them on faith
Mar 22, 2019
Ever since 1969, when he rose to national prominence with the story of the My Lai massacre, Seymour Hersh has been one of the best-known investigative journalists in the world. His career has not been without controversy. His most recent piece, about the recently deceased George H.W. Bush's role in the Iran-Contra affair ("The Vice President's Men"), is a clear example of why he remains controversial.
Hersh's principal thesis, that the office of Vice President George H.W. Bush controlled much of President Reagan's foreign policy, including the Iran-Contra debacle, is certainly plausible. Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel directing the Iran-Contra investigation, found substantial evidence leading to the vice president's office, and Bush, by then president in his own right, pardoned virtually every conspirator while misleadingly denouncing Walsh's indictment of felonious activity as merely "the criminalization of policy differences."
"The true history of U.S. national security policy is baffling enough. It does not require embellishment by sensational but unverifiable claims made by sources who apparently insist on anonymity 35 years later, long after applicable statutes of limitations have passed and many of the participants have died."
But Hersh makes at least three sensational claims that beg for airtight evidence. First, that the Washington bureaucracy was riddled with Soviet sleeper agents who, when detected, were not prosecuted, but allowed to "wither on the vine." Second, that what the author calls "Star Wars" (otherwise referred to as SDI or ballistic missile defense) was known to be unachievable or impractical: "[n]obody on the Joint Chiefs of Staff ever believed we were going to build Star Wars." Third, that the Iran-Contra affair was made public by an article appearing in a Lebanese magazine - an article based, in Hersh's telling, on a leak provided by the very U.S. government cell that was conducting the operation. The purpose of the leak was to shut down an out-of-control caper.
As to Star Wars, over $200 billion has been spent since Reagan initiated the program, and it continues today under a different name. It was, according to Hersh, intended as a ruse to tempt the Soviet sleeper agents to expose themselves in efforts to find out technical details about the program. But if SDI were merely a false flag, why was it not terminated upon the collapse of the Soviet Union? He may be right, but as the eminent science writer Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Independently confirmable evidence is as yet nowhere in sight.
Second, what about those sleeper agents? Exposing and prosecuting them would supposedly also expose SDI's role as a ruse, a contention which is credible only if we believe the entire program was designed with deliberate errors intended to mislead the Soviets in the Cold War (a program that continues in 2019).
The contention of one of Hersh's anonymous sources that "we" (meaning the Reagan administration) "could not take the chance of another McCarthy period" is risible on its face. As a former congressional staff member, my entire career's association with Republican politicians suggests to me that they would have bounded like spring lambs at the chance to publicly tar their political opponents, or opponents of SDI, as communist sympathizers.
Who were all those sleeper agents? How far up in the bureaucracy did they go? Any names? When I asked Hersh these questions at a public event this February in Washington, Hersh said he did not know anything about them, impatiently dismissing the questions as harping on "just one sentence in the story." Like Carl Sagan's hypothesized invisible pet fire-breathing dragon that lived in his garage (a thought experiment intended to emphasize the crucial importance of testable evidence), the sleeper agents exist on Hersh's insistence.
Finally, the leaked information about the arms-for-hostages deal that appeared on November 3, 1986, in Ash-Shiraa magazine in Beirut. Mr. Hersh's contention that a cell within the U.S. government blew its own secret operation out of the water, a news leak that would have unforeseeable and uncontrollable criminal consequences leading to potential presidential impeachment, is surely a blockbuster.
The leak was allegedly orchestrated by former members of a "secret team" assembled by one of the vice president's key men: Vice Admiral Arthur Moreau, a covert operative apparently more formidable in his capacity for mischief than James Bond's nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. But a competing explanation exists for the exposure of Iran-Contra. On October 5, 1986, a month before the Lebanon leak, the C-123 cargo aircraft piloted by the CIA-connected Eugene Hasenfus crashed in Nicaragua, blowing open the Central American end of the Iran-Contra affair. The story was already unraveling, and the Ash-Shiraa story was merely one more dangling thread, whatever its source.
The true history of U.S. national security policy is baffling enough. It does not require embellishment by sensational but unverifiable claims made by sources who apparently insist on anonymity 35 years later, long after applicable statutes of limitations have passed and many of the participants have died.
