Seymour Hersh Tells All at CSULB

Award winning journalist, Seymour Hersh, spoke at Cal State Long Beach as apart of the Distinguished Speaker Series, today.

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize and several George Polk awards, Hersh is widely known for his investigative reporting dating back to the 1970s. Recently he has spoken out against the Bush administration and reported the abuses of Abu Ghraib.

Hersh showered the audience with his thoughts on the current Bush administration, the debates, but mostly spoke of the “casual stuff that passes” in war, emphasizing the horrific nature of combat on all sides.

The telling of two war stories cemented gruesome images of the horrors that walk with war. He described the Vietnam My Lai massacre, explaining in detail the brutal execution of a little Vietnamese boy and essentially compared it to the torture of Abu Ghraib.

His point, war changes people and it should never be thought of as a heroic act, suggesting the offenders in his ‘war stories’ are victims too.



Not a Bush fan, Hersh urged the next president to open up dialogue with countries that surround Iraq, by involving them we can relief our presence and our troops. Just leaving, he said, might be a bad idea. “What is the mental status of children [in Iraq] who were 3 when war broke out? What do they think now?” he asked.

One of Hersh’s themes was the idea of “words are just words.” He connected this idea with President Bush’s statement, “we don’t do torture.” Words are just words if they don’t mean anything, he reiterated.

Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and his current book, Chain in Command, further explores his original Abu Ghraib investigation.