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Seymour Hersh
159 quotes
“I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it's not, but at least we offer some way out, some integrity.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for?”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What's going on [with journalists]?... Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It's journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are other issues... Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't we doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why don't we find out how good or bad this policy is?...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough....”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all over... The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won't like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that's what we're supposed to be doing...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s amazing how much reporting you can do from America. People retire. Two stars retire very angry that they didn’t make three stars. Three stars retire angry that they didn’t make four. Four stars retire angry that they weren’t [Joint Chiefs of Staff]. There’s always a lot of room to talk to people when they get home.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can tell you is that there’s an awful lot of good people in the government, believe it or not—an awful lot of people who don’t like lying. A lot of people in the military who get up to high positions and can’t stand what they had to do to get there and try to stop what they’re doing. A lot of people in the intelligence community that, you know.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I worked for The New York Times for nine years, under Abe Rosenthal, who was a very conservative guy. I always joke, he used to come into the newsroom in Washington and tap me on the top of my head and say, “How’s my little commie?” The next sentence would be, “What do you have for me?”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our reporting should speak for itself. I really do believe that. You know who the good reporters are around the world. There’s people you stop and read even if it’s something you’re not interested in, because they know how to report.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There will probably always be a New York Times. And The New York Times, for all my kvetching, it’s still the paper. And it still does great investigative reporting. I can’t stand some of its foreign coverage because it’s instinctively anti-Russian, anti-Iran, anti-Syrian. I don’t like that.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My own preference and my own view is: Things are more complicated than you think.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Seymour Hersh I respect a lot. He broke the My Lai story. I know him, and he’s got great intelligence. People talk to him from all over the world. It’s like the JFK killing. You cover this sh*t up, man...There’s a lot of other lies going on. Read the book, The Killing of Bin Laden by Seymour Hersh.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Oliver Stone, quoted in Oliver Stone On ‘Snowden’ And How Spy Movies Today Are Glorified Propaganda, Mike Fleming Jr, Deadline, September 16, 2016
“There is no middle ground anymore. There’s no standard. If you like Trump, you watch Fox. If you don’t like Trump, you watch CNN] or MSNBC, or read [[w:The New York Times|The [New York] Times]].”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Young kids still see journalism as a viable way of dealing with the problems of society––particularly with a president who’s tone deaf on so much stuff.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s a limit to what I could do. But sure, if I had my way, there would've been much more awful stuff about oil companies too. How they manipulate information. And I don’t have my way. I have to work within the confines.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here’s the White House that, you have a president that’ll do a 20 minute interview and somebody will sum up what he said, and he’ll say, "I didn’t say that!" The reporter will say, "No, you just said that 15 minutes ago!" "No, I didn’t!" You have a president that does that.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then there’s a crisis, whatever the president says about what’s going on with the chemicals in Syria or whatever, it’s immediately jammed into a headline on the cable news! CNN, Fox News––immediately it’s "the president says this!" And whether they screw it up or not doesn’t matter. It’s there. It’s a bully pulpit, and he uses it very effectively because he sets the agenda. And so we’re really in trouble now.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve been a freelancer for much of my career. In 1969, I broke the story of a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who... were ordered to attack an ordinary peasant village.. and told to kill on sight. The boys murdered, raped and mutilated for hours, with no enemy to be found.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The crime was covered up at the top of the military chain of command for eighteen months—until I uncovered it... but getting it before the American public was no easy task... [It was] initially rejected by the editors at Life and Look magazines. When the Washington Post finally published it, they littered it with Pentagon denials and the unthinking skepticism of the rewrite man...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here [at Substack], I have the kind of freedom I’ve always fought for. I’ve watched writer after writer on this platform as they’ve freed themselves from their publishers’ economic interests, run deep with stories without fear of word counts or column inches, and—most importantly—spoken directly to their readers. And that last point, for me, is the clincher.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve never been interested in socializing with pols or cozying up to money types at the self-important cocktail get togethers—the star-fu----- parties, I always liked to call them.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m at my best when I swig cheap bourbon with the servicemen, work over the first-year law firm associates for intel, or swap stories with the junior minister from a country most people can’t name.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What you’ll find here is, I hope, a reflection of that freedom. The story you will read today is the truth as I worked for three months to find, with no pressure from a publisher, editors or peers to make it hew to certain lines of thought—or pare it back to assuage their fears. Substack simply means reporting is back . . . unfiltered and unprogrammed—just the way I like it.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The New York Times called it a "mystery," but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name... The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades... to do the good—using C4 explosives... as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Last June, the Navy divers... planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.... Two of the pipelines... had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Asked for comment... a White House spokesperson, said in an email, "This is false and complete fiction."... a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: "This claim is completely and utterly false." Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school... The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership — the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines... Action that could be traced to the administration would violate US promises to minimize direct conflict with Russia. Secrecy was essential....”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America’s political fears were real: Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income, and Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia—while diminishing European reliance on America.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many Germans saw Nord Stream 1 as part of the deliverance of former Chancellor Willy Brandt’s famed Ostpolitik theory, which would enable postwar Germany to rehabilitate itself and other European nations destroyed in World War II by, among other initiatives, utilizing cheap Russian gas to fuel a prosperous Western European market and trading economy...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the attack were traceable to the United States, "It’s an act of war."...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline....”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Still, the interagency group was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack... Throughout "all of this scheming," the source said, "some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, 'Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.'"...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack. “It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”..”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The source recalled, “Bill Burns [CIA Director]comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Norwegian navy was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow water a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island . . .” Norway was the perfect place to base the mission... In the past few years.. the Pentagon has created high paying jobs and contracts, amid some local controversy, by investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade and expand American Navy and Air Force facilities in Norway...”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg, a committed anti-communist, who served as Norway’s prime minister for eight years before moving to his high NATO post, with American backing, in 2014. He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War. He has been trusted completely since. “He is the glove that fits the American hand,” the source said....”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission. Within a few minutes, pools of methane gas that remained in the shuttered pipelines could be seen spreading on the water’s surface and the world learned that something irreversible had taken place.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House—but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“More recently, Victoria Nuland expressed satisfaction at the demise of the newest of the pipelines. Testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in late January she told Senator Ted Cruz, Like you, I am, and I think the Administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Seymour Hersh, How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline, February 8, 2023
Also quoted by: Victoria Nuland
“First, many thanks for your interest in what the pipeline story was all about: a very dangerous Presidential decision. You are careful readers.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m an old hand at dropping bombshell stories that are based on the disclosures of sources I do not, and cannot, name.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a pattern to the response by the mainstream media.”
Seymour Hersh (born 1937) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source