Chris Hedges, CIA?

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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby 82_28 » Mon Sep 21, 2015 5:14 am

Hunter » Sun Sep 20, 2015 10:26 pm wrote:On the subject of anarchy, I think it is just the most ridiclous position to espouse, it does not and will not work, people cannot be trusted, you think the wealthy and those with money are bad now, just imagine them without any government, they would be complete savages and quickly dominate those in a weaker position, what good is that, we NEED someone like Bernie is what we need, we need regulation and reform more of it not less. You think people with money would just stop polluting rivers and shit and destroying the earth in a world of anarchy? It would be a million times worse. Maybe I am naive and drinking the kool aide but I believe someone like Bernie is good for all of us, especially the working class people who would otherwise be dominated by those with guns and money in anarchy. And yes of course I am aware they already dominate us now WITH government etc but that is whole point of electing good people like Bernie, there are good people in the world who can be trusted to lead but for some reason we have elected the wrong ones over and over and over, but there is no reason to assume that there are not good people in the world that can be trusted with power, they are out there, I would like to believe some of you right on this board are among them, are you not? Do any of you believe that you could be trusted with power to lead ethically and morally, I not only believe I would I know I would because that is how I roll and if you believe or know you would also then that shatters the whole idea that government cannot work, it can work, we have just entrusted the wrong fucking people, we keep electing sociopaths to lead us, well no fucking shit that is a disaster.


Nah. Anarchy is day to day life. It means following rules and laws that cause no harm. It means being a steward of everything around you because all are in the same boat. And in spite of corruption you do choose the lesser of evils when you are forced to. I don't set out to break shit each day I wake up but I also don't believe any form of propaganda. The "anarchists" who vandalize are not real anarchists, but they are people with needs and wants, thus they are real people so in turn they are real anarchists. So let them call themselves what they want. I view anarchy as a method to reduce harm and also never to cause it.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Sep 21, 2015 12:47 pm

Hunter » Mon Sep 21, 2015 1:26 am wrote:On the subject of anarchy, I think it is just the most ridiclous position to espouse...


Well, that's the joke, eh? Anyone "espousing" Anarchism is not an Anarchist. They're an angry child.
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby Luther Blissett » Mon Sep 21, 2015 2:46 pm

Hunter » Mon Sep 21, 2015 3:18 am wrote:
coffin_dodger » Mon Sep 21, 2015 3:03 am wrote:Hunter:
...we have just entrusted the wrong fucking people, we keep electing sociopaths to lead us...


Whilst there appears to be some truth in this statement, I have to disagree. Come election time, when the electorate is presented with a choice of two or three candidates, one from each 'party' - that have been spotted, nurtured and progressed by The Handlers for their sociopathic compliancy, one can only expect to elect a willing and malicious tool. The only option open to voters is one and the same, part of a system that is a closed loop.

Yea, I see what you mean, that is definitely the issue we face, the sociopaths are all entrenched now and they all have to be rooted out, no small matter, I understand that and didnt mean to make any of this sound easy or simple, it isnt, but I do believe that there are good people out there than can be trusted to lead. I was in rant mode there for a few minutes is what that was mostly about, someone on fb had pissed me off and I was in a mood, but I do think government can work, maybe it is beyond repair at this point though. Good point for sure.


I personally can no longer see a state solution, hence my leftward drift into an amorphous "anarcho-socialism" or "anarcho-syndicalism" that doesn't matter anyway. I feel fairly confident in saying that I don't believe in "leadership" but for practical purposes that mostly only relates to the horizontal community organizations in which I involve myself and how I participate in actions and activism. Thus far they are just small-scale efforts which have little to no impact on anything other than free adult literacy classes, tenants unions, and gardens. I still vote.

I had a few great conversations this weekend about hero worship, Drake, "separating the art from the artist," "khoul pope", the masculinity of management, etc. Leaderlessness is the one thing that sort of frees one up from all that stuff, making it easy to say goodbye to both a problematic fave, a politician, a cult leader, cops, a boss, God, etc. It just feels right to me. I like plenty of philosophers, artists, and pretty much everyone on the "hot dissidents" thread, but I have no qualms with abandoning any of them if it comes out that they're transphobic or secret fascists. I would do the same to Hedges if he was CIA and I wouldn't look back.

To bring it back to Hedges: I like this guy, and most of what he says, and feel a certain sort of comfort and kinship with him. It just feels right to me. However, I feel like the most contentious impact he's had on the far left has been his endorsement of powerlessness and pacifism. I defer to Stokely Carmichael and Sitting Bull before Hedges because I feel as though I just can't get on board with him, though I waver. I understand that violence is the language of the state and so I won't involve myself in it, but I'm certainly not going to preach nonviolence when it's a matter of life and death for other people (as with the Martin Shkreli story out now).

I do secretly harbor a sort of chaotic sacrificial spark that I've always been too cowardly to use; I'm not suicidal and I'm not going to immolate myself but, ironically, it's Hedges's words that sort of define my feelings about pacifism for me: "when I see what they [his students] have been through, I can no longer be afraid." I try to let that inform my ally business, even though I really am too afraid to throw my body against the machine so far. I derive comfort by convincing myself that I have a lot of work left to do.

Hedges could totally be a gatekeeper for much of what is discussed here. There's really only a bit of crossover in subject matter (especially given that Hedges likes to repeat himself), and I certainly use and like Rigorous Intuition a lot more than Hedges's essays. My man doesn't want to discuss ritual abuse, Gladio, P-tech, Jimmy Savile, MK Ultra, and definitely not Dechmont Law, the yeti, Dyatlov Pass, Maury Island, D.B. Cooper, or Gunung Padang.
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby Grizzly » Mon Jun 06, 2016 12:59 am

Chris Hedges ups the ante: "Shut Down the Convention"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512135133

On July 25, opening day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Cheri Honkala, leader of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, who was denied a permit to march by city authorities, will rally with thousands of protesters outside City Hall. Defying the police, they will march up Broad Street to the convention.

