The Good American

Who could resist a news article with the title "Seymour Hersh: 'The Good American'." Certainly not moi. I quite like Mr. Hersh, even if he does tend to shrillness. Apparently some in the German press do as well, if the author of the aforementioned article (published in Die Zeit) is any indication.

The article reports on Saturday last's festival for the New Yorker, the magazine in which most of Mr. Hersh's work is published. He was one of the featured speakers, and clearly did quite well. Here is a summation of some of his remarks.

Iran? Yes, an attack against Iran is imminent (Hersh reported this just recently in The New Yorker ), but against small targets like training camps and the Revolutionary Guard. "The U.S. has specialists at the borders who, with the assistance of Kurdish and Israeli experts, install "eavesdropping boxes" capable of listening into buildings in Teheran. "We know what's going on in Iran" Hersh says. The nuclear bomb will take another five years. The bomb is a threat – first and foremost to Israel because it means the end of Zionism. "Once Iran has the bomb, the middle class will give up and say, 'We'd rather go to Argentina or London, where we can live in peace.'"

The war on terror? "If it comes out, what really happens in Guantanamo Bay, we will all be very ashamed." This is equally true of Abu Ghraib. "Iraqi girls who are imprisoned there, have begged their fathers to kill them because they were dishonored. I saw photos of GI's grabbing at naked Iraqi women and girls while showering." And there are twelve countries in which the CIA or their local henchmen can torture. "Afterwards, they burn the bodies, so that no trace can be found."

Then Seymour Hersh comes to the subject of Vietnam. The first big story he broke as a journalist was the massacre of My Lai , and he talks about how the people there were tortured with electric shocks. "But the U.S. never experienced a Learning Curve, a learning process."

George Bush? "Bush is no good for the security of the USA or the world," says Hersh.

Why, yes. I do believe Mr. Hersh has captured the current history of the U.S. quite nicely. It's quite a shame that he doesn't get to exercise his craft among more pleasant subjects.