🚀 go-pugleaf

4;
  what took place there had happened before and would happen
  again in Quang Ngai province-although with less drastic
  results. The desire of Lieutenant Colonel Barker to mount
  another successful, high enemy body-count operation in the
  area; the desire of Ramsdell to demonstrate the
  effectiveness of his operations; the belief shared by all
  the principals that everyone living in Son My was staying
  there by choice because of Communists...and the basic
  incompetence of many intelligence personnel in the Army-all
  these factors combined to enable a group of ambitious men to
  mount an unnecessary mission against a nonexistent enemy
  force, and somehow to find the evidence to justify it all.

I won't go into all the things that must be true for Hersh to be
correct. I will add that in the definitive book of the subject,
The Phoenix Program, My Lai is described as part of the
Colby/Shackley operation.

After My Lai, the New York Times assigned Hersh to the Watergate
beat. The paper was getting scooped by Woodward and Bernstein at
the Washington Post. For a "crack" reporter, Hersh did not
distinguish himself, especially in retrospect. He basically
followed in the footsteps of the Post. i.e. the whole complicated
mess was a Nixon operation; there was no real CIA involvement;
whatever Hunt and McCord did, no matter how weird and
questionable, they did for the White House. As late as the
December 12, 1992 edition of The New Yorker, Hersh was still
hewing to this line in his article entitled "Nixon's Last Cover
Up." In spite of this, at times Hersh actually did favors for the
White House. As Ron Rosenbaum describes in Travels with Dr.
Death, Hersh circulated some dirt on Dan Ellsberg (p. 294).

Anson mentions a famous anecdote about Hersh's reporting on
Watergate (p. 107). Hersh got wind of a man involved in the
Water