August 31, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu

Seymour Hersh delivers the lecture
Investigating the War on Terrorism: Abu Ghraib and the
Underside of the Conflict in Iraq at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• Seymour Hersh
• Investigating the War on Terrorism: Abu Ghraib and the Underside of the Conflict in Iraq
• Hersh is one of America’s premiere investigative reporters
• The Harry Girvetz Memorial Lecture
• Sunday, October 10
• 1 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public $12 / UCSB students $10
• Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

Seymour Hersh, widely regarded as one of the most influential and acclaimed investigative reporters of the past 35 years, will deliver the lecture Investigating the War on Terrorism: Abu Ghraib and the Underside of the Conflict in Iraq on Sunday, October 10 at 1 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. This event is The Harry Girvetz Memorial Lecture.

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers with his reporting in The New Yorker about the war in Iraq, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The lecture, based on Hersh’s book Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (to be released on September 14, 2004) will take an unflinching look behind the public story of President Bush’s “war on terror” and into what Hersh claims are the lies and obsessions that led America into Iraq. Hersh will reveal the connections between early missteps in the hunt for Al Qaeda and disasters on the ground in Iraq. The talk will feature a new account of the Abu Ghraib story and of where Hersh believes responsibility for the scandal ultimately lies.

Seymour Hersh has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, four George Polk Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes, many of them for his work at The New York Times. In 2004 he won a National Magazine Award for public interest for his pieces on intelligence and the Iraq war. His earlier ground-breaking reports include many that are landmark events in American journalism: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the C.I.A.’s bombing of Cambodia, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s wiretapping of his own staff, and the C.I.A.’s efforts against former Chilean President Salvador Allende.

He is also the author of eight books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, The Target Is Destroyed: What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It, and The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and America’s Foreign Policy.

Hersh began his newspaper career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. He served in the Army and worked for a suburban newspaper and then for the Associated Press and United Press International until 1967, when he joined the Presidential campaign of Eugene J. McCarthy as speech writer and press secretary. Hersh joined The New York Times in 1972 and worked there until 1979, when he opted to work as a freelance journalist.

Washington Post writer Bob Woodard calls Hersh “one of my heroes,” and journalist and author David Halberstam says, “There’s a kind of fearlessness, a love of justice and a strain of American Puritanism there. He has great sources because people trust him. They know he’s straight.”

In UCSB Arts & Lectures’ on-going effort to make events accessible to all who wish to enjoy them, this lecture will be signed. Sign language interpretation is made possible by the California Arts Council in collaboration with the National Arts and Disability Center and by the Santa Barbara Foundation’s Access Theatre Endowment Fund.

Courtesy of Borders, books by Seymour Hersh will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Seymour Hersh is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, in association with the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion and Public Life and the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Tickets for the event are $12 for the general public and $10 for UCSB students. They are on sale now can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.