Seymour Hersh Quotes

#1. Grab whom you must. Do what you want.

Seymour Hersh

#2. I'm worried about people who say Bush is lying. It's much more frightening that he's not lying, that he believes what he believes: that it's his mission to change the Middle East into a democracy. That's more unnerving.

Seymour Hersh

#3. Bush can talk about 100,000 people wanting to go work in the police or in the army. It's because there's nothing else for them to do. They're willing to stand in line to get bombed because they want to take care of their family.

Seymour Hersh

#4. We're going to be really ashamed of ourselves when this whole story about Guantanamo comes out. Guantanamo is a really depraved place ...

Seymour Hersh

#5. If Bush had gone into Iraq for cynical reasons, we could cut our losses now. What's frightening is that he did it for ideological reasons, and therefore he's not going to get out. So it isn't ultimately about oil or about Israel, it's about a belief.

Seymour Hersh

#6. The idea of photographing an Arab man naked and having him simulate homosexual activity, and having an American GI woman in the photographs, is the end of society in their eyes.

Seymour Hersh

#7. I have a theory in life that there is no learning. There is no learning curve. Everything is tabula rasa. Everybody has to discover things for themselves.

Seymour Hersh

#8. The reality is that Qaddafi has been trying to talk to us about his weapons system for years, and we ignored him. The Libyans even came to me about two years ago and offered me a chance to go through their facilities because they couldn't get anybody's attention here.

Seymour Hersh

#9. The National Security Adviser is supposed to be an arbiter of policy and open minded in internal debates. But the playing field was never balanced. It was always tilted toward Rumsfeld's position, which is obviously the same as Bush's.

Seymour Hersh

#10. In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn't happening now, but I will tell you, there has never been an American army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.

Seymour Hersh

#11. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks: body counts.

Seymour Hersh

#12. The general assumption, which I think is a valid one, is that a lot of the major media were on their heels a little bit and prone to share the grief of the nation and to give Bush all the support it could.

Seymour Hersh

#13. The neoconservatives are a small circle, and they're all sort of holding hands as they develop their policy, and outsiders aren't allowed. If you agree with the guys on the inside, you're a genius. If you disagree, you're a traitor, a pariah, you're an apostate, and you're not allowed in.

Seymour Hersh

#14. I can tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the American people think. There's going to be an awful lot more body bags.

Seymour Hersh

#15. I don't know whether God talks to him or whether he's trying to undo what his father did. But he believes in the mission. The body bags aren't going to deter him. Public dissent isn't going to deter him. He's going to go ahead. And that's more frightening.

Seymour Hersh

#16. I'm a better American than 99% of the guys in the White House.

Seymour Hersh

#17. We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler.

Seymour Hersh

#18. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life.

Seymour Hersh

#19. It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out, in the military, in the intelligence community.

Seymour Hersh