There is a larger lesson. Many of us have long been skeptical of the claims of the conventional wisdom emanating from within the Beltway: government agencies, establishment pundits, think tanks and foundations that subsist off the status quo. But we must apply the same skepticism and insistence upon verifiable evidence to the self-described truth-tellers, whistle-blowers, and gadflies possessing their own agendas. The problem of establishing the boundaries between complex truth, pernicious half-truth, and outright falsehood, has never been more necessary than in the present era.
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Seymour Hersh: The Man Who Knows Too Much
He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib... No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as 'the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist'. Rachel Cooke meets the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington
Oct 19, 2008
Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. 'Brad Pitt loved this place,' says Hersh with a wolfish grin. 'It totally fits the cliche of the grungy reporter's den!' When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated - the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It's not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees, trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems, each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers. By the time I look at Hersh again - the full panorama takes a moment or two - he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its horns on it.
And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their scoop, they describe him - the competition. He was unlike any reporter they'd ever seen: 'Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and rumpled, bleached khakis.' Forty years on, little has changed. Today he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and - thanks to a tennis injury - he is walking like an old guy: chest forward, knees bandy, slight limp in one leg. There is something cherishably chaotic about him. A fuzzy halo of frantic inquiry follows him wherever he goes, like the cloud of dust that hovers above Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown strip. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his thoughts pour forth, unmediated and - unless you concentrate very hard - seemingly unconnected. 'Yeah, I shoot my mouth off,' he says, with faux remorse. 'There's a huge difference between writing and thinking.' Not that he has much time for those who put cosy pontification over the graft of reporting: 'I think... My colleagues! I watch 'em on TV, and every sentence begins with the words: "I think." They could write a book called I Think.'
But we must backtrack a little. Before the office, there is the breakfast joint. Hersh and I meet at the Tabard Inn, a Washington hangout so gloomily lit I could do with a torch. He has poached eggs and coffee and 'none of that other stuff, thanks'. (I think he means that he doesn't want potatoes with his eggs). Like everyone in America just now, he is on tenterhooks. A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds that he might 'jinx it'. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. 'You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president's inauguration],' he says, with relish. '[They say:] "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.' He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won't change anything - 'They've got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves' - it will reveal how the White House 'set out to sabotage the system... It wasn't that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.'
In one way, it's amazing Hersh has anything left to say about Bush, Cheney and their antics. Then again, with him, this pushing of a story on and on is standard practice. Though it was Woodward and Bernstein who uncovered the significance of the burglary at the Watergate building, Hersh followed up their scoop by becoming one of Nixon's harshest critics and by breaking stories about how the government had supported Pinochet's 1973 coup in Chile, secretly bombed Cambodia and used the CIA to spy on its domestic enemies. His 1983 book about Nixon, The Price of Power, is definitive. So far as the War on Terror goes, Hersh has already delivered his alternative history - Chain of Command, a book based on the series of stories he wrote for the New Yorker in the aftermath of 9/11 and following Bush's invasion of Iraq. Among other things, Hersh told us of the bungled efforts to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; of the dubious business dealings of the superhawk Richard Perle - a report that led to Perle's resignation as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (Hersh alleged that Perle improperly mixed his business affairs with his influence over US foreign policy when he met the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi in 2003. Perle described Hersh as 'the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist' and threatened to sue before falling oddly silent); and of how Saddam's famous efforts to buy uranium in Africa, as quoted by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, were a fiction. Most electrifying of all, however, was his triple salvo on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It was Hersh who first revealed the full extent of this torture, for which he traced the ultimate responsibility carefully back to the upper reaches of the administration. 'In each successive report,' writes David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, in his introduction to Chain of Command, 'it became clear that Abu Ghraib was not an "isolated incident" but, rather, a concerted attempt by the government and the military leadership to circumvent the Geneva Conventions in order to extract intelligence and quell the Iraqi insurgency.' As Remnick points out, this reporting has 'stood up over time and in the face of a president whose calumny has turned out to be a kind of endorsement'. Bush reportedly told Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, that Hersh was 'a liar'; after the third of his reports on Abu Ghraib, a Pentagon spokesman announced that Hersh merely 'threw a lot of crap against the wall and he expects someone to peel off what's real. It's a tapestry of nonsense.'
