The Promise of Paradise and Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh had not imagined that President Obama would be like George W. Bush in key ways.
After the applause died down, the award-winning reporter’s first words to the audience were, “You have to hand it to Bush Cheney and company鈥hey realized early that they would be able to pull this off as long as they basically left white people alone.”
The words came and went, unremarkably at first, then came the shock and the smile when I realized: Wait, this is a talk sponsored by a Stanford department. And wait, he just said that to a majority white audience! And wait, most of the people in the audience are nodding in agreement!
Seymour Hersh, writer for the New York Times and New Yorker magazine, had indicted the Bush Cheney administration, as well as a majority of the audience who had come to listen to him that evening in August 2006, and it was a pleasant shock to hear it 鈥 a shock that the Palo Alto/Stanford community was ready to hear this message put in such frank terms, and a bit of a shock to hear such a brazen reference to race and culture.
President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address.
Flickr.com
Thinking back, I shouldn鈥檛 have been surprised to hear him speak that way: that is something that people from multi-ethnic places like Hawaii and New York City understand. Nor should I have been shocked that the Palo Alto/Stanford audience understood as well, but it鈥檚 a habit I picked up growing up a local boy in Hawaii: the knee-jerk assumption (based on Hawaiian history) that white communities (haole) will disappoint you when it comes to social justice.
The rest of Mr. Hersh’s talk was just as frank, just as unvarnished, as his first words to us. He talked about the news expose that made him famous, the My Lai massacre during the war in Vietnam. He spoke of the division of conscience among the American troops in the platoon that executed an entire Vietnamese village. The divide fell largely along racial lines, many of the black and Hispanic soldiers donning black armbands the day after the massacre, in remembrance.
Then he changed his focus to the wars of our day.
He spoke of a Nisei four-star general from the island of Kauai, who risked his own career by revealing publicly that the Secretary of Defense was selling the fantasy that 35,000 troops would be enough for a quick victory and a subsequent occupation of Iraq.
He touched on the journey of Ehren Watada, a conscientious objector from the next generation of AJA soldiers, who refused to serve in Iraq, but would gladly fight alongside of his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan. He now understood the Iraq War to be based on two falsehoods: manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and manipulated intelligence about Saddam Hussein allegedly having supported 9/11.
And, from Mr. Hersh I learned that the man whose conscience had exposed the torture being carried out by American personnel in Iraq at the Abu Ghraib prison was a Filipino-American major general who grew up in Hawaii.
They had displayed a form of patriotism that is different from the way immigrant soldiers who came a generation before them had tried to prove theirs. They spoke truth to power, just like the very first American patriots, and perfectly balanced duty, loyalty to fellow citizens, loyalty to fellow members of the armed forces, loyalty to American ideals.
All of them from Hawaii.
At the end of Mr. Hersh’s talk that day, a few of us in the audience took the opportunity to ask him a question. A woman from Palo Alto, in front of me in line, asked a great one: “Mr. Hersh, I understand you to be a patriot, perhaps the highest form of patriot. How do you keep up your patriotism when your job is essentially to catch our government when it lies to us?”
Mr. Hersh paused before answering. “You know, I have this crazy fantasy鈥hat this young guy from Chicago will somehow miraculously come from behind and beat Senator Clinton, and then go on to roll over whichever candidate the Republicans offer up!” He was smiling broadly and looking off into space. His eyes looked liked they were twinkling almost at the thought.
Many in the audience smiled. Perhaps some were smiling at the possibility; perhaps others were just smiling because the thought made our speaker, who had given so much on that evening, smile from way down deep. At the moment, this possibility that the 鈥測oung guy from Chicago鈥 represented, energized him.
While I thought this biracial, multicultural senator with the African name could in fact win, I also thought that Mr. Hersh’s faith was misplaced. I felt like I needed to tell him that, as he had told us so much that we needed to know.
