40 Facts About Hersh Seymour

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh was born on April 8,1937 and is an American investigative journalist and political writer.

Hersh Seymour has won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards.

Hersh Seymour has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden and disputed the claim that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War.

Hersh Seymour was born on April 8,1937 in Chicago to Yiddish-speaking Lithuanian Jewish parents who emigrated to the US from Lithuania and Poland and ran a dry-cleaning shop in Chicago's Austin neighborhood.

Hersh Seymour began working at Walgreens before being accepted into University of Chicago Law School but was expelled for poor grades.

Related searches

Hersh Seymour was editor-in-chief of The Southwest Suburbanite in Oak Lawn, Illinois.

Hersh Seymour next began a short-lived suburban paper, The Evergreen Reporter.

Hersh Seymour then decided to move to Washington, DC Hersh Seymour later became a correspondent for United Press International in South Dakota.

In 1969, Hersh Seymour received a tip from Geoffrey Cowan of The Village Voice regarding an Army lieutenant being court-martialled for killing civilians in Vietnam.

In 1972, Hersh Seymour was hired as a reporter for the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where he served from 1972 to 1975, and again in 1979.

Hersh Seymour reported on the Watergate scandal, though most of the credit for that story went to Carl Bernstein and Hersh Seymour's longtime rival Bob Woodward.

In 1975, Hersh Seymour was active in the investigation and reporting of Project Azorian, the CIA's clandestine effort to raise a Soviet submarine using the Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer.

In 1985, Hersh Seymour contributed to the PBS television documentary Buying the Bomb.

From 1993 to 2013, Hersh Seymour was a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

On November 12,1969, Hersh Seymour reported the story of the My Lai massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians were murdered by US soldiers in March 1968.

Documents declassified in 2017 show that Hersh Seymour was on the National Security Agency watchlist possibly because of hostility towards his journalism including his writings about the My Lai massacre.

In early 1974, Hersh Seymour had planned to publish a story on "Project Jennifer", a covert CIA project to recover a sunken Soviet navy submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

Hersh Seymour repeated the allegations during a press conference held in London to publicize his book.

Ari Ben-Menashe was Hersh Seymour's primary source for the claims that Davies was a paid Israeli agent and that Maxwell collaborated with Mossad.

Hersh Seymour strongly criticized Bill Clinton's decision to destroy, on August 20,1998, the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

Hersh Seymour wrote a series of articles for The New Yorker magazine detailing military and security matters surrounding the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

In May 2004, Hersh Seymour published a series of articles which described the treatment of detainees by US military police at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq.

In subsequent articles, Hersh Seymour wrote that the abuses were part of a secret interrogation program, known as "Copper Green".

In January 2005, Hersh Seymour alleged that the US was conducting covert operations in Iran to identify targets for possible strikes.

In September 2013, during an interview with The Guardian, Hersh Seymour commented that the 2011 raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden was "one big lie, not one word of it is true".

Related searches

Hersh Seymour said that the Obama administration lied systematically, and that American media outlets were reluctant to challenge the administration, saying "It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]".

Hersh Seymour later clarified that he didn't dispute Bin Laden's death in Pakistan, and rather meant that the lying began in the aftermath of bin Laden's death.

On May 10,2015, Hersh Seymour published the 10,000-word article "The Killing of Osama bin Laden" in the London Review of Books on the fourth anniversary of the Abbottabad raid that killed bin Laden.

Hersh Seymour's story drew harsh criticism from reporters, academics, media commentators and officials.

Peter Bergen disputed Hersh Seymour's contentions, saying they "defy common sense"; Hersh Seymour responded that Bergen simply "views himself as the trustee of all things Bin Laden".

Hersh Seymour wrote that the Obama administration had used "cherry picked intelligence" to try to justify a military strike against Syria after the Ghouta chemical attack and had ignored evidence the Syrian rebels could have obtained Sarin gas.

Hersh Seymour said there was a split between the US intelligence community and president Donald Trump over the alleged 'sarin attack' at the rebel-held town of Khan Shaykhun in Idlib on April 4,2017: "Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the US intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon".

Hersh Seymour has been criticised for contradicting the official account of the killing of Osama Bin Laden and for questioning the claim that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians.

Many of these allegations, Hersh Seymour relied only on hearsay collected decades after the event.

Month before the publication of The Dark Side of Camelot, newspapers, including USA Today, reported Hersh Seymour had announced the removal from the galleys at the last minute a segment about legal documents allegedly containing JFK's signature.

Some of Hersh Seymour's speeches concerning the Iraq War have described violent incidents involving US troops in Iraq.

In March 2007, Hersh Seymour asserted in a New Yorker piece that the United States and Saudi governments were funding the terrorist organization Fatah al-Islam through aid to Lebanese Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

Hersh Seymour wrote in his 1983 book, The Price of Power, that former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai had been paid $20,000 a year by the CIA during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

Hersh Seymour later said that he had heard "gossip" and that he was fishing for information.

Hersh Seymour said the contamination of other victims was “suggestive.