Earlier this year, Hersh turned his attention to Iran: to Bush's desire to bomb it and to America's covert operations there. But while Hersh believes the President would still dearly love to go after Iran, the danger of that actually happening has now passed. Events, not least the sinking of the global economy, have moved on. So he is shortly to write about Syria instead, which he has recently visited. In the dying days of the Bush administration, he says, it is noticeably easier to meet contacts - Cheney, the enforcer, is a lot less powerful - and the information he is getting is good. By coincidence, it was in Syria that he first heard about what was going on inside Abu Ghraib, long before he saw documentary evidence of it. 'I got in touch with a guy inside Iraq during the Prague Spring after the fall of Baghdad, a two-star guy from the old regime. He came up to Damascus by cab. We talked for four days, and one of the things we talked about was prisons. He told me that some of the women inside had been sending messages to their fathers and brothers asking them to come and kill them because they'd been molested. I didn't know whether it was GIs playing grab ass or what, but it was clear that the women had been shamed. So when I first heard about the photographs, I knew they were real. Did I think the story would be as big as it was? Yeah. But was it as big as My Lai? No.' Only a handful of relatively lowly military personnel have so far been punished for their part in the abuse, and Colonel Janis Karpinski, the commander of the Iraqi prisons, was merely demoted (from Brigadier General), in spite of the fact that the Taguba Report, the internal US army report on detainee abuse that was leaked to Hersh, singled her out for blame. 'And John Kerry wouldn't even use it [Abu Ghraib] in his campaign. He didn't want to offend the military, I assume.'
Four decades separate My Lai and Abu Ghraib. You have to ask: wasn't it appalling for him to be investigating US army abuses of civilians all over again? Didn't he think that lessons might have been learnt? Yes, and no. It made him feel 'hopeless', but on the other hand, war is always horrible. In 1970, after his My Lai story, he addressed an anti-war rally and, on the spur of the moment, asked a veteran to come up and tell the crowd what some soldiers would do on their way home after a day spent moving their wounded boys. With little prompting, the traumatised vet described how they would buzz farmers with their helicopter blades, sometimes decapitating them; they would then clean up the helicopter before they landed back at base. 'That's what war is like,' he says. 'But how do you write about that? How do you tell the American people that?' Still, better to attempt to tell people than to stay feebly silent. What really gets Hersh going - he seems genuinely bewildered by it - is the complicit meekness, the virtual collapse, in fact, of the American press since 9/11. In particular, he disdains its failure to question the 'evidence' surrounding Saddam's so-called weapons of mass destruction. 'When I see the New York Times now, it's so shocking to me. I joined the Times in 1972, and I came with the mark of Cain on me because I was clearly against the war. But my editor, Abe Rosenthal, he hired me because he liked stories. He used to come to the Washington bureau and almost literally pat me on the head and say: "How is my little Commie today? What do you have for me?" Somehow, now, reporters aren't able to get stories in. It was stunning to me how many good, rational people - people I respect - supported going into war in Iraq. And it was stunning to me how many people thought you could go to war against an idea.'
As for the troop 'surge' and its putative success, he more or less rolls his eyes when I bring this up. 'People are saying quietly that they are worried about Iraq. This is nothing profound, but by the time the surge got going, ethnic cleansing had already happened in a lot of places. There was a natural lull in the violence. The moment we start withdrawing, and relying on the Shia to start paying members of the Awakening [the alliance of Sunni insurgents whose salaries were initially paid by the US military, and who have helped to reduce violence in some provinces]...' His voice trails off. 'And the big bad bogeyman is Saudi Arabia. There's an awful lot of money going to Salafist and Wahabist charities, and there's no question they'll pour money into the Awakening, and they're so hostile to Shi'ism and to Iran that how can you possibly predict anything other than violence? How do we get out of this? There is no way out. We have a moral obligation to the people of Iraq that goes beyond anything that anyone's talking about. The notion that it's their problem, that we should just leave... I mean, can you believe what we've done to their society? Imagine the psychosis, the insanity, that we've induced.' He stabs the yolk of one of his poached eggs, and sets about his toast like he hasn't eaten in days.
