Pulitzer Prize winner to head UI conference - Seymour Hersh

[seemslikeadream]

URBANA – A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter heads a list of journalists and media executives who will talk about media consolidation and freedom of the press next week at the University of Illinois.
Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New Yorker magazine, will give the keynote address at the conference, "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" Hersh broke the story of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The conference is Tuesday and Wednesday. It is the first conference to be sponsored by the Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research, established last fall by the College of Communications to study media policy issues.
The conference's aim is to bring together people to talk about the state of the U.S. media.
Conference participants include talk show host Phil Donahue; Amy Goodman, host of the "Democracy Now!" news program; Naomi Klein and John Nichols of The Nation magazine; and Roberta Baskin, an investigative journalist and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity.
Hersh's keynote address – "The Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" – will be at 5 p.m. Tuesday at Foellinger Auditorium, 709 S. Mathews Ave., U.
The conference will include a panel discussion at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Foellinger Auditorium, and four panel discussions Wednesday at the Festival Theater, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, 500 S. Goodwin Ave., U.
For a list of times and participants, see the Web site for the Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research at www.iimpr.org.
The conference is free and open to the public.
The discussions will be aimed at a general audience rather than at communications scholars.

http://www.news-gazette.com/localnews/story.cfm?Number=18189


Seymour Hersh: Iraq "Moving Towards Open Civil War"

We spend the hour with Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Hersh won the Pulitzer prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year, he broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He is author of the book "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." We hear an address he delivered at an event sponsored by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entitled "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" And he joins us in the studio to talk about the resistance in Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, the state of the media and much more.
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We are broadcasting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from the studios of PBS and NPR station WILL.
Urbana is a hub of independent media activity. The local Independent Media Center here is one of the most active in the country and has just bought the Post office. In a few weeks, the low-power FM station - WRFU Radio Free Urbana - will begin broadcasting. And the city is working on offering free wireless internet broadband access. Meanwhile, community radio station WEFT is going strong as is public access TV Channel 6.

This week, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is hosting a conference focusing on the state of the media in this country. Entitled "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" the conference is the first of its kind to be sponsored by the Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research, established last fall by the College of Communications to study media policy issues.

Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine delivered the keynote address last night. Hersh won the Pulitzer prize for exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Last year, he broke the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. He is author of "Chain of Command: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib." This is an excerpt of what he had to say last night.


Seymour Hersh, speaking at the University of Illinois conference "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" on May 10, 2005.
Seymour Hersh, live in studio

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/142250

[realFedUp]

1. Hope Cspan is there...nt

[Nothing Without Hope]

2. I hope a video link to a recording will be posted here. This sounds

like something that is not to be missed. Thanks!

[warrens]

3. Rats, wish I had known about this

1. Tuesday, May 10, Foellinger Auditorium. 5-6:30 PM Seymour Hersh, Keynote address. MillerComm

2. Tuesday May 10, Foellinger Auditorium. Opening Plenary 7:30-9:30PM
Host: Bob McChesney
Opening Welcome: Chancellor Richard Herman
Speakers: Amy Goodman, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein

3. Wednesday, May 11, Krannert. Festival Theater 9:00AM-10:30AM
Moderator: Dean Ron Yates
Speakers: Seymour Hersh, Danny Goldberg (Air America), Linda Foley (president, Newspaper Guild), Orville Schell (UC-Berkeley)

4. Wednesday, May 11, Krannert. Festival Theater 10:45AM-12:15PM
Moderator: Professor Bruce Williams
Speakers: Phil Donahue, John Nichols, Naomi Klein

5. Wednesday, May 11, Krannert Festival Theater. 1:45-3:15
Moderator: Prof. Angharad Valdivia
Speakers: Len Hill, Dennis Swanson (Viacom), Paul Jay, Roberta Baskin (Center for Public Integrity)

6. Wednesday, May 11, Krannert Festival Theater. 3:30-5:00
Moderator: Prof. Dan Schiller
Speakers: Ben Scott (Free Press), Amy Goodman, Bill Fletcher


Directions to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can be found here.

