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Talking of journalism, there's nothing like having a senior member of one's profession (and a bit of a personal hero) compared directly with, ooh, mass murderers. So it's always nice when senior people in the Bushosphere get all Forgetting-the-First-Amendment on you.
Richard Perle, top advisor to the White House on Foreign Affairs, went onto CNN the other night and called Seymour Hersh a terrorist. Who's Seymour Hersh, I hear you ignorant fellows at the back cry out. Well, lemme tell ya.
Hersh is one of America's greatest investigative reporters:
...his exposé of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam. To refresh: In March of 1968, a division of American troops called Charley Company, led by Lieut. William L. Calley Jr., entered the village of Son My (called My Lai 4 on the soldiers' maps) and spent a few hours killing every man, woman and child -- all unarmed civilians -- in the vicinity, about 500 all told. Women were raped; babies were used as target practice. Hersh brought it all out in the open, and helped end the war as a result, because Americans realized that this incomprehensible conflict far away was making their boys act like Nazis.
Pulitzer Prizes, the lot. He then went onto expose the CIA's involvement in Chile, Kissenger's ordering of the bombing of Cambodia, the Israeli nuclear arsenal, Gulf War syndrome, major parts of Watergate. I could go on - the guy is a legend.
So why did Perle call him a terrorist? Well, Hersh now writes for the New Yorker, and in this week's issue he breaks the story that Perle while chairing a secret civilian committee at the Pentagon that deals with the purchasing of munitions for upcoming wars, is also chairman of a company currently trying to raise capital to sell the very same. It finishes with:
But Perle, in crisscrossing between the public and the private sectors, has put himself in a difficult position—one not uncommon to public men. He is credited with being the intellectual force behind a war that not everyone wants and that many suspect, however unfairly, of being driven by American business interests. There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war. In doing so, he has given ammunition not only to the Saudis but to his other ideological opponents as well.
Ergo, Hersh is a terrorist. Lovely. Anyone scared yet? [Ben Hammersley.com]
11:07:04 PM 
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