Sy Hersh

This is a revealing book about Seymour Hersh.

I didn't know that he and the founder of the upstart Dispatch News Service colluded to sell the Mi Lai story to CBS 60 Minutes in 1969.

They did it behind the back of the poor maimed soldier who spilled his heart out to Hersh concerning Mi Lai during the writer's research for the third or fourth article he was preparing on the 1968 massacre.  Hersh essentially passed the kid off to Mike Wallace and pocketed the loose change.

The vet had no clue what his story meant to the news market. He was simply trying to tell the truth.

To this day Hersh's ploy seems sort of anti-ethical, much like the Snowden affair relative to Glenn Greenwald, a story of high-risk politics without a known moral quantification.

I like Hersh, Snowden and Greenwald.  I must be in the minority these days. I'm just not convinced that the government needs to know, nor should it know, more than the governed in an idealized democracy.


TS