Daily Cal misses the Seymour Hersh Story
Seymour Hersh, the best investigative reporter currently working, spoke here on campus last Friday. His speech focused predominantly on the war on terror and reconstruction efforts in Iraq. The Daily Cal article on the event completely missed the biggest part of his speech; his description of a conversation he had with a member of the Army about some Iraqis being massacred by the Army.

The Berkeley NewsCenter article on the speech managed to pick up on the big news of the night:

There was more — rumors of atrocities around Iraq that to Hersh brought back memories of My Lai. In the evening's most emotional moment, Hersh talked about a call he had gotten from a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.

"He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'

I learned of this missing element from the Daily Cal article after coming across a mention of that portion of the speech via a blog, called A Tiny Revolution.

Before I found the NewsCenter article, I streamed the speech to confirm that the report from the blog was accurate, and Hersh's lecture was so good, I ended up listening to the whole thing. Check it out if you have the time. The link to hear him is in the NewsCenter article, and if you don't have time to listen to it, that article does an excellent job of summarizing the main points in his speech.
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