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Patriotism is No Excuse for Stupidity

Patriotism is No Excuse for Stupidity

As reporters go, Seymour Hersh is not only famous but also pretty darn reliable. He won a Pulitzer Prize during the Vietnam War. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. When he writes, people listen.Recently, he and I were on a radio show together. I asked him about his latest piece for the New Yorker in which he reported that the first real U.S. commando effort in Afghanistan had gone badly and that the Taliban -- thanks partly to an ill-advised, overly noisy U.S. effort -- had fired upon a dozen of our elite soldiers, seriously wounding several of them.