Chris Hedges

Early life

Christopher Lynn Hedges was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the son of Thelma Louise (née Prince) and the Rev. Thomas Havard Hedges, a Presbyterian minister. He grew up in rural Schoharie County, New York, and graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School, a private boarding school in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1975. He founded an underground newspaper at the school that was banned by the administration and led to him being put on probation.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Colgate University in 1979. He later received a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School (where he studied under James Luther Adams) in 1983. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in May 2009 from the Unitarian Universalist seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, in Berkeley, California. He speaks English, Arabic, French, and Spanish, and studied Latin and Classical Greek at Harvard.

The New York Times

Hedges spent 15 years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He was based in the Middle East for five years, serving for four of those years as the Middle East bureau chief. He then covered the war in the former Yugoslavia as the Balkan bureau chief based in Sarajevo. He later covered Al Qaeda in Europe and the Middle East from Paris.

Three of Hedges' articles were based upon the stories of Iraqi defectors who had been furnished to Hedges by the Information Collection Program of the US-funded Iraqi National Congress. The program promoted stories to major media outlets in order to orchestrate US intervention in Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Most significant was a November 8, 2001, front page story about two former Iraqi military commanders who claimed to have trained foreign mujahedeen how to hijack planes without using guns. Hedges quoted a man he believed to be an Iraqi general: "These Islamic radicals ... came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States". The two defectors also asserted there was a secret compound in Salman Pak facility where a German scientist was producing biological weapons.

According to Mother Jones, "The impact of the article ... was immediate: Op-eds ran in major papers, and the story was taken to a wider audience through cable-TV talk shows. When Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush's national security adviser, was asked about the story at a press briefing, she said, 'I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.'" As late as 2006, conservative magazines including The Weekly Standard and National Review continued to use the story to justify the invasion of Iraq.

It later surfaced that the story was "an elaborate scam". The defector Hedges quoted, who identified himself as Lt. General Jamal al-Ghurairy, was actually a former sergeant, and the real Ghurairy had never left Iraq. Hedges said that he had taken the story at the request of Lowell Bergman of Frontline, who wanted the defectors for his show but could not go to Beirut for the interview. The trip had been organized by Ahmed Chalabi, whom Hedges himself considered to be unreliable. Hedges said he had done the story as a favor to Bergman, explaining, "There has to be a level of trust between reporters. We cover each other's sources when it's a good story because otherwise everyone would get hold of it." Hedges had relied on the US embassy in Turkey for further confirmation of the man's identity.

Hedges wrote two more stories informed by Chalabi-coached defectors that year. The second one, claiming that Iraq still held 80 Kuwaitis captured in the 1991 Gulf War in a secret underground prison, was also found to be baseless.

Political views and activism

Hedges was an early critic of the Iraq War. In May 2003, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security." His speech was received with boos and his microphone was shut off three minutes after he began speaking.

His newspaper, The New York Times, criticized his statements and issued him a formal reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality". Shortly after the incident, Hedges left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, and a columnist at Truthdig, in addition to writing books and teaching inmates at a New Jersey correctional institution. Hedges has spent a decade teaching in prisons in New Jersey and has become a fierce critic of mass incarceration in the United States.

In the 2008 United States presidential campaign, Hedges was a speech writer for candidate Ralph Nader.

In his December 29, 2008 column for Truthdig, Hedges stated that "the inability to articulate a viable socialism has been our gravest mistake. It will ensure, if this does not soon change, a ruthless totalitarian capitalism." He elaborated upon this in a 2013 interview with The Real News, claiming that "the left has been destroyed, especially the radical left, quite consciously in the whole name of anti-communism," and "we have allowed ourselves to embrace an ideology which, at its core, states that all governance is about maximizing corporate profit at the expense of the citizenry. For what do we have structures of government, for what do we have institutions of state, if not to hold up all the citizenry, and especially the most vulnerable?"

On December 8, 2009, Hedges described himself as a "radical Keynesian" during his lecture at The New School, entitled "Empire of Illusion".

On December 16, 2010, Hedges was arrested outside the White House along with Daniel Ellsberg and over a hundred activists who were protesting the War in Afghanistan.

Hedges appeared as a guest on an October 2011 episode of the CBC News Network's Lang and O'Leary Exchange to discuss his support for the Occupy Wall Street protests and was criticized by co-host Kevin O'Leary for sounding "like a left-wing nutbar". Hedges said "it will be the last time" he appears on the show and compared the CBC to Fox News. CBC's ombudsman found O'Leary's heated remarks to be a violation of the public broadcaster's journalistic standards.

On November 3, 2011, Hedges was arrested with others in New York as part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, during which Hedges and others staged a "people's hearing" on the investment bank Goldman Sachs and then blocked the entrance to their corporate headquarters. Hedges has appeared on the syndicated Democracy Now! television program, Breaking the Set on RT (formerly known as Russia Today), and George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.

In October 2012 Hedges publicly supported Jill Stein, the candidate of the Green Party of the United States, in the 2012 United States presidential election. On April 7, 2013, Hedges delivered the keynote address at the Green Party of New Jersey state convention.

