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“... The world​ needs m">SeymourHersh. 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 ...”

“... Throughout the time I was working on my own book on the KAL 007 tragedy I heard reports that m">SeymourHersh was working on a parallel book, and I looked forward to it keenly ...”

“... m">SeymourHersh belongs to that small group of American newspaper reporters who made national reputations during the Vietnam War and Watergate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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’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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It has long been accepted in the Arab world and in Iran that US foreign policy towards the Middle Last is a conspiracy devised by the American Jewish lobby. It has long been accepted in Europe that the Arabs and Iranians, although prone to exaggeration, had a legitimate grievance about Washington’s automatic bias in favour of Israel since the departure of Eisenhower ...”

“... Fifteen months ago in these pages I reviewed a book by Khidhir Hamza, who called himself ‘Saddam’s bomb maker’. At the same time I assessed the now notorious government dossier of September 2002 on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, together with the more restrained document published by the International Institute of Strategic Studies ...”

“... On 7 June 1981, Israeli aircraft bombed and completely destroyed the Iraqi nuclear research reactor Osirak. The French government, which had sold the reactor to Iraq, protested. Bertrand Barre, its nuclear attaché in Washington, explained that the reactor posed no proliferation risk and that ‘it was intended to be used … for testing or converting materials into isotopes, which have specialised uses in medicine ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... The 20th century, it’s said, taught us a simple lesson about politics: of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the desire for power ignoble, but neither will drive its devotees to the criminal excess of an idea on the march ...”

“... was right to go West. He needed lusher plains of political corruption across which to spread himself. He needed a country of wide horizons and myopic international vision. And he needed an administration of almost li...”

“... Mostly he remained inconceivably calm. Even now, with the clock winding down on his freedom, Snowden still went to bed at 10.30, as he had every night during my time in Hong Kong ...”