Seymour M Hersh (the M is for Myron) was born in Chicago, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Lithuania and Poland (he has a twin brother, a physicist, and two sisters, also twins). The family was not rich; his father, who died when Seymour was 17, ran a dry-cleaning business. After school he attended a local junior college until a professor took him aside, asked him what he was doing there and walked him up to the University of Chicago. 'Chicago was this great egghead place,' Hersh says. 'But I knew nothing. I came out of a lower-middle-class background. At that time, everyone used to define themselves: Stalinist, Maoist, whatever. I thought they meant "miaowist". Seriously! Something to do with cats. Among my peers, they all thought I would write the great novel, because I was very quick and cutting. I've just read Philip Roth's new novel [Indignation], and the arrogance of his character reminded me of that certitude. I was always pointing out other people's flaws.' He went to law school but hated it, dropped out and wound up as a copy boy, then a reporter for the local City News Bureau. Later he joined Associated Press in Washington and rose through its ranks until he quit for a stint working for the Democrat senator Eugene McCarthy. Pretty soon, though, he was back in journalism. 'Using words to make other people less big made me feel bigger, though the psychological dimension to that... well, I don't want to explore it.' His wife of 40 years, Elizabeth, whom he describes as 'the love of my life' in the acknowledgements of Chain of Command (they have three grown-up children), is a psychoanalyst. Doesn't she ever tell him about his ego and his id? He looks embarrassed. 'No, no... marriage is... different. When you live with someone you don't... The hardest part for her is when she tells me to take out the garbage and I say: "Excuse me? I don't have time. I'm saving the world."' Later, however, he tells me that journalism, like psychoanalysis, is about 'bringing things into focus'.
He was a broke freelance working for a new syndication agency when he got wind of My Lai. A military lawyer told him that a soldier at Fort Benning, a Georgia army base, was facing a court martial for murdering at least 109 Vietnamese civilians. Hersh rocked up in Benning and went on a door-to-door search, somehow avoiding the officers on base, until he found Lieutenant William L Calley Jr, a boyish 26-year-old otherwise known as Rusty. He asked the former railway pointsman if they could talk, which they did, for three hours. They then went to the grocery store, got steaks, bourbon and wine, and talked some more at the apartment of Calley's girlfriend. Calley told Hersh that he had only been following orders, but nevertheless he described what had happened (it later turned out that soldiers of the 11th Brigade killed 500 or more civilians that morning). Soon after, 36 newspapers ran the story under Hersh's byline. Some, however, did not carry it, in spite of the fact that Calley's own lawyer had confirmed it, among them the New York Times. The scoop caused not only horror but disbelief. Hersh, though, was not to be put off. 'By the third story, I found this amazing fellow, Paul Meadlo, from a small town in Indiana, a farm kid, who had actually shot many of the Vietnamese kids - he'd shot maybe 100 people. He just kept on shooting and shooting, and then the next day he had his leg blown off, and he told Calley, as they medevac-ed him: "God has punished me and now he will punish you."' Hersh wrote this up, CBS put Meadlo on the TV news, and finally the story could no longer be ignored. The next year, 1970, he was awarded the Pulitzer prize.
How does Hersh operate? The same way as he's always done: it's all down to contacts. Unlike Bob Woodward, however, whose recent books about Iraq have involved long and somewhat pally chats with the President, Hersh gets his stuff from lower down the food chain. Woodward was one of those who was convinced that WMD would be found in Iraq. 'He does report top dollar,' says Hersh. 'I don't go to the top because I think it's sorta useless. I see people at six o'clock in the morning somewhere, unofficially.' Are they mostly people he has known for a long time? 'No, I do pick up new people.' But with new contacts he must be wary; there is always the danger of a plant. His critics point to what they regard as his excessive use of unnamed sources. Others accuse him of getting things wrong and of being gullible. A low point came in the Nineties, when he embarked on a book about Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh was shown documents that alleged the President was being blackmailed by Marilyn Monroe, and though he discovered that they were fake in time to remove all mention of them from his book, the damage to his reputation had already been done - and the critics let rip anyway, for his excitable portrayal of JFK as a sex addict and bigamist. There was also the time, in 1974, when he accused the US ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, of being in on a CIA plot to overthrow President Allende. Some years later, Hersh had to write a long correction; it ran on page one of the New York Times. As a Jew, his mailbag since 9/11 has also included letters from readers who denounce him as a self-hater (later, at this office, he shows me one of these: its author, an MD with a Florida postcode, accuses him of being a 'kapo' - the kapo were concentration camp prisoners who worked for the Nazis in exchange for meagre privileges).
