68 Quotes by Seymour Hersh

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.

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.

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

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

And then, of course, Bush won reelection, with everything out there, all of our complaints, all of the issues, all of the troubles with Iraq. So where are we? Bush certainly sees himself as having been given an endorsement. He was asked about accountability in an interview, about why Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz have been promoted, these people who led us into the debacle in Iraq. Bush said there was accountability - it was the election. So there we are.

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.

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.

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.

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.