We will recapture our democracy in the streets of cities such as Philadelphia, not in convention halls such as the aptly named Wells Fargo Center, where the Democratic Party elites intend to celebrate the results of the rigged primary elections and the continuity of corporate power.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, other activists and I will march with Honkala. It is not as if we have a choice. No one invited us into the center or to the lavish corporate-sponsored receptions. No one anointed us to be Clinton superdelegates—a privilege that went to corporate lobbyists, rich people and party hacks. No one in the Democratic establishment gives a damn what we think.

The convention is not our party. It is their party. It costs a lot of money to attend. Donate $ 100,000 and you become an “empire” donor, with perks such as “VIP credentials for all convention proceedings,” along with tickets to lavish corporate and Party receptions, photo ops with politicians at the convention podium, four rooms at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel and a suite at a Yankees game, where a “special guest” will be present. Short of $100,000? You can become a “gold” donor for $50,000, a “silver” donor for $25,000 or a “bronze” donor for $10,000.

We have the best democracy money can buy. The Wells Fargo Center and the fancy hotels in Philadelphia will be swarming with corporate representatives and lobbyists from Comcast, Xerox, Google and dozens of other companies that manage our political theater.

Much more at the link...............
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby stoneonstone » Mon Jun 06, 2016 1:21 am

Kind of at the same point as Luther.

Over the past few years, Dimitri Orlov's Communities that Abide as crept in to my wiring, as probably the only rational solution:http://cluborlov.blogspot.ca/2015/04/communities-that--revisited.html

Some problems, undoubtedly, but the only rational hope I've seen in years.

God, I hope Hedges isn't CIA, but anyone who dresses as well, and has his background, was likely to be procured or on retainer. Until I see him washing dishes and tramping like Orwell, I'm prepared to accept he's a smart buy.

Thankfully I have a farm, and a community I have affection for, so Hedges and the other theorist/observers hollowing out the rightful revolution isn't going to cost me too much sleep. But I will lose some...
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby Karmamatterz » Tue Jun 07, 2016 9:04 pm

Nah. Anarchy is day to day life. It means following rules and laws that cause no harm. It means being a steward of everything around you because all are in the same boat. And in spite of corruption you do choose the lesser of evils when you are forced to. I don't set out to break shit each day I wake up but I also don't believe any form of propaganda. The "anarchists" who vandalize are not real anarchists, but they are people with needs and wants, thus they are real people so in turn they are real anarchists. So let them call themselves what they want. I view anarchy as a method to reduce harm and also never to cause it.


82, that reads a lot like a Libertarian....or maybe I'm stretching it a bit after a glass of hops.
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby 82_28 » Wed Jun 08, 2016 3:08 am

Karmamatterz » Tue Jun 07, 2016 5:04 pm wrote:
Nah. Anarchy is day to day life. It means following rules and laws that cause no harm. It means being a steward of everything around you because all are in the same boat. And in spite of corruption you do choose the lesser of evils when you are forced to. I don't set out to break shit each day I wake up but I also don't believe any form of propaganda. The "anarchists" who vandalize are not real anarchists, but they are people with needs and wants, thus they are real people so in turn they are real anarchists. So let them call themselves what they want. I view anarchy as a method to reduce harm and also never to cause it.


82, that reads a lot like a Libertarian....or maybe I'm stretching it a bit after a glass of hops.


Yeah, I ain't no libertarian. An anarchist is someone who is open to everything and has to jump through the hoops when they have to. But yeah, no, not a libertarian. Same with religion. Not an atheist or agnostic. I don't give a fuck. No authority when you can find that setup. I just let things be. Ain't up to me what people do with themselves.

It's basically this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

Libertarian socialism (sometimes called social anarchism,[1][2] left-libertarianism[3][4] and socialist libertarianism[5]) is a group of anti-authoritarian[6] political philosophies inside the socialist movement that rejects socialism as centralized state ownership and control of the economy,[7] as well as the state itself.[8] It criticizes wage labour relationships within the workplace.[9] Instead, it emphasizes workers' self-management of the workplace[8] and decentralized structures of political organization.[10][11][12] It asserts that a society based on freedom and justice can be achieved through abolishing authoritarian institutions that control certain means of production and subordinate the majority to an owning class or political and economic elite.[13] Libertarian socialists advocate for decentralized structures based on direct democracy and federal or confederal associations[14] such as libertarian municipalism, citizens' assemblies, trade unions, and workers' councils.[15][16] All of this is generally done within a general call for libertarian[17] and voluntary human relationships[18] through the identification, criticism, and practical dismantling of illegitimate authority in all aspects of human life.[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]

Past and present political philosophies and movements commonly described as libertarian socialist include anarchism (especially anarchist communism, anarchist collectivism, anarcho-syndicalism,[27] and mutualism[28]) as well as autonomism, communalism, participism, guild socialism,[29] revolutionary syndicalism, and libertarian Marxist[30] philosophies such as council communism[31] and Luxemburgism;[32] as well as some versions of "utopian socialism"[33] and individualist anarchism.[34][35]
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby brekin » Thu Jun 16, 2016 3:17 pm



Image

The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges
Pulitzer winner. Lefty hero. Plagiarist.

BY CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/ ... plagiarist
June 11, 2014
In early 2010, the editors at Harper’s Magazine began reviewing a lengthy manuscript submitted by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter. In the piece, Hedges had turned his eye to Camden, New Jersey, one of the most downtrodden cities in the nation. Hedges’s editor at Harper’s, Theodore Ross, who left the magazine in 2011 and is now a freelance writer, was excited when he saw the draft. “I thought it was a great story about a topic—poverty—that nobody covers enough,” Ross said.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times, where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He writes a weekly column published in the widely read progressive website Truthdig and frequently republished on the Truthout website. He is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling American Fascists. Since leaving the Times in 2005, he has evolved into a polemicist of the American left. For his fierce denunciations of the corporate state, his attacks on the political elite, and his enthusiasm for grassroots revolt, he has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.