[Auntie Bush]

4. Damn! I'd give anything to be there. So glad someone is finally

discussing this problem. I wish it could be aired on CSpan!

[WildEyedLiberal]

5. I saw him speak last night!

I would've gone to the other panels today, but I have a final at 3.

His lecture was great. Among other things, he said that American democracy was in "great peril" and that the Bushistas were "cultists." He says that's why Bush is so scary: because he believes he's on some sort of twisted divine mission.

Hersh also handled a "question" from a freeper really well. The freeper got booed. :P

[seemslikeadream]

6. Transcript "Moving Towards Open Civil War"

dupe

[seemslikeadream]

7. Transcript "Moving Towards Open Civil War"

In one case -- after I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of digital pictures emailed me, and – was a lot of work on it, and I decided, well, we can talk about it later. You never know why you do things. You have some general rules, but in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units -- soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.'s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they're called in as an insurgent kill. It's a kill of, you know, would-be insurgents or resistance and it goes into the computers, and I'm sure it's briefed. Everybody remembers how My Lai was briefed as a great victory, “128 Vietcong killed.” And so you have that pattern again. You know, ask me why I didn't do this story. Because I didn't think the kids did murder. I think it was another day in the war. And even to write about it in a professional way would name names and all that.

In any case, the paper also says -- this is the last one of these things that I found great interest -- that the Lummi tribe, one of the members – it’s a major tribe in the Sunni heartland of Baghdad, the four provinces that Saddam -- the center post of the resistance, the Lummi tribe probably had something to do with turning in Saddam. He had turned on some of those people. Anyway, the new Defense Minister is a Sunni, from the tribe, and he says he's going to continue the policies of Mr. Allawi, the former Defense Minister, which is what? What's the defense policies of Allawi, the former interim Prime Minister? Well, basically, what we have done since -- in the last year, is we have recreated the Iraqi Mukhabarat. This is the heavy-hitting secret police that Saddam ran. We have gone in and recreated many of the members, put them through a little acid test, made them vow that their allegiance – to what? – I guess, to America, or they're no longer Saddamites. In any case, this is our main force right now. This is the force that Allawi controls. This is a force, the former, you know, whatever the guys, whatever you want to call them, the former roughest guys that Saddam had are now working for us. They're our most prominent security force. And we have had really an amazing spectacle of the Secretary Of Defense, Rumsfeld, making at least two trips in the last five months, I think it’s three, but I know of two, I think it was three, though -- going in and basically -- once before the election was announced, and two more trips -- basically pleading on the inside for the two major factions, the Kurds and the Shia, I'm assuming some knowledge of -- I hope I'm not -- Iraq? -- you know, the country? and there's -- anyway, I don't want to kid you. But we're negotiating -- obviously the whole point of the election was to keep Allawi in play so that he could serve as a bridge, our man, between the Kurds and the Shia. And what he delivers is, of course, is the Mukhabarat.

And here you have Rumsfeld. We went to war to get rid of Saddam and all of that. Here you have Rumsfeld going at least twice in the last four months or so to beg, to beg for Allawi to stay in, and beg basically for the former Mukhabarat security forces to continue doing what they do, terrorizing. It was an amazing piece in The New York Times Magazine. I mean, amazing in its inability to go beyond the immediacy of what they were reporting about one of these militias that are former Mukhabarat, former Saddam people, that are now working for us, killing, (quote, unquote), “insurgents,” which means they're basically -- I don't know, when do you describe what's going on as a civil war? I don't know. When is somebody going to say that? But if it's not a civil war, it's very close. And I don't know -- I can’t see an end game. I'll give you a ticket out.


http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/11/142250#transcript

[Nothing Without Hope]

8. Thank you for this. Seymour Hersh - thank heaven (or wherever) for him.

I'll have to read the transcript and see if he mentions any updates on his earlier prediction of invasion of Iran in June.

I'll recommend it if it isn't too late for that