Lacking Leadership: Seymour Hersh on U.S. Foreign Policy and the Role of the Press

“I think we are a lost country,” renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said during a recent talk at Connecticut College. “At least in Washington…we lack the leadership.”

Hersh’s lecture, titled “This Day in History: Reflections on U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights Practices,” marked the end of a two-year Human Rights Lecture Series and quickly turned into a grim spiel on the shadowy nature of U.S. foreign policy.

The funding for the lectures, donated by an anonymous family, was designated to bring a series of human rights activists to the College. Inspired by the funds, Dr. Tristan Borer, Professor of Government and International Relations, galvanized a group of students to take advantage of the opportunity to bring the discussion of human rights back to campus. The group began with the re-introduction of an official Amnesty International chapter.

In years past, Conn used to have an Amnesty group, but according to Borer, it morphed into STAND, a student-led initiative focused on ending atrocities in Darfur. What Conn lacked was a student organization dedicated to human rights issues in general. “The unintended effect of this gift was the reinstatement of an Amnesty club,” said Borer, adding that the club is “a highly recognizable, multi-issue human rights organization.”

Amnesty scheduled Hersh’s talk around the tenth anniversary of the Abu Ghraib scandal, which he broke in May 2004. Co-president of the club Molly Bangs ’14 explained how the talk was supposed to capstone the events that Amnesty held on campus throughout the year: “Amnesty International focused a lot of our events on raising awareness specifically on Abu Ghraib, torture and the military.”

Students, as well as Professor Borer, were excited to hear Hersh’s thoughts. “He’s one of the best investigative reporters in recent U.S. history,” Borer said. “He’s built his career around exposing U.S. government errors.”

As a freelance journalist, Hersh plays an important role in democracy. “People should know what the government is doing,” Borer said. “And someone needs to say when the government is doing something wrong. The role of the press is to hold their government accountable.”

But, even the press isn’t completely objective. In a phone interview, Hersh pointed out that places like The New York Times are more liberal-leaning, and thus lenient toward President Obama and his administration.

“It’s a great idea to be a journalist,” Hersh said. “But to work for a major news source is limiting yourself to be a mouthpiece.”

It also means that you need access. And to compromise that access by publishing critical articles means missing out on important future press events.

“If you’re assigned to the White House beat, you have occasional interviews with the President,” Hersh explained. “The White House can punish you by excluding you.”

Hersh has made a successful career by bypassing these structures, though he admits that it was easier to be published during the Bush/Cheney administration. When he wrote for The New Yorker in the past, he said there wasn’t such a worry about being critical. And The New York Times, according to Hersh, is committed to the President’s policies.

Hersh is more than skeptical of the U.S. government — that much was obvious from his lecture. After opening with, “There is nothing good to say about U.S. foreign policy,” what followed was an honest dissection of our contemporary political state. Points of interest included: Obama’s foreign policy and the U.S. handling of tensions in Crimea, Syria, Iraq and Libya. Hersh pointed to a lack of transparency inside /and/ outside the White House.

In mentioning one of his most recent pieces, “The Red Line and the Rat Line,” Hersh illustrated how the United States narrowly avoided war in Syria due to miscommunicated evidence. His point: we’ve been shown the agenda of our administration, regardless of the fact that a war with Syria never occurred.

The piece, published in the London Review of Books, has been receiving attention from the foreign press, while media outlets in the U.S. have remained quiet, choosing not to comment or even acknowledge Hersh’s claims. When pitching the piece, he was denied by both The New Yorker and the Washington Post.

“This is the way it goes,” Hersh said. “It hurts my feeling in a way…There’s no love for me among my colleagues. The main thing that we’ve been reporting for months, [Syria] is suspect. I’m not claiming that I know it happened, but that the evidence we have is crappy.”

Hersh continued: “I could be wrong, but I’m not. I know more secret information than I wrote. If I’m right, Obama [and/or] the people around him are being really reckless.”

In his talk, Hersh bemoaned the “irony of America,” saying, “We give [the government] the right to send us to war and yet [they] don’t give us the integrity we expect from a President.”

Speaking on the failed launch of the Obamacare website, Hersh further claimed that the notion of morality is virtually absent from the White House, and that fault was not lain solely on the president but on the nature of his administration and its conjunction with the press.

“I’ll tell you the solution,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “Get rid of 90 percent of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control. The role of the journalist is to be an outsider.”

Bangs remarked how it was “refreshing to hear someone so respected speak so freely about the dire situation Washington is in.” Yet, she was disappointed that the talk lacked a “common thread.” If there was a denominator to Hersh’s whirlwind of socio-political divulgences, it was that the world today is rapidly approaching “hopeless.”

“Want to hear something cheery?” he asked the audience. “There’s 3,000 miles of water on either side of us.”

Although perhaps not to the caliber that Amnesty had hoped, Hersh did, in passing, mention the scandal at Abu Ghraib. In what was quickly being understood as “Hersh” fashion, the journalist posited that military torture problems come down to the identity of the U.S. army. The soldiers are “ghetto kids,” said Hersh, while “the officers get promoted for keeping their mouths shut.”

“Depressing” seems to be the most-used word to describe Hersh’s lecture. “Controversial” is another fitting descriptor.

While the attendance at Hersh’s talk was the highest of the whole lecture series, according to Borer, “Hersh seemed to be a bit polarizing. People either really liked his talk, or were turned off. Half the audience gave him a standing ovation; half left scratching their heads about ‘what the big deal was.’”

But that didn’t bother Borer. “We don’t always have to agree on everything and having someone say fairly controversial things that get people thinking is really what we tried to do with the series,” she said. “Some people thought his delivery was a little ‘rough around the edges.’ That didn’t bother me. This is a man who has spent his career trying to speak truth to power [and] expose government lies and atrocities. I think it was an amazing opportunity for the community to hear him share his insights.”

•After a dinner with Professor Borer and a few select students, Hersh traveled back home to deal with the controversial response of his latest article on Syria. Despite his notoriety, he’s a down-to-earth guy used to the resistance and opposition. “It happens,” he said. “This is the way it goes.” •

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