A leading moralist of the left, however, had now been caught plagiarizing at one of the oldest magazines of the left.


Ross and the fact-checker, who remains an editor at the magazine and asked that his name not be used in this story, sat down to discuss the matter before approaching Ellen Rosenbush, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, and Rick MacArthur, the publisher, who knew Hedges personally. The fact-checker was assigned to speak to Hedges about the material lifted from Matt Katz. According to Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges told them that he had shared the draft with Katz, who, Hedges claimed, had approved his use of Katz’s language and reporting. (Rosenbush and MacArthur declined to comment on the record for this article.)

But when the editors at Harper’s asked Katz about Hedges’s account, Katz told them he had not in fact seen the manuscript. “When I went back to Hedges, he tried to clarify by saying he didn’t mean that he had actually showed Katz the draft,” the fact-checker said. “He lied to me—lied to his fact-checker.”

At this point, Ross said, he brought the matter to Rosenbush, and together—after a series of meetings that included the fact-checker, literary editor Ben Metcalf, and MacArthur—they decided Harper’s could no longer stand behind the piece.

“I do not believe I shared a text with Matt Katz, but this was a few years ago,” Hedges wrote to me when I asked him about this account. “I know I spoke with him several times as he wrote the series and covered Camden.” Katz told me that he did not remember seeing a draft, and he confirmed speaking with a Harper’s fact-checker. He declined to comment further.

The plagiarism at Harper’s was not an isolated incident. Hedges has a history of lifting material from other writers that goes back at least to his first book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, published in 2002. He has echoed language from Nation author Naomi Klein. He has lifted lines from radical social critic Neil Postman. He has even purloined lines from Ernest Hemingway.

The unraveling of the Camden article occurred over the course of several weeks. “The more we dug into it, and the more we looked back at the early drafts,” Ross said, “the more we began to see that this could not have been anything but intentional. Specific language, specific sentence structure, specific topics. He went to all the same places as this reporter [Matt Katz], and talked to the same people. Some of it was just taken from the reporter’s articles. There were sentences that were exactly the same.” I asked Harper’s for a copy of Hedges’s original manuscript, for comparison with Katz’s published pieces, but the magazine’s policy is not to share unpublished work of its writers.

“The Katz stuff was flat out plagiarism,” says the Harper’s fact-checker. “At least twenty instances of sentences that were exactly the same. Three grafs where a ‘that’ was changed to a ‘which.’” The fact-checker reiterated to me that first-person accounts in Hedges’s draft had him quoting the same sources as in Katz’s pieces, with the sources using exactly the same wording as in Katz’s pieces. “Hedges not only used another journalist’s quotes,” says the fact-checker, “but he used them in first-person scenes, claiming he himself gathered the quotes. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen as a fact-checker at the magazine. And it was endemic throughout the piece.”

The fact-checker spoke on the phone with Hedges at least three times and exchanged about a dozen e-mails with him. “He was very unhelpful from the beginning, and very aggressive,” said the fact-checker. Hedges repeatedly claimed he had done original reporting. “Hedges reassured me there were no problems,” said Ross. “He then went to the fact-checker and tried to intimidate him and give him a hard time. Hedges told him, ‘Why are you going to the editor?’”

The fact-checker told me, “Not only was the plagiarism more egregious than I had seen before, but it was shocking how unapologetic Hedges was when it was put in his face. He got very heavy-handed about it. He kept claiming that the people quoted in the Katz piece gave him the exact same quotes.”

According to Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges then tried to circumvent their questions by appealing privately to Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur, who at the time was a personal friend.

“After it became clear that we had a serious problem, the reaction at the magazine was admirable,” Ross said. “Ellen brought me in to talk to Hedges on the phone when we killed it. He was very upset. He didn’t believe he did anything wrong. It was a hostile conversation between the three of us. It got heated. I said words to the effect of ‘Chris, we’re doing you a favor here. You don’t want to go out with that kind of work. Because you’ll get caught. Someone is going to catch you.’ I thought it was all pretty sad. Here was a chance to do a creative, smart, impactful story on poverty and we lost it because he wasn’t willing to do the work.” Hedges has not been invited to write for Harper’s again.

Hedges made his name on the left with his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,considered a classic about the psychological effects of combat. When a University of Texas classics professor named Thomas Palaima read the book, he was initially enthused. Palaima teaches a course on the human experience of war and wanted to include Hedges as required reading in his syllabus. “I read War from a sympathetic progressive standpoint,” Palaima said. “I admired his courage as a reporter and his general moral stance against, to my mind, morally unjustifiable wars.”

But in poring over the book, he had come across a passage that sounded disturbingly familiar. On page 40 of the hardcover first edition, Hedges writes:

In combat the abstract words glory, honor, courage often become obscene and empty. They are replaced by the tangible images of war, the names of villages, mountains, roads, dates, and battalions.

The rhythm of the language, the ideas, and the sentiment, Palaima concluded, were from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. The passage in A Farewell to Arms reads:

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates.

Finding no citation of Hemingway in Hedges’s text, endnotes or bibliography, Palaima alerted Hedges’s publishing house, PublicAffairs, in an e-mail dated June 8, 2003, as to what he hoped was “an inadvertent plagiarism.” Over the next few weeks, he corresponded with the company's founder and CEO, Peter Osnos, who assured him that the passage had already been altered for future editions.

Thus, on page 40 of the paperback edition, the text now reads:

The lofty words that inspire people to war—duty, honor, glory—swiftly become repugnant and hollow. They are replaced by the hard, specific images of war, by the prosaic names of villages and roads.

