Sy Hersh: Crimefighter & Media Pariah

It’s funny, I’ve been watch Seymour (Sy) Hersh interviews incessantly, and then today there’s a World Socialist Web Site  review on his latest book, Reporter (2018). The review was good, so I left a comment. Here it is in full:

Excellent review of a thoughtful & courageous reporter with ethics! Sy Hersh clearly explains why he’s now so censored in this book, and in many interviews since. Barack Obama was obsessed with leaks, and wanted them stopped. Hersh was even more vilified after publishing the “Killing of Osama bin Laden” in 2013, which has been reviewed by the WSWS. This story debunked Obama’s narrative, reinforced by “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), a Hollywood propaganda movie on bin Laden’s execution by Navy Seals.

Most recently, Sy Hersh has been unable to publish his biography of Dick Cheney, because of sourcing, as he would have to give his sources away (something he doesn’t do), and put them in jeopardy– perhaps of being killed. Therefore he wrote this memoir, “Reporter” instead.

Essential political books by Sy Hersh also include: The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983) and The Dark Side of Camelot (1997).

But as so often happens, I can’t leave it alone. As Peter Falk in Colombo would say, “Something’s still bothering me…,” and it was the second-to-last paragraph in the piece, which pointed out political disagreements the SEP/ICFI has with Hersh. This can be easily misunderstood & distorted by unprincipled agitators, therefore there is need to clarify a theoretical issue on polemics. Marxist WSWS writer Andre Damon correctly writes:

“We do not share many of Seymour Hersh’s views, including his appeals to what he calls the reasonable sections of the US military and intelligence apparatus for a change in US foreign policy. But, as the book’s title implies, he is a genuine reporter; he knows the difference between the truth and a lie and works to expose it before the world public.”

A demagogue would try to use those political differences to divide Hersh from Marxists, which would be a mistake. Sy Hersh is a real reporter, which means he isn’t allowed to be politically biased towards any party. That’s a requirement to do his job well. Identifying with Marxism would have ended his career. Also, if Hersh had ever become openly partisan, he would have lost the confidence of his sources, and then access. This is the hardest-hitting establishment reporter in American political history, and this “self-censorship” is the price he’s had to pay. I politically wish he would publish everything he knows, but I understand why he doesn’t.

Most “journalists” today are biased and/or embedded, which makes them flunkies & apologists. Sy Hersh is pretty much on an island at this point, in terms of his profession– which (like all others) has been destroyed by corporate corruption & greed. Since “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” was published in the London Book Review in 2013, Hersh’s articles have no longer been released or discussed much in American media. He’s so popular among readers, and so widely known that it doesn’t matter where he’s published, as the Internet broadcasts him to a global audience hungry for the truth.

Like Julian Assange & WikiLeaks, Sy Hersh is fighting for the truth, and being persecuted by the ruling establishment. This common experience is shared with Marxists, and it’s why Trotskyists consider them to be comrades-in-arms– in our common fight against tyranny & injustice. Marxists are armed with political theory, and dialectical materialism as philosophy. Marxism is a powerful tool for analysis of political economy and planning revolutionary action, but only if there is helpful & accurate data with which to work.

If we as a society don’t have journalists like Hersh & Assange publishing the truth in its rawest forms, then Marxists (and all others) are in the dark. It’s a symbiotic relationship between Trotskyists and the best reporters, whistle-blowers, activists, and other forms of truth tellers. Trotskyists analyze data and can quickly come to correct political conclusions, using Marxist science & dialectics. The correct message & political line can then be relayed to the disenfranchised youth & exploited workers of the world.

If all the real journalists are persecuted & silenced, then there are no more publicly known facts. This makes achieving socialism impossible, because there will be no facts around which to base political arguments. It will be only variants of fake news, which is what we have now– mostly. That’s why Marxists always stand with and defend these journalists, who are actually socialists in deed, which is why they are being punished in the media & politically.

Whenever Sy Hersh is asked a stupid or bad question in an interview, his reflexive reply is to the effect that, “You have to understand these matters are complex, and that I’ve been doing this a long time…” Then, he takes a few minutes to clarify the issues, which usually means giving background & context.

I’ve labeled Sy Hersh as a crimefighter in the title, because he is. The greatest crimefighter in American fiction is Superman. What’s ironic here are Hersh’s resemblances to mild-mannered Clark Kent reporting for the Daily Planet, making him more powerful in real life than the “Man of Steel” ever was in fiction. What if the next Superman franchise featured an emphasis on Clark Kent’s writing & investigative reporting? I think it would be a helluva story. Anyways, in this age of the Internet, the pen is still mightier than the sword, despite what DC Comics, Hollywood, and the rest of the establishment try to tell you.

