Two of my favorite people

Seymour Hersh was the investigative reporter responsible for exposing the My Lai massacre in 1969 and fuelling the American Peace Movement. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970. Since then he has been exposing various things from an attack on a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan to the current plan for the military to use nuclear weapons in Iran. He broke the story that one group of “insurgents” killed in Iraq were actually a group of young soccer players.

Iva Toguri D’Aquino was identified as Tokyo Rose, a propaganda commentator heard on the radio during World War Two. She was charged with treason and sentenced. Her history is more complex though, she was a Japanese American who was visiting Japan when Pearl Harbour was bombed and she wasn’t able to return to America. And she couldn’t just be Japanese either