Search Results

“... In 2011​ Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons ...”

“... Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack ...”

“... When​ George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January 1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about Reagan’s two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with which he appeared to handle the presidency ...”

“... Barack Obama’s​ repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet dissent, and even overt opposition, among some of the most senior officers on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. Their criticism has focused on what they see as the administration’s fixation on Assad’s primary ally, Vladimir Putin ...”

“... It’s been​ four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance ...”

“... The world​ needs Seymour Hersh. Without his indefatigable reporting, we would know even less than we do about the crimes committed by the US national security state over the last fifty years. While most of his peers in the press have been faithfully transcribing what are effectively official lies, Hersh has repeatedly challenged them, revealing scandalous government conduct that would otherwise have been kept secret: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the domestic surveillance programme run by the intelligence agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib ...”

“... the time I was working on my own book on the KAL 007 tragedy I heard reports that Seymour Hersh was working on a parallel book, and I looked forward to it keenly. Ever since he sprang to prominence with his exposure of the My Lai massacre 17 years ago I have read his writings with respect, sometimes with admiration. It is thus with some regret that I ...”

“... Seymour Hersh belongs to that small group of American newspaper reporters who made national reputations during the Vietnam War and Watergate. He won a Pultizer Prize in 1970 for his exposure of the My Lai massacre. He exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia and the role of the CIA in toppling the Allende regime in Chile ...”

“... a profound transformation. Walworth Barbour, then US Ambassador to Israel, is quoted in Seymour Hersh’s book as saying alter the 1967 war that ‘Arab oil is not as important as Israel is to us. Therefore I’m going to side with Israel in all of my reporting.’ Such a statement would sound out of place in late 1991, after the despatch of half a million ...”

“... fell victim to the swords of all three.Now this is a fairly routine passage from Seymour Hersh’s new book, ill-advisedly (and unironically) entitled The Dark Side of Camelot:Even aboard Air Force One, the President was forced to wear a stiff brace that stretched from his shoulders to his crotch – the aftermath of an errant poolside grab while he ...”

“... lest we must stop them here, at the Rio Grande, the Canadian border, on Main Street. As Seymour Hersh shows in his indispensable guide to the politics of American security after 9/11, these are by no means merely ancient or academic formulations. While liberal critics claim that the Bush administration lied about or deliberately exaggerated the threat posed ...”

“... an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no evidence ...”

“... and their life-long drive to achieve things that do not yet exist. Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh have written an attractive book which reveals the fascination of mathematics as an activity, and the seductions of its claims to indubitability. These have inspired, challenged and confounded views of the world and of the mind throughout philosophical ...”

“... in his 2003 State of the Union speech, he named Britain as the source of the information. Seymour Hersh, in a New Yorker article last March, quoted a former American intelligence officer as saying that ‘at least one member of the UN inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable ...”

“... by history as the Bund was not, lost the mass of its potential constituency in the Holocaust. Hersh Mendel’s riveting Memoirs of a Jewish Revolutionary and Shlomo Avineri’s elegant study of the Zionist theorist and pre-state socialist politician, Chaim Arlosoroff, illustrate in their different ways the two faces of Jewish socialism, and their ...”