‘But That Newspaper Is Dead’
A few days ago, the UN Security Council held hearings on the accusations by Seymour Hersh that the Biden Administration had illegally destroyed Europe’s $30 billion Nord Stream pipelines. Hersh is one of America’s most renowned journalists and the previous week he had revealed the exact details of the attack, an obvious act of war against Germany, our close NATO ally.
- Seymour Hersh: Standing Tall in a Sea of Lies
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 13, 2023 • 2,000 Words
The story is arguably as big as anything in Hersh’s towering half-century career, but with very few exceptions his revelations and the UN session it prompted have been totally ignored by our entire mainstream media, so that only a sliver of the Western public may ever hear of those facts and recognize their importance. For example, our government’s recent shoot-down of several errant American weather balloons seems to have received at least 100x greater news coverage.
Even among well-educated, intelligent individuals, the overwhelming majority probably still draw their knowledge of the world primarily from mainstream sources and if an event is ignored or downplayed by these, its importance will be doubted.
But although our Western media almost entirely ignored these developments, the Security Council session on the destruction of some of Europe’s most important civilian energy infrastructure attracted testimony from leading American public figures.
Ray McGovern had spent 27 years as a CIA Analyst, rising to direct the Soviet Policy division, chairing the National Intelligence Estimates group during the Reagan Administration, and serving as the Presidential Briefer on intelligence matters. He explained that twenty years ago, the American government had used fraudulent claims of Saddam’s WMDs to justify our disastrous Iraq War, doing so with the assistance of our subservient media. And today, our media is supporting the extreme recklessness of our current government policy towards Russia and Ukraine, which risks a nuclear confrontation.
After watching all these interviews, I was quite surprised that Hersh’s ideas on the rights and wrongs of the Russia-Ukraine conflict seemed to be so extremely mainstream and conventional, far more so than most of the other top-ranking figures whom I follow, especially McGovern and Sachs, who had the deepest personal knowledge. I suspect that Hersh drew his understanding from his large network of sources within the current national security establishment, and those individuals probably held such conventional opinions, leading him to inevitably acquire similar views by osmosis.
This impression of Hersh’s remarkably mainstream positions was greatly strengthened after I read Reporter, a widely-praised memoir that he’d published a few years ago. Although I’d been generally familiar with his landmark journalistic achievements from decades ago, I’d never closely followed his career, and thought that reading his book might give
Article from LewRockwell