Yet the new edition still did not credit Hemingway. “The wording was changed to throw camouflage over the plagiarism,” Palaima said. “It was a cuttlefish approach—you spray ink into the water so no one can really see what’s going on. The original idea is Hemingway’s.”

In response, Hedges told me that the passage “was noticed and corrected by me after the first edition was published. This was several months before the e-mail from Palaima.” And: “The passage, when it was corrected, was sufficiently different from the Hemingway not to warrant attribution.”

Palaima followed up with several more e-mails to PublicAffairs during June 2003 noting his concern, as he told me, that the publishing house was engaged in a “cover-up” that was “just dishonest.” He got on the phone with Osnos, who, according to Palaima, dismissed his argument as “that of a pedant’s pedantry.” Palaima left the conversation believing that Osnos thought it was important to protect Hedges.

In September 2003, Palaima published a piece on the Hemingway plagiarism in the Austin American-Statesman, in which he noted that plagiarists “are not merely stunting their own intellectual development or disappointing their professors. By disguising the fact that they are not speaking in their own voices, [they] diminish our belief that their voices are original and worth listening to.” According to Palaima, when he and Hedges spoke on the phone prior to publication of the American-Statesman piece, Hedges suggested that Palaima was not competent to question his work. Palaima, a MacArthur Fellow and veteran classicist, replied that he was adhering to the basic rules of scholarship in which proper citation is given.

“It was a very strange conversation,” says Palaima. “He kept saying that essentially what he had done was trivial. He was dismissive and belittling.” Palaima replied that as author of more than a hundred scholarly articles, reviews, and op-eds, and as an editor of a scholarly monograph series, a scholarly journal, and several books, he had “never encountered a case where an unattributed use of another intellectual’s ideas and wording was solved by altering the wording in a subsequent printing without attribution.”

According to Palaima, Hedges claimed by way of explanation that he had copied the Hemingway text into his notes and later used it, mistakenly thinking it was his own. As for not crediting Hemingway once the plagiarism had been discovered, Hedges stated that it would have been prohibitively costly for the publisher to add a credit, because the text would have to be repaginated.

Palaima was stunned. “All he had to do was add ‘As Hemingway wrote,’ and the problem would have been addressed,” Palaima told me. “Plutarch said that little details reveal the character of the man. If Hedges was found in a small matter to have further compounded his dishonesty, it makes you wonder about more important matters.”

All the parties in this story, including myself, have professional lives that intersect with magazines and websites in the small world of left-liberal journalism. I’m a contributing editor at Harper’s, have written both for The Nation and Truthdig, and have received investigative grants from the Nation Institute. This article first took shape as an investigation for The American Prospect and then for Salon, both of which eventually declined to publish it. Prior to my discovery that Hedges had been caught plagiarizing while working for Harper’s, he was on my radar screen as a result of lifting passages from the work of my wife, Petra Bartosiewicz, who also writes for Harper’s.

Bartosiewicz found that he had used, unattributed, her language from a piece she had published in the magazine’s November 2009 issue. Her article concerned the plight of a Pakistani woman named Aafia Siddiqui, who was accused of being a terrorist and who had disappeared, allegedly into the CIA’s system of black sites.

In the Harper’s piece, Bartosiewicz described the scene in which Siddiqui, according to a Justice Department complaint, attacked a group of American officers in a room in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was being held. She wrote:

“None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” No explanation is offered as to why no one thought to look behind it. The group sat down to talk and, in another odd lapse of vigilance, “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui, like a villain in a stage play, reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, then fell unconscious.

Hedges wrote a piece about Siddiqui for Truthdig, published on February 8, 2010, roughly three months after Bartosiewicz’s article hit newsstands. In his piece, he wrote:

“None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” The group sat down to talk and “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui allegedly reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, and then fell unconscious.

Later in the same article, Hedges refers to Bartosiewicz’s article, without explaining that the paragraph in his piece was hers. He proceeds to lift additional language from her Harper’s work without quoting her or attributing the material to her.

Bartosiewicz:

The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate.

Hedges:

The governor of Ghazni province, Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate.

Bartosiewicz:

He proposed a compromise: the U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui, the Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them.

Hedges:

He proposed a compromise: The U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui. The Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them.

Bartosiewicz:

Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Hedges:

Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Bartosiewicz contacted a Harper’s editor (who has asked not to be named in this story) who reached out to Truthdig. The site replied that Hedges apparently had lifted the quotes directly from Bartosiewicz’s piece and had meant to attribute them as a “block quote.”

As it appears now on the website, Truthdig has modified the article’s formatting and language and added an editor’s note at the top of the piece: “As a result of errors, an earlier version of this column misrepresented quoted material. The corrected version is below.”

When asked about the Bartosiewicz passages, Hedges attributed it to “sloppy sourcing on my part. I feel badly about this, especially as Petra’s article was a first-class piece of reporting.” He wrote that the passages “should have been set off from the main body of the text as a block quote.” But he never addressed why he made so many small changes to the original text: the tweaking of some sentences and lines but not others, the adding of a hyperlink not in the original, the changing of phrases such as “my local reporter” to “a local reporter.”

Hedges’s work is often reposted at the progressive news website Common Dreams. Readers who found another of his 2010 Truthdig columns there noted that Hedges had lifted language and ideas from Neil Postman’s seminal work on technological dystopia, Amusing Ourselves to Death—but failed to include a citation.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.

Hedges, in his column “2011: A Brave New Dystopia,” published at Truthdig on December 27, 2010, writes (as the text appears on Common Dreams):

Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission.

A commenter at Common Dreams remarked on the similarities:

[T]he sustained repetition of alternating sentences beginning with ‘Orwell feared’ and ‘Huxley feared’ is what makes Postman’s passage striking, and Hedges copies it, replacing ‘feared’ with ‘warned’ (sorta like my students do faux paraphrases by replacing a few words with stuff they pulled out of the thesaurus). So he’s using the same content and the same stylistic device…Technically, it is plagiarism…If I’d tried that in graduate school, I’d have flunked.

