Seymour unleashed

The legendary investigative journalist presently at the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, who broke the My Lai story in the Vietnam War and Abu Ghraib in Iraq, is losing his patience with the national security state.

Foreign Policy magazine has a blog post about a speech Hersh gave in Qatar the other day, where he's put into familiar territory for me--the "conspiracy" camp--for talking about how so many American military and intelligence leaders are members of the Catholic lay organization, Knights of Malta, who believe they are actually on another Middle East "crusade" in Iraq and Afghanistan to save Christianity from the Muslim horde.

If you listen closely to conservative rhetoric, consider the disproportionate number of religious fundamentalists in the military, and think about the many, many inside contacts in military and intelligence Hersh has built up over the years, you know he's right.

Since I'm somewhat notorious for having been a CIA employee in my youth (google "paranoid shift"), I'll go ahead and tell you that my first job at the age of sixteen was sorting and filing IBM cards, with information about CIA activities printed on them classified "secret" and below, like the Wikileaks cables. So I do know a little about the "need to know" intelligence culture, which is why I appreciated this remark from Hersh:

"I've given up being disillusioned about the CIA. They're trained to lie, period. They will lie to their president, they will certainly lie to the Congress, and they will lie to the American people. That's all there is to it."

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/18/seymour_hersh_unleashed

--Michael Hasty