Hersh has had serious, high-level political contacts on every continent for decades. He grew up in Chicago, and understands the realities with the police & the mafia, etc. Most people don’t have anywhere near his understanding of how the world works, much less who controls it. One his best assets is his ability to be patient, clear-headed & appear friendly in the face of hostility. It is rare to have mastery of all these social skills, and Seymour Hersh is one of those geniuses. He needs to be more widely read, understood & defended.

* New Superman premise: Decades of being surrounded by a beltway of Kryptonite has robbed our Man of Steel of his super-human strength & immortality. In order to continue his fight against evil, Superman has mothballed his spandex & cape, and permanently assumed the role of mild-mannered reporter, who now must combat evil with his wits & keyboard. Instead of sensationally flying from scene-to-scene to valiantly save the day, our aging reporter has become the chummy drinking companion of many top political figures, allowing him untold access into this nefarious world of political criminality…

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The White House Under Mafia & CIA Influence

Governments are defined by Marxists as committees of the ruling class. Under capitalism, the rulers are the rich capitalists. Governments operate at the behest of the rich & powerful in the “private” sector. The quotation marks are because the line between government & private sector business has disappeared. The truth is, it probably never really existed, as all national governments have been corrupt & murderous since their inception, as it’s inherent to capitalism.

Nation states only formed when the global economic conditions allowed them to be formed. National governments have to have an industrial base to sustain their existence, and produce guns & butter while providing jobs and a tax base. Each country developed according to its unique conditions & position in the global context of capitalism, as a specific economic phase in human history.

Capitalism at its inception was a tendency with some progressive features, as it spurred human development. Nationalities were brought together quickly and in great quantity for the purpose of creating, manufacturing, buying & selling commodities. The great waves of immigration in the late 19th & early 20th centuries reflected a world being violently brought together by global capitalism. There would never be a return to feudalism or any other relics of antiquity in the history of humanity.

Now in the 21st century, migration & human progress is being halted by ruling fascists. Mankind has now reached the point where it has to decide if it wants to continue as a species, or perish in madness. The blind hatred that nationalism whips up, at the whims of the puppet masters is lethal to humanity. When madness is allowed to rule the day, and always gets the final word, we are bankrupt.

This is the USA in 2018, bankrupt ideologically & financially. When the next economic crash comes (and it’s coming soon), there will be no money left in the Federal Reserve for a bailout of the banks. That’s when panic ensues, as everyone rushes for the exit. What do you think will happen to your money?

The mafia & CIA are mirror images which work together, like Republicans & Democrats. Truly the dark heart of the deep state, these entities deal most directly with covert money and power. Under capitalism, the only way to accumulate either money and/or power in great quantities is by murder, fraud & coercion. That usually has to be done covertly under capitalism, and must always be sanctioned those who rule.

All this leads to an essential book on the CIA & mob influence in politics: Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), which is meticulously researched & well footnoted.

Synopsis Review: Family patriarch Joseph Kennedy (1888-1969) made his fortune in the 1920″s bootlegging liquor for mobsters during Prohibition, using his fleet of yachts, along with mob & Teamster connections to make deliveries. All the Kennedy’s, as well as Richard Nixon have extensive mob ties.

The JFK presidency was the first modern US administration in many ways. Jack Kennedy was a rock star, an American icon, along with his wife Jacqueline. But their marriage was a farce, as all the Kennedy men, from Pa Joe to Jack, Bobby & Edward– womanized daily (usually at the pool) with reckless carelessness. JFK had Chlamydia since ~ 1940 and suffered with it up to his death. He never told any of his young female partners about his venereal disease. Up to today, the Kennedy family still denies confirmed truths such as these. What does the #MeToo campaign have to say about stuff like this?

JFK used the mob to secure the Democratic nomination in 1960, through mafia payoffs to local sheriffs in the crucial West Virginia primary. Then Joseph Kennedy rigged Illinois for Jack Kennedy in November, which was the decisive state in his cliffhanger election battle with Republican nominee Richard Nixon. Payoffs through Chicago mafia boss Sam Giancana & Teamsters leader James R. Hoffa put the political machinery to work for Kennedy. Ballot boxes were stuffed, votes assigned, etc.

The 1960 election was stolen. Nixon learned from this experience to win the presidency in 1968, using mob money & similar-type influence to defeat Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey. Nixon probably wouldn’t have prevailed in 1968 without mob assistance.

Lyndon B. Johnson was unpopular due to his escalation of the Vietnam War, and therefore wasn’t on the Democratic ticket in 1968. How LBJ attached himself to JFK in 1960 is another revelation in Hersh’s JFK biography. FBI director J Edgar Hoover disliked all the Kennedy’s, mostly for their public philandering, as he considered it undignified. In private, Hoover was a sick as the rest about sex, and likely a closet homosexual.