As the piece currently appears onTruthdig, the paragraph references Postman somewhat awkwardly in the paragraph’s first and second sentences: “Orwell, as Neil Postman wrote, warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley, Postman noted, warned of a world where no one wanted to read books.” The editors’ note accompanying the piece sits at the bottom of the piece and is vague: “Revisions have been made in this column since it was originally posted on Truthdig.”

The two references to Postman do not appear at Common Dreams. In addition, the Internet archive tool Wayback Machine shows the Truthdig piece without the citations on October 20, 2012, almost two years after the article first appeared. The citations do appear, however, in the post as it was captured on January 18, 2013.

When I asked Hedges about the similarities between his work and Postman’s, he wrote, “Please see the file that is posted in the archive on the Truthdig web site. It credits Postman for the juxdaposition [sic] of Orwell and Huxley.” He did not respond to questions about the discrepancy with the Common Dreams version of the piece and the original piece as it was published at Truthdig.

In a query to Truthdig, I stated that this article would reveal at least two instances of plagiarism in Hedges’s Truthdig articles and asked for a response. Truthdig managing editor Peter Scheer replied: “Truthdig has always found Chris Hedges to be a journalist of high ethical standards. Years ago we received one request and one complaint from a Harper’s editor representing Christopher Ketcham and his wife. We resolved those issues with notes, links and clarifications to the satisfaction of everyone involved.” He made no reference to the Postman column. (It should be noted that the Harper’s editor was representing the magazine.)

Truthdig founder and editor-in-chief Robert Scheer (Peter’s father) later wrote: “I remain enormously impressed with the body of Chris Hedges’s work and would match it quite favorably for integrity and wisdom against any comparable offerings elsewhere on the Internet.”

When asked about the change in the text in order to credit Postman, the elder Scheer did not address the particulars of the change but wrote only that “Truthdig corrects errors when they are brought to our attention as we did in this instance.”

When I was researching this article for Salon, the editors there pressed Truthdig, given that the Postman correction appeared to be downplaying the plagiarism. In an e-mail to the Scheers and Truthdig publisher Zuade Kaufman, a Salon editor noted that, “due to the changes to Hedges’s piece that referenced Bartosiewicz’s article, Truthdig was clearly aware of potential misattributions in Hedges’s articles. When another attribution problem appeared in a Hedges article, Truthdig corrected it with an editor’s note that was both less specific and less prominently placed than the first one.”

Salon’s numerous attempts to get clarification of Truthdig’s correction policy finally resulted in a letter from Truthdig publisher Kaufman, who presented a series of accusations against both Salon and myself. “We are surprised that a publication as prominent as Salon would take this matter seriously,” wrote Kaufman. “In all honesty, we feel it raises serious questions regarding the true motives of Salon and Mr. Ketcham.”

Kaufman went on to note the “relative positions in the journalistic community between Salon and Truthdig and between Mr. Ketcham (and his spouse) and Mr. Hedges.” Because of these “relative positions” in the hierarchy of journalism, Kaufman stressed that “the issue of commercial motives cannot be disregarded,” and cited without elaboration “possible personal, economic and commercial gain that would be derived by Salon and Mr. Ketcham from damaging the reputation of Truthdig, Mr. Hedges, the Nation and other competitive publications and authors.”1 Nowhere in her letter did she address the Postman correction and its implications.

In the acknowledgements to Hedges’s most recent book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, published by Nation Books, Hedges thanks Nation magazine editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel. “And the Nation Institute,” he writes in the acknowledgements, “has been my home and my supporter since I left the New York Times.” (The Nation magazine and the Nation Institute are separate entities.)

Among his Nation Institute colleagues is Naomi Klein, who on at least one occasion published something that reads a lot like a subsequent Hedges item. Compare a piece by Klein in The Nation concerning America’s international influence as it relates to climate change, published on October 14, 2009, with a piece by Hedges on the same subject, published at Truthdig four days later, on October 18, 2009. The lifting here is subtler than in other examples, but the ideas in each sentence are similar and the words in several cases exactly the same:

Klein:

So while the United States increased its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels, the European Union countries reduced theirs by 2 percent. … Flash forward to the high-stakes climate negotiations that just wrapped up in Bangkok. The talks were supposed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen this December that significantly strengthens the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, the United States, the EU and the rest of the developed countries formed a unified bloc calling for Kyoto to be scrapped and replaced. Where Kyoto set clear and binding targets for emission reductions, the US plan would have each country decide how much to cut, then submit its plans to international monitoring (with nothing but wishful thinking to ensure that this all keeps the planet’s temperature below catastrophic levels). And where Kyoto put the burden of responsibility squarely on the rich countries that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same.

Hedges:

The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent. But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto. Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring. And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same.

Asked about this, Hedges wrote, “These facts may indeed have come from Klein, I do not remember, but the sentences are not copied from Klein.” When contacted, Klein said she had no comment.

In an e-mail, vanden Heuvel wrote that, after hearing about this story, the magazine conducted a review of “some of his pieces for the Nation, and we were satisfied with their editorial integrity. … We did not find evidence of plagiarism in any Nation article under his byline that we reviewed. Indeed, we believe that his reporting for the magazine has been rigorous and essential to the public debate.”

Hedges, also in an e-mailed response—he declined to be interviewed on the phone—said that the plagiarism allegations at Harper’s were the work of a single editor, Theodore Ross. “An internal memo written by an editor at Harper’s, I believe it was Ted Ross, made this charge about a draft that was in the process of being annotated,” stated Hedges. “As I told Ross at the time, some hard statistics in my story, as well as some of the inner workings by the political boss of Camden, George Norcross, came from a three part series on Camden in The Philadelphia Inquirer.”

