Event Recap: Seymour Hersh on Torture, Bush, and Obama

While it was exciting to see legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in person Friday evening, I regretfully have to say that like many writers, Hersh is better at the written word than the spoken. Or perhaps I am better at reading than listening.

Hersh spoke to an overflow crowd at the University of Oregon’s Portland campus. The main lecture room was filled to capacity. We who constituted overflow sat in two separate rooms with large video screens.

For forty-plus years, Hersh has investigated political and military issues. He gained worldwide recognition – and a Pulitzer Prize– in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and its ensuing cover-up. He has also written about Gulf War Syndrome, the treatment of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, and controversial CIA projects. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters.

The University of Oregon has put on a series of presidential lectures since 2002. Friday’s lecture was the first under University of Oregon president Richard Lariviere, who took the helm of Oregon’s flagship institution last year. Lariviere, a Sanskirt scholar, gave Hersh an inspiring introduction. “I want students to hear from those who take courageous stands and seek justice,” he said.

Then Hersh climbed to the podium and began talking without notes. He obviously knows his political history backwards and forwards. But his talk was so full of veiled references, unnamed sources, digressions, rapidly named sources from the last fifty years that I’d heard of but couldn’t quite place, that I often felt stupid, confused and frustrated. Hersh apparently has many anonymous sources at all levels of military and political rank. While they won’t talk to him if he blows their cover, it’s annoying to be bombarded with statetments like, “There’s a new level of torture. I won’t get into details, but it’s ghastly.” Or that there’s an especially bad secret prison in Africa. So what is this new level of torture? Where in Africa? We’re adults. We came to hear a lecture about torture. Go ahead and tell us.

The strongest parts of the talk were when Hersh recounted the process of tracking down his stories and their sources. The details of the My Lai story – how a bunch of soldiers came to murder an entire village of women, children and old men – were gripping. As were Hersh’s efforts to track down the participating soldiers a year and a half later. Also fascinating were his conversations with the parents of My Lai soldiers and Abu Ghraib military police who saw their children come home from war completely changed. These stories supported Hersh’s assertions about the enormous psychological damage to returning soldiers, and that torture is also very difficult on the torturer.

A long section of the talk focused on the Cheney/Bush/Wolfowitz et al coup, and their manufacturing of the Iraq War. “Cheney and Bush came into office with enormous contempt for Congress,” Hersh said. He described secret arrangements made between the Cheney White House and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar for these Arab countries to pay for American bases in exchange for protection. Hersh said that Saudis were paying half the salaries for American embassy workers in Saudi Arabia so that Congress didn’t have to know how many people were working there. We heard a lot about US hit squads who carry out assassinations in the night.

“Where is Obama on this?” Hersh asked. “He’s got his problems. My own personal view is skeptical, but you’ve got to give him another year.” Hersh apologized for depressing the audience so much, but said that the hope is Obama may step up and decide on only being president for one term. “If he’s going to be a one-termer, he’ll pull us out of this,” Hersh said.

It was an unsatisfying note to end on, though you can’t expect satisfaction from this mess. Hersh said he could take individual questions in the lobby, but since we’d already been there ninety minutes, he would skip the traditional Q&A session. However, one man demanded that his question be heard. This is where being in the overflow room really sucked, as there was no microphone on the questioner, nor any audio. Judging from Hersh’s interjections, the questioner was impassioned. Finally a few of us couldn’t take it, and rushed the main room to find out what was going on. We missed most of it, but apparently one man seemed to have construed Hersh’s description of torture as a reflection on the American character, and was especially upset that Hersh thought our only hope was that our best president in years would be a one-termer. What kind of hope is that, the guy wanted to know. Hersh assured him that he wasn’t talking about the American character, but of the character of war. As far as hope, well, that was harder to finesse.

Image credit New Mexico State University.