This riveting film (available on Netflix) by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus tells the story of how Seymour Hersh, renowned investigative journalist since the 1960s, uncovered some of the biggest American crimes of recent history. And how he did this despite massive cover-ups by the government trying to maintain the false image of the United States as “a force for good in the world” as Bob Avakian has so succinctly put it.
One of the crimes is the massacre by U.S. troops of the whole village of My Lai in Vietnam in 1968. You learn how Hersh first heard a rumor in the military about this and then doggedly pursued the truth. He followed clues one by one to reveal the nightmarish truth about what happened and how the massacre was not an “isolated incident of a bad apple” but the genocidal policy of the government. The film goes on to show his role in exposing the Watergate scandal where Nixon and his White House team lawlessly went after Nixon’s political enemies. Then the role of the CIA and Henry Kissinger in engineering the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s and installing a “friendly” fascist Pinochet, who murdered tens of thousands. And in 2004, how Hersh found and exposed the horror of the U.S. torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
There are many other interesting aspects of this film, like the self-censorship of the major media (very relevant today), the role of investigative journalism and the toll it takes on the journalists, and the story of how Hersh came to be a journalist.
I would urge all your readers to watch this film. If you already know this history, Cover-Up puts it all together in a compelling way. You see not only how and why Hersh investigated, but how he and his work was suppressed at every turn (including by the major media) and how and why he fought through to bring the truth to light for the whole world. If you don’t know about this history, or have vague notions about it, you can learn a lot about the real recent history of U.S. imperialism, how it works, and what it has really been doing in the world.