“It has always been my experience working with editors over many years that we work together to fully source and vet an article,” Hedges continued. “Thus, at this stage a charge of plagiarism was at once shocking and unwarranted. … The final, published material is what counts.” Hedges reiterated in his e-mail that “I believe we are speaking about a charge made by one editor, Ross, who is no longer with Harper’s.”

I asked Ross about this claim. “Hedges is simply incorrect when he says I was responsible for the plagiarism allegations against him at Harper’s,” Ross told me. “As he knows, a staff fact-checker, the editor-in-chief, the literary editor, and the publisher jointly concluded that his story could not be published. Most important, the final decision to withdraw the piece on these grounds was not mine. Harper’s editor-in-chief Ellen Rosenbush made that decision, with the approval of the publisher, and in consultation with myself and the fact-checker—again something of which Hedges is very much aware.”

As for the “process of annotation” that Hedges described, Ross responded: “To say that it is any editor’s responsibility to locate, remove, and replace plagiarized, paraphrased, or improperly sourced material is ludicrous. That’s not how the editorial process functions, and for a veteran journalist like Hedges to claim not to know this is baffling. Hedges’s story remains the only one I’ve ever been involved with at any level in publishing to be killed for these reasons.”

I reached out both to Chris Hedges and to the Nation Institute’s executive director, Taya Kitman, with a summary of the instances of plagiarism uncovered in the course of this investigation. In an e-mail, Kitman told me that, upon becoming aware of this story “some months ago”—when in December of 2012 I apprised the Nation Institute of the article in progress—both the Nation Institute and Nation Books “conducted a review of Hedges’s writing in his capacity as a Nation Books author and as an investigative fund reporter.” Kitman wrote that this internal investigation did not find any instances of plagiarism. “Chris has been one of our most valuable and tireless public intellectuals,” she said in her e-mailed statement.

Hedges said he subsequently published the Camden piece twice, once as an article in The Nation and as a longer version in his book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, co-written with the journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco.

Without a copy of the Harper’s draft, it is impossible to know how much the work changed from then until publication. Footnotes suggest that Hedges conducted research after Harper’s killed the piece. However, I found two passages in the book where Hedges uses nearly the exact same language as Katz, the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter.

Katz:

The law, sponsored in part by Norcross’ political allies, earmarked $12.35 million—the second-biggest recovery check—to Cooper’s $220 million expansion. An additional $3 million was provided for its neonatal unit, and the hospital is in line to receive $9 million toward the construction of a new medical school run with Rowan University.

Hedges:

A law, sponsored in part by Norcross’s political allies, earmarked $12.35 million—the second biggest recovery check to the city—to Cooper’s $220 million expansion. An additional $3 million was provided for its neonatal unit. The hospital received $9 million toward the construction of the $140 million Cooper Medical School which will open in the summer of 2012.

Katz:

Less than 5 percent of the $175 million recovery package was spent on the things residents care about most: crime, city schools, job training, and municipal services.

Hedges:

Less than five percent of the $175 million recovery package was spent addressing the most pressing concerns in the city—crime, schools, job training, and municipal services.

Asked about this, Hedges wrote, “I am mystified by your suggestion re two sections of my book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.Both are properly footnoted and sourced.” This is incorrect. In the book, Hedges sources the first quote to a Philadelphia Inquirer article by two other reporters. He sources the second passage to a Katz article, but not the one where the language appears.

Responding to this, the Nation Institute’s Kitman wrote, “It is abundantly clear from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt that Chris Hedges acknowledges the investigative work The Philadelphia Inquirer did in Camden.” The footnotes, she acknowledged, are wrong, and she said they would be corrected in future printings.

I asked two journalism ethicists to look at the instances of plagiarism described throughout this piece. “These examples suggest not inadvertent plagiarism,” said Kelly McBride, who runs the Ethics Department at the journalism school the Poynter Institute, “but carefully thought out plagiarism meant to skirt the most liberal definition of plagiarism.” Robert Drechsel, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that the use of material from Klein, Postman, and Hemingway “could be characterized as something that has come to be called ‘patchwriting.’ English and writing professors Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard have defined it as ‘restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source.’ Whether it happens intentionally, carelessly, or as an oversight, it’s a very serious matter.”

“Whatever the explanation for Hedges’s reporting,” Drechsel told me, “harm will have occurred. Trust is a journalist’s and journalism’s most precious commodity. Difficult to gain and virtually impossible to regain once lost. If there is even a hint of the possibility that misconduct was covered up, it’s even worse. Journalism will take another hit.”

Correction: In the original version of this article, The New Republic indicated that PublicAffairs changed the text of War is A Force That Gives Us Meaning only after having been alerted by Thomas Palima to the presence of plagiarism. In fact, the wording had been changed months earlier, and an edition with the present language existed at the time of Palaima's email to PublicAffairs. However, there was still no attribution to Heminway in the new version, despite the obvious similarities in ideas and formulation. Additionally, this story has been updated to note that the Hedges pieces in Truthout are republished after initially appearing in Truthdig.

As an authorial aside from the perspective of over 15 years of freelance journalism, and in the context of Kaufman’s letter, I should note that a possible result of this piece will be the burning of my bridges at the Nation, where I know the editors and have been published; the Nation Institute, from which I have received funding for investigative journalism published in Harper’s and elsewhere; Truthdig, where I have published half-a-dozen columns and have been proud of my work; and Nation Books, Hedges’s current publisher, a house I have always respected and admired.
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby Nordic » Thu Jun 16, 2016 9:23 pm

Well. That sucks. :hrumph
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby PufPuf93 » Thu Jun 16, 2016 9:44 pm

Nordic » Thu Jun 16, 2016 6:23 pm wrote:Well. That sucks. :hrumph


That was my response too Nordic.