Seymour Hersh laid his eyes directly on me as I approached the podium with a question that had to do with how a presidential election was decided.
“Mr. Hersh, I want ask about the so-called October Surprise, where the Reagan campaign allegedly made a deal with the Islamic revolutionary government in Tehran not to release the American Hostages until after the election was over, so that President Carter would lose and Reagan would win.”
“Allegedly?” he asked rhetorically. “That really happened!”
“Who were your sources in the White House that confirmed that it happened?” He was about to start his answer before I cut him off:
鈥淏ut before you answer I have one comment. I am from Hawaii, and today I am very proud to be from the same place as these heroes who spoke up at personal risk to themselves, Ehren Watada, General Shinseki and Major General Taguba. But Senator Obama鈥e is not the guy. He is not the guy that is gonna fix this.”
Murmurs spread across the audience. “I mean, he had Secretary of State Rice right in front of him, testifying before the Senate, and he did nothing with the opportunity to hold the administration accountable.”
The murmurs got louder, many of them in agreement. He waited for the audience to die down, with a distressed look on his face. To this great reporter at this moment in time, the senator from Illinois, born and raised in Hawaii, was the reason to continue the good fight.
But how could he be this great hope if he would so clearly shirk his responsibility when given the opportunity to question Dr. Condoleezza Rice, with a halfhearted, hemming and hawing, “I鈥h鈥ook forward to having鈥h鈥etter communication with the White House during the president’s second term. And with that I yield the rest of my time.” It wasn’t even good politics, even if it had been a part of a master plan to become president
Seymour Hersh, with his hand on his brow looked directly at me as I left the podium and said, “Look, I get what you鈥檙e saying, you know, but you have to understand, he doesn鈥檛 scare white people!”
With that pronouncement, the host of the evening, the head of Stanford’s humanities department, saw fit to end the talk on behalf of Mr. Hersh, respecting how far he had traveled and how gracious he had been. Perhaps our host thought that Mr. Hersh was starting to make less sense as the hour got later, or sounded upset. Even if it didn’t make sense to the head of Stanford’s humanities department, I understood what Mr. Hersh was trying to say when he said emphatically that Barack Hussein Obama “doesn’t scare white people.” But I admit that I didn’t fully understand it until November 2008. He was pointing out a few different things:
1) This black guy can realistically be the next president, this is not the Al Sharpton campaign, or Jessie Jackson in ’84.
2) This administration will not be like the Bush administration, not even in the same universe. Obama鈥檚 domestic policy will be different. The world will know that this is a clean break for American foreign policy.
3) There are huge implications in the fact that this man can really win.
I have to confess, I didn’t fully comprehend his third point until after the 2008 election: much of the world was in ecstatic celebration; the commander of the most superior armed forces ever to roam the planet was black; there were four black women in the White House! (That thought, to this day, still makes me giggle.) I had not anticipated the moment when older, rural women and men in the Midwest would look into candidate Obama’s eyes and see candidate Obama looking back at them like they could have been his family. Powerful.
But during August 2006, it struck me as selfish to root for the black guy, also from Hawaii, if I sensed that he would not correct the damage that had been done in the previous eight years.
Mr. Hersh resisted when I said, “Senator Obama is not the guy to fix this.” But by 2013, the message was sinking in. He was researching a story about how this president was making a case to bomb Syria, using intelligence that he must have known to be faulty. Although this attack would have targeted the Assad regime, it also would have compounded a humanitarian crisis, and cost more American treasure.
In an interview on Dec. 9, 2013, on the radio show Democracy Now, Mr. Hersh intimated his reasons for writing the article 鈥 published in the London Review of Books 鈥 about President Obama almost bombing Syria with the hope of damaging the Assad regime:
“鈥he American president that we now have 鈥 a guy I voted for, who has a lot of good things about him 鈥 was willing to go to war, wanted to throw missiles at Syria, without really having a case and knowing he didn鈥檛 have much of a case. And that, to me, is very troubling.”
