jmoiron.net

I saw Chris Hedges on the Colbert Report a few weeks ago, and frantically scoured the internet for material he had written. He seems to have a pretty good handle on the Robertson/Falwell Fascist movement, and it's something that I wanted to learn more about. He's also a plain spoken, intelligent graduate of harvard divinity school, which is something I did not know even existed.

It turns out that Mr. Hedges has also won the Pulitzer prize, and was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for "many" years. He was on Democracy Now! this morning, and had some absolute gems, including this one which needs no polishing:

Amy Goodman: I wanted to ask about Michael Gordon, your former colleague at the New York Times, the person who was so-called breaking the story, who was deeply involved with the weapons of mass destruction myths also in his writings with Judith Miller, and now this latest today, the Iranian government accusing the US and Britain of being involved in an attack last week that killed eleven members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Chris Hedges: Well, that’s probably the best reason to watch Democracy Now!, rather than read the New York Times, about the war in Iraq. It’s almost -- one’s left sort of speechless. I guess it’s proof that some people never learn anything. I mean, I was on the investigative team and got briefly sort of tarnished with that dirt. I was based in Paris covering al-Qaeda but did get sucked into one of these sort of sham Chalabi stories. It was the one where they supposedly had a defector in Lebanon. It wasn’t my story -- you tend on investigative units to work as teams. It was Lowell Bergman’s story, which was broadcast on Frontline, but he could not fly to Beirut to interview the guy, so I did.

Amy Goodman: Explain who he was, the person you interviewed?

Chris Hedges: Well, he was an impostor. Supposedly, he was a general, and he was talking about training camps that were being run in Iraq for al-Qaeda. I think it’s been pretty well discredited.

It's kind of shocking. I mean, you'd assume upon finding this out that this would blow up big time. There's a lot of really important things that get swept under the carpet here, especially when big "scoops" like this get discredited. "Oh I'm sorry, we beat the drum for war in an inappropriate and foolish manner and failed the public as a news apparatus. Here's 1 apology. There you go. And now to our next story, Iran is supplying weapons ..." It all seems so clear but there is just a huge majority out there that doesn't get it. Hedges wasn't out of brilliance, and he's certainly not wont for humor:

Amy Goodman: What will you do if the US attacks Iran?

Chris Hedges: Well, I’m not going to pay my income taxes.

It's pretty funny, but if you think about it, if done en masse, it would cause trouble to the machine.