I have considered Hedges one of the more responsible journalists.
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby brekin » Fri Jun 17, 2016 12:52 pm

PufPuf93 wrote:
Nordic » Thu Jun 16, 2016 6:23 pm wrote:Well. That sucks. :hrumph


That was my response too Nordic.
I have considered Hedges one of the more responsible journalists.


You'd maybe want to review the thread a bit, remember Hedges helped pen a series after 9/11 that won a pulitizer at the NYT which was used as fodder to attack Iraq, which turned out to be completely baseless, an intelligence prank really, both saying Saddamn was running a international jihadist terrorist training camp in Iraq (which is actually common now, no?) and biological weapons production was going on.

Here's his original story. And the the link afterwards in the thread to its national impact and by extension change in Civilizations and then the finding that is was complete fabrication. In fact, as far as responsible journalism goes, Hedges wrote this one for the Bush administration, but afterwards he writes for us, the little guys, he's always whipping up to storm the barricades.

THE SCHOOL
Defectors Cite Iraqi Training for Terrorism
By CHRIS HEDGES
Published: November 8, 2001


Two defectors from Iraqi intelligence said yesterday that they had worked for several years at a secret Iraqi government camp that had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995.
They said the training in the camp, south of Baghdad, was aimed at carrying out attacks against neighboring countries and possibly Europe and the United States.

The defectors, one of whom was a lieutenant general and once one of the most senior officers in the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, said they did not know if the Islamic militants being trained at the camp, known as Salman Pak, were linked to Osama bin Laden.
They also said they had no knowledge of specific attacks carried out by the militants. But they insisted that those being trained as recently as last year were Islamic radicals from across the Middle East. An interview of the two men was set up by an Iraqi group that seeks the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein.

The defectors said they knew of a highly guarded compound within the camp where Iraqi scientists, led by a German, produced biological agents.

"There is a lot we do not know," the former general, who spoke on condition that his name not be printed, admitted. "We were forbidden to speak about our activities among each other, even off duty. But over the years you see and hear things. These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot. They needed a lot of training, especially physical training. But from speaking with them it was clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The gulf war never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this."

The reports mesh with statements by Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a captain in the Iraqi Army who emigrated to Texas in May after working as an instructor for eight years at Salman Pak, located at a bend in the Tigris. United Nations arms inspectors suspected that such activities, including simulated hijackings carried out in a Boeing 707 fuselage set up in the camp, were going on at Salman Pak before they were expelled from Iraq in 1998. But this is the first look at the workings of the camp from those who took part in its administration.

Dr. Richard Sperzel, former chief of United Nations biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq, said the Iraqis had always told the inspectors that Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces."But many of us had our own private suspicions," he said. "We had nothing specific as evidence. Yet among ourselves we always referred to it as the terrorist training camp."

The former lieutenant general, who acknowledged his involvement in some of the worst excesses of President Hussein's government, including direct involvement in the execution of thousands of Shiite Muslim rebels after an uprising that followed the 1991 gulf war, spent three days in Ankara being interviewed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He said the decision by the C.I.A. to include Turkish intelligence officials in the interview led him to fear for his safety. He has since fled Turkey, where he sought asylum, and was interviewed in another Middle Eastern country.

The assertions of terrorism training by the Iraqi defectors is likely to fuel one side of an intense debate in Washington over whether to extend the war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government of Afghanistan to include Iraq.

The Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group headed by Ahmed Chalabi in London, helped arrange the meeting and interview with the defectors and supports that side of the Washington debate. The group was involved in an abortive C.I.A. attempt to build an alliance in northern Iraq to oust Mr. Hussein. The collapse of the effort soured relations between the Iraqi National Congress and some senior officials in the State Department and the C.I.A.
American officials confirmed that they had met with the former general in Turkey but said they had not learned all that much from him. They said it was unlikely that the training on the fuselage was linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings in the United States.

The camp is overseen by the highest levels of Iraqi intelligence, and those who worked there were compartmentalized into distinct sections. On one side of the camp, these men said, young Iraqis who were members of Fedayeen Saddam, or Saddam's Fighters, were trained in espionage, assassination techniques and sabotage.The other side of the camp, separated by a small lake, trees and barbed wire, was where the Islamic militants were trained. The militants spent a great deal of time training, usually in groups of five or six, around the fuselage of the 707. There were rarely more than 40 or 50 Islamic radicals in the camp at one time.

"We could see them train around the fuselage," said one of the defectors, a former Iraqi sergeant in the intelligence service who spent nearly five years at the camp. "We could see them practice taking over the plane."
The former general, wearing a black suit and sporting a gold ring on each index finger, said the terrorist teams were trained to take over a plane without using weapons.

Although the Islamic militants were carefully segregated from the Iraqi units, there was haphazard contact, he said.
"One day after work my car broke down as I was leaving the camp," the general said, "and a Toyota van filled with these Islamic fighters came out behind me. The driver was a man I knew, and he got out to help push the car. There were various nationalities on the van, including an Egyptian who, unlike the rest, was clean shaven. Six of them came out to help. They finally towed my car to a gas station."
The general gave a wry smile and answered what he knew would be the next question.

"No," he said of the Egyptian, "he was not Mohamed Atta." Mr. Atta is thought to have been the leader of the September hijackers.
The general said that one day when he questioned Lt. Gen. Jassim Rashid al-Dulaimy, who he said was overseeing the terrorist training, about the lanky German who worked in the biological unit, he was told that he was "the man who caused all our problems in 1991."
The section where biological agents are said to have been produced was bombed by coalition warplanes during the gulf war, the general said.
The report of Iraqi ties with Islamic radicals comes on the heels of an announcement by the Czech interior minister, Stanislav Gross, who said Mr. Atta had met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat identified by the Czech authorities as an intelligence officer, in April.