Very troubling, and troublingly familiar to the Bush years. Mr. Hersh, using his sources, had uncovered the fact that President Obama was willing to use a chemical weapons attack during Syria’s civil war as a pretense for bombing, while the intelligence was not saying that the Assad regime had done it. There were other groups in Syria that were capable of that type of chemical attack, according to the intelligence available at the time.
President Obama, much like President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell, was willing to let the ends justify the means, to not be honest with the American people when presenting the case, in order to bomb Syria.
Bashir Assad is a despot, and his forces have gone on offensives against entire Syrian towns. It seems as if he is not fit to lead Syria, and his commitment to giving up his chemical weapons may be suspect. But an American president being willing to manipulate intelligence to make it look like we had unequivocal evidence that Assad鈥檚 forces had used chemical weapons when we didn鈥檛, and being willing to bypass the congressional process for declaring war, is another issue entirely.
It鈥檚 also a safe bet that Seymour Hersh is disappointed in the man he voted for regarding the Snowden revelations of domestic spying on Americans. In the early 1970s, Seymour Hersh did an expose on domestic spying in the intelligence community. His groundbreaking reporting in the New York Times about Operation CHAOS in 1974, much like the reporting on the Snowden leaks in 2013, brought about national outrage and congressional hearings.
Then, just as now, the director of the NSA initially lied to congress, but later had to admit that many innocent Americans were illegally and unconstitutionally being eavesdropped on.
Then, just as now, the president stood by and did nothing as the intelligence director lied under oath.
Then, just as now, the program was proven not to be a useful tool in protecting the US from foreign attack. The stated purpose of operation CHAOS in the 1970s was to uncover foreign influence among black leadership and anti-Vietnam-war groups. Ultimately, after having caught hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans in the dragnet, no connection to foreign powers was uncovered, according to the director of central intelligence.
Then, just as now, the president was complicit in hiding the controversial program from the American people and Congress.
Then, just as now, there were no mechanisms in place for the American people to review and measure the success and cost effectiveness of the programs.
Then, just as now, the administration tried to pre-empt and circumvent any possible review or regulatory action by Congress or the judiciary with regard to these revelations, trying to keep this authority solely in the executive branch.
It must be a disappointment for Seymour Hersh to see President Obama鈥檚 administration not being an improvement over President Nixon鈥檚 on this issue.
Some might think the suggestion that President Obama is equivalent to the disgraced 鈥淭ricky Dick鈥 is too much, and they are probably right. But we also must keep in mind that during the Nixon/Ford administration, the Justice Department did not openly consider criminalizing the act of reporting and working with whistle blowers.
To my knowledge, Mr. Hersh did not face the threat of going to prison for espionage for doing reporting similar to Glenn Greenwald鈥檚. And, neither President Ford, nor President Nixon ever tried to justify secrecy and lack of oversight by saying, as President Obama did recently, that, hey, Paul Revere gathered intelligence on the British on behalf of the American colonies, so domestic spying is OK.
Seymour Hersh had not imagined that President Obama would be like George W. Bush in key ways, and he can be forgiven for assuming that a constitutional law professor would have great regard for our Constitution.
For me, expectations were low to begin with. Yet it鈥檚 worse than I ever thought it could be.
We have a president who refused to make public his legal rationale for targeting and killing two American citizens with drone strikes (one of them not yet an adult), a president who was not truthful with us about the state of surveillance in our country, or its constitutionality.
We have a president who wraps himself in the traditions of the struggle for civil rights, but erodes those very same rights for all, criminalizing the press and conveniently negating the right to privacy.
America and Hawaii deserve a better President Obama.
About the author: Konti Pellegrin is a Stanford and Punahou graduate who has been a science and mathematics educator for “at risk” youth, mostly in South-Central Los Angeles. He has also worked in Silicon Valley.
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