Seymour Hersh in Toronto

*sigh* My hero. Ok, one of them, anyway. Seymour Hersh, uncoverer-of-My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and ol'fashioned muck-raker, was in T.O. Tuesday night. He was invited to deliver the keynote speech at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression International Press Freedom Awards event. I have yet to find any excerpts from his speech but it looks like he gave a few pre-event interviews. In Tuesday's column by the Globe's Michael Posner, Hersh sounded uncharacteristically optimistic regarding special Prosecutor Fitzgerald:

"He's going to save America" [...] "Because it's not just about Wilson," [...] "Fitzgerald's going deep. He may just unravel the whole conspiracy"

But, in a much more Hersh-like tone, the veteran reporter worried allowed aloud about the wars-yet-to-come:

"We're so out of control," he says of the United States. "We have a colossus out of control. It's the end of the world, brought to you by the neocons."
Hersh recently got hold of a copy of the United Nations interim report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The document cited "converging evidence" that senior levels of the Syrian government were involved in the murder. But according to Hersh, the Mehlis report is built on the same anemic foundations as Powell's UN presentation in February, 2003. "He is relying on intercepts of an unnamed source inside the Iranian air force, someone without inside stuff. It's not empirical." On the basis of this thin evidence, he says, the Bush administration is campaigning at the UN for sanctions on Syria.

In his pre-speech interview with Antonia Zerbisias:

"Who in the hell is (President George) Bush?" he demands. "My parents came here to get away from stuff that he's recreating. Who is he to deconstruct 250 years of the constitution? If you were a Muslim in America after 9/11, you were presumed guilty of something. He prosecuted 2,000 Muslims — and not one conviction for terrorism. They got a couple of guys on credit card fraud and a couple of guys on overstayed visas. Right now this government is going around and anywhere in the world we think there's a member of the `global war on terrorism' we can snatch him and take him somewhere where the sun don't shine on him. "That is enraging."