Politically in 1960, J Edgar Hoover wanted to contain JFK who had momentum going into the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. By then, Hoover had reached out to ambitious Texas senator LBJ, feeding him damaging intelligence on JFK’s extra-martial sexual affairs. Johnson used that leverage to blackmail the Kennedy’s into putting him on the ticket, otherwise the JFK campaign would be ruined. Jack Kennedy’s endless womanizing put his administration in a position where he was constantly being extorted by political enemies– foreign & domestic.

The original Kennedy family plan (everything came from Joseph), had been to have obscure Missouri senator Stuart Symington as VP in 1960, as he could deliver California, which Lyndon Johnson couldn’t & didn’t. Bobby Kennedy was made attorney general, despite having no legal courtroom experience, and for four years belittled & betrayed the CIA, while defying the FBI by running interference on media reports of brother Jack’s whoring in the White House.

LBJ was to be dumped for a Kennedy/Kennedy ticket in 1964, with Bobby running in ’68, another confirmed revelation in The Dark Side of Camelot. The entire Kennedy administration was Jack spun as the handsome knight-in-shining-armor, with brother Bobby as his hatchet man.  Everyone else was either manipulated & deceived, or dismissed.

All this leads to the John F Kennedy assassination. With everything Hersh has discovered, the motive & primary suspects in the JFK assassination come into clear focus. The most motivated people who hated JFK (& RFK) were J Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon & LBJ on the political side.

On the mob side, it was Jimmy Hoffa, Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante & Carlos Marcello. These were the mobsters who delivered Illinois in 1960, and were then double-crossed by Jack & (especially) Bobby Kennedy, who went after the mafia & organized crime with zeal as US attorney general. These were the same gangsters the Kennedy’s were financing through the CIA in their covert operations to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Bobby Kennedy represents the worst aspects of their privilege: hypocritical pseudo-intelligence, combined with belligerent ruffianism, all varnished with an expensive coat of public-relations & lying.

On the US intelligence side of the JFK/RFK assassinations, the CIA thoroughly hated the Kennedy’s for their arrogance & amateurism, which in their eyes made their jobs impossible. The Bay of Pigs disaster was JFK’s failure, and the CIA had to take the heat. Meanwhile JFK’s ratings soared, for being “tough on communism,” even though the operation failed miserably.

JFK’s game of nuclear chicken with Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, put the world’s population one military mis-step away from mutually assured destruction. The situation had to be de-fused through back-channeling, so president Kennedy could save face and declare victory to the American people, as the 1964 re-election was at stake for him. Ruling interests and an adoring public enabled US presidents, even way back then.

This explains why the cover-ups of both Kennedy assassinations have been so complete, despite the number of participants. The interests of US intelligence (and the ruling class in general) were prioritized with state sponsored murder of a US president, and then his brother as a candidate. It should be noted that Richard Nixon had a long-standing relationship with small-time mobster Jack Ruby, who was deep in debt to Sam Giancana when he shot alleged-JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald dead in a Dallas police station.

Hoover & his FBI were ready to work with LBJ, before he took the oath of office on Air Force One. The war John F Kennedy started in Vietnam needed to be escalated, in order to “fight communism” & reverse dangerous “Russian influence” that “threatened our way of life.”  LBJ, Nixon and Hoover worked well together, doing what they do, which is Cosa Nostra-– Our Thing.

The modern version of the Camelot myth is Barack Obama, who rose out of Illinois with help from the Chicago political machinery. In many ways, Obama was in reality, what JFK was mythologized to be. Obama was a US president who could be (mostly) trusted by the intelligence community to support them, instead of making grandstand plays. He cooperated & complied with US intelligence, providing them with political cover while making every resource available. He also kept his private affairs, private enough. That’s why Barack Obama lasted two terms.

Perhaps the modern Camelot was Bill Clinton, impeached on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice by the House of Representatives on Dec. 19, 1998, for lying to Congress about having sexual relations with White House staffer Monica Lewinsky. Proof of perjury came when Miss Lewinsky produced a semen-stained dress she wore (as seen in photos) in the Oval Office. The spooge stains were a DNA match for the US president. Bill Clinton is the only US president to be impeached, and that is history– boys & girls.

Fast forward to 2018, and these above descriptions of early 1960’s Democratic liberalism in Camelot bear much resemblance to what is in the White House now. Comparing JFK to Donald Trump seems ludicrous to many “serious” historians, but the parallels are striking.

Both JFK & Trump were/are obsessed with their public images. They believe they are always right, refuse to ever back down or admit fault, and treat women like whores. They have extensive mob connections, and are always ruthlessly self-interested in using them.  Neither read books, as both prefer gossip. As far as ideology goes, JFK’s was anti-communist, militarist & conservative. Trump is racist, fascist & conservative; the same thing.

This needs to be understood, because there are still too many politically confused people who believe all this corruption can be reformed with a fresh face, or new administration. When everything is cynical & dirty, it all must go. That is why a socialist revolution led by the youth & working masses of the world is the program of all genuine Marxists. Anything else is acquiescence to this corruption.

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