In June 2013, Hedges and numerous celebrities appeared in a video showing support for Chelsea Manning.

On September 20, 2014, a day before the People's Climate March, Hedges joined Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and Kshama Sawant on a panel moderated by WNYC's Brian Lehrer to discuss the issue of climate change. Hedges and Klein also participated in the 'Flood Wall Street' protests that occurred shortly thereafter.

On November 11, 2014, Hedges published an article to explain why he and his family have become vegan. He explained that this is "the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species".

In a December 15, 2014 article, Hedges compared the actions of ISIS today to the way Israel's founding fathers acted in the late 1940s.

Hedges contended at the Left Forum in 2015 that with the "denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism," Karl Marx has been "vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic." He elaborated that Marx "foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies—think neoliberalism—were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites."

On April 15, 2016, Hedges was arrested, along with 100 other protesters, during a sit-in outside the U.S. Capitol during Democracy Spring to protest the capture of the political system by corporations.

Commenting on the 2016 election during an interview on The Real News, Hedges asserted that the modern American Left's embrace of neoliberalism resulted in a dysfunctional democracy and has given rise to a Trump presidency, which he characterizes as "proto-fascist." At a March 2017 speech delivered in Vancouver, Hedges insisted that any resistance to the Trump Administration must be broadly socialist and anti-capitalist in nature:

This resistance must also be accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist, anti-capitalist society. Because the enemy in the end is not Trump or Bannon—it is corporate power. And if we do not stop corporate power, we will never dismantle fascism’s seduction of the white working class and unemployed."

NDAA lawsuit

In 2012, after the Obama Administration signed the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, Hedges sued members of the U.S. government claiming that section 1021 of the law unconstitutionally allowed presidential authority for indefinite detention without habeas corpus. He was later joined in the suit, Hedges v. Obama, by activists including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg. In May 2012 Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the Southern District of New York ruled that the counter-terrorism provision of the NDAA is unconstitutional. The Obama administration appealed the decision and it was overturned. Hedges petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case, but the Supreme Court rejected this challenge in April 2014.

Allegations of plagiarism

In 2003, University of Texas classics professor Thomas Palaima wrote an article for the Austin-American Statesman accusing Hedges of plagiarizing Ernest Hemingway in Hedge's 2002 book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Palaima complained in the article that Hedges had corrected a passage in his first edition of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning that was close to Hemingway and should have cited the paraphrase in all subsequent editions. Hedges' publisher at the time, PublicAffairs, said it did not believe the passage needed to be cited to Hemingway. The New Republic made the charge that Palaima's accusation of plagiarism resulted in a rewording of the passage, but after posting the article online the magazine put up a correction box that read: "In the original version of this article, The New Republic indicated that PublicAffairs changed the text of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning only after having been alerted by Thomas [Palaima] to the presence of plagiarism. In fact, the wording had been changed months earlier, and an edition with the present language existed at the time of Palaima's e-mail to PublicAffairs. However, there was still no attribution to Hemingway in the new version, despite the obvious similarities in ideas and formulation".

In June 2014, The New Republic published an article by Christopher Ketcham accusing Hedges of plagiarism. Ketcham claims Hedges plagiarized many writers over his career, including Matt Katz, Naomi Klein, Neil Postman, Ernest Hemingway, along with Ketcham's wife: Petra Bartosiewicz. Hedges, his editors at Truthdig, and his publisher Nation Books denied the claims made by Ketcham. The Nation Institute's Executive Director, Taya Kitman, is quoted in The New Republic saying that when she became aware of the accusations by Ketcham, both The Nation Institute and Nation Books "conducted a review of Hedges's writing in his capacity as a Nation Books author and as an investigative fund reporter." Kitman wrote that this investigation did not find any instances of plagiarism. "Chris has been one of our most valuable and tireless public intellectuals," she said in her e-mailed statement. In a response first published by The Real News on June 16, 2014, Hedges noted that Ketcham based his allegations on an unpublished manuscript he admitted he had never seen and passages that were footnoted or sourced. He accused Ketcham and The New Republic (TNR) of malicious intent and character assassination. On the following day (June 17), The New Republic republished Hedges' response along with Ketcham's (and TNR's) response to the counter-allegations made by Hedges.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that The New York Times "did not have reason to believe Hedges plagiarized in his work for the paper" and had no plans to investigate Hedges for plagiarism. The American Prospect and Salon declined to publish Ketcham's article, and The Nation Institute and Truthdig issued statements dismissing Ketcham's allegations.

Ordination and ministerial installation

On October 5, 2014, Hedges was ordained a minister within the Presbyterian Church and installed as Associate Pastor and Minister of Social Witness and Prison Ministry at the Second Presbyterian Church Elizabeth in Elizabeth New Jersey. Of his rejection for ordination thirty years earlier, he wrote that "going to El Salvador as a reporter was not something the Presbyterian Church at the time recognized as a valid ministry, and a committee rejected my 'call.' "

Personal life

Chris Hedges is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong. The couple have two children. Hedges also has two children from a previous marriage. He currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Books