There are unexplained gaps and absences, some as long as 15 months, during Mr. Atta's stay in Hamburg, Germany, suggesting that he may have been training abroad.Many of the trainers in the Salman Pak camp are notorious figures in their own right. The chief trainer, Abdel Hussein, nicknamed "The Ghost," was involved in several assassinations outside Iraq, as was General Dulaimy, who has been implicated in the assassination in Beirut of an Iraqi opposition leader, Sheik Taleb al-Suhail, in 1994.

The general, who said he does not stay in the same place for more than one night because of a fear of retaliation by Iraqi agents, said General Dulaimy had boasted of his assassinations, including the one in Lebanon.
"He heads a special assassination unit called the School of the Lion's Den," he said. "It is supposedly only for those who have hearts of lions. He is a very skilled and brave man, and he is trusted by the regime."The interviews for this article were obtained by The New York Times and the PBS series "Frontline." Sections will be broadcast Thursday in a "Frontline" documentary about Iraq made in association with The Times.


Here is the part in this thread where it is shown it is complete bullshit.
November 6-8, 2001: Fabricated INC Story of Muslim Terrorists Training in Iraq Electrifies Media, Builds Case for War
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34179&start=90#p451712

And a nugget from the original link, showing that Hedges was either a hammer or nail, government tool or played doofus. Being punked by the Middle East intelligence agent equivalent of Ashton Kutcher.

"The Perfect Hoax"
- The interview was set up by Chalabi, the leader of the INC, and former CBS producer Lowell Bergman. Bergman had interviewed Khodada previously, but was unable to journey to Beirut, so he and Chalabi briefed Hedges in London before sending him to meet with the defector. Chalabi and Bergman have a long relationship; Chalabi has been a source for Bergman since 1991. The CIA withdrew funding from the group in 1996 (see January 1996) due to its poor intelligence and attempts at deception. For years, the INC combed the large Iraqi exile communities in Damascus and Amman for those who would trade information—real or fabricated—in return for the INC’s assistance in obtaining asylum to the West. Helping run that network was Mohammed al-Zubaidi, who after 9/11 began actively coaching defectors, according to an ex-INC official involved in the INC’s media operations (see December 17, 2001 and July 9, 2004). The ex-INC official, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, did everything from help defectors brush up and polish their stories, to concocting scripts that defectors with little or no knowledge could recite: “They learned the words, and then we handed them over to the American agencies and journalists.” After 9/11, the INC wanted to come up with a big story that would fix the public perception of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Al-Zubaidi was given the task. He came up with al-Ghurairy.

http://www.historycommons.org/context.j ... _iraq_1194

I don't know how many royal fuck ups Hedges is allowed as a journalist? As long as he rethreads pieces from the Collected Works of Orwell I guess for people who won't spend the time to read the O.G. he'll always be a darling of the left. Also, Hedges is, if anything, basically an Apocalypse Addict of the Old Testament type. He left Harvard Divinity School but it has never left him, and his populist writings are basically end times screeds for the more rabbinical on the left. He needs the Shock Doctrine guys, it gives him meaning, it makes him hard. He wants to get his war on stateside so it will match his worldview. Won't you join him?

The Thrilling Fields
A New York Times reporter confesses that war turns him on.

No one is in a better position than Hedges to pronounce on the revolting things war does to everyone caught up in it. This decidedly includes journalists. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning presents itself as a meditation but winds up being an autobiography of a particularly tormented kind.
....

What will provoke any reflective reader is that Hedges' account of the horrors of war follows a confession of rare and frightening honesty: War turns him on. He describes it always as an "addiction" and a "seduction," and he believes there are strong reasons—other than geopolitical ones—that so many people seek it. "Even with its destruction and carnage," he writes, "[war] can give us what we long for in life." It may be that most veterans keep silent about their combat experiences not because they fear revealing their sadness but because they fear revealing their exhilaration.
....
Having spent his adult life among people who look at war as the meaning-deliverer of first resort, Hedges leaves the impression that he has forgotten how society operates in peacetime. For instance, he notes that the Croatian Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic banned non-Croatian words during World War II. But how, one wonders, is this different from the peacetime language-bullying of Jesse Jackson or the Parti Québécois? Similarly, Hedges laments that, in wartime, "The lines between real entertainment and political entertainment blur and finally vanish." Has he never watched Crossfire?
....
Hedges finds Pyle's words moving, but his book invites us to distrust them. One suspects that Pyle is condescending to us, declaring his moral and intellectual superiority, trying to pass off as conscience what is little more than thrill-seeking. Is this moral reflection or moralistic preening? It's tough to say in the case of Pyle. Or Hedges. Or any of us.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/cult ... ields.html

Beware the siren scream of his tin drum.

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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby PufPuf93 » Fri Jun 17, 2016 1:39 pm

Thank you brekin.

Sometimes one finds it hard to keep up with all the public figures that turn out to be assholes or at least have agendas not mentioned.

Not much idealism remains in the journalism profession.
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jun 17, 2016 1:44 pm

Masterful recap, brekin, thank you.
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby Nordic » Fri Jun 17, 2016 5:33 pm

Another one bites the dust.

"Trust no one".
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Re: Chris Hedges, CIA?

Postby RocketMan » Sun Oct 08, 2017 6:05 pm

I was reading a WSWS interview with Hedges (whom I have been warily following until now) when this bit jumped at me:

CH: [...]The whole exercise was farcical. The White House would leak some bogus story to Judy Miller or Michael Gordon, and then go on the talk shows to say, ‘as the Times reported….’ It gave these lies the veneer of independence and reputable journalism. This was a massive institutional failing, and one the paper has never faced.

DN: The CIA pitches the story, and then the Times gets the verification from those who pitch it to them.

CH: It’s not always pitched. And not much of this came from the CIA. The CIA wasn’t buying the “weapons of mass destruction” hysteria.


https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/1 ... g-o06.html

Rrriiiight. :starz:
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