His supporters, though, believe that his mistakes - and even the wilder allegations he sometimes makes in speeches - should always be put in the context of his hit rate. A former Washington Post reporter, Scott Armstrong, once put it this way. Say he writes a story about how an elephant knocked someone down in a dark room. 'If it was a camel, or three cows, what difference does it make? It was dark, and it wasn't supposed to be there.' Hersh himself points out that, since 1993, he has been up against the stringent standards of the New Yorker and its legendary team of fact checkers. 'By the way, all my inside sources have to deal with the fact checkers, and they do. People find it hard to believe that, I don't know why.' And then there is his editor, David Remnick. 'I never love editors,' he says. 'But David is smart and he has great judgement.' How often does he check in with Remnick? 'I'm sure he would tell you less often than I should. He gets pretty angry with me. Sometimes we have these rows where I won't take his calls. He says no to a lot of stuff - stuff I think the editor would die for! Admittedly, it is not the Seymour Hersh weekly. But sometimes he'll say: "We are not going to publish this kind of stuff 'cos it's frigging crazy."' It was Tina Brown, formerly of Tatler and Vanity Fair, who brought him to the New Yorker. 'What's-her-name... yeah, Tina. She gave me a lot of money, and she said: "Just go do it!" But she used to worry. She'd call me up and say, "I sat next to Colin Powell at dinner last night and he was railing about how awful you are." So I would say, "Well, that's good." And she'd say, "Is it?" And I'd tell her, "Yes, it is."'
Does it worry him that he is sometimes described as the 'last American reporter'? Who is coming up behind him? 'A friend of mine wants to put $5m into a chair for investigative journalism for me, but why would I want to do that? Look, the cost of running my kind of work is very high, and a lot of stories don't even work out. I know a wonderful journalist who works on the internet. I called friends of mine at the Times and the Post. But he hasn't been hired because he would cost a lot of money.' But Hersh is in his seventies (he is a year younger than John McCain, though you'd never know), he can't keep going forever. Or can he? Most reporters start out hungry but somewhere along the way are sated. Not Hersh. 'I have information; I have people who trust me. What else am I going to do? I love golf and tennis and if I was good enough, I'd be professional. Since I'm not, what am I gonna do? Why shouldn't I be energetic? Our whole country is at stake. We have never had a situation like this. These men have completely ruined America. It's so depressing, my business!' Yet he seems chipper. 'No, I'm not chipper. I don't know how to put where I am... I don't take it that seriously. I've been there: up, down, back up. I do a lotta speeches, I make a lotta money, I proselytise.' Does he like making money? 'Are you kidding? I do!'
After we finish breakfast, he takes me to the office. He is eager to put off the moment when he must get on with his Syria piece. The more time he wastes with me... well, the morning will soon be over. Inside he points out a few choice interior-design details - the Pulitzer (it nestles among dozens of other awards), the framed memo from Lawrence Eagleburger and Robert McCloskey to Henry Kissinger, their boss at the State Department, which is dated 24 September 1974, and reads: 'We believe Seymour Hersh intends to publish further allegations on the CIA in Chile. He will not put an end to this campaign. You are his ultimate target.' Then he roots around in a cairn of paper for a while - quite a long while - eventually producing a proof of one of his articles with Remnick's editing marks on it. I've never seen anything so harsh in my life. Practically every other sentence has been ruthlessly disembowelled. 'Yeah, pretty tough, huh?' He also shows me one of his own memos to a contact. It makes reference to the current administration. 'These guys are hard-wired and drinking the Kool-Aid,' it says, deadpan. He laughs. He's getting cheerier by the minute. Soon it will be time for lunch! Now he puts his feet on the desk, removes one training shoe and jauntily waves the sweaty sole of a white sock at me. A couple of calls come in. He is concise bordering on cryptic. Finally an old Times colleague arrives. 'I knew this guy when he had hair!' Hersh shouts as this fellow and I pass in a small area of floorspace not yet covered by books or papers. I'm leaving, but Hersh doesn't get up and he doesn't say goodbye. A breezy salute - and then his eyes fall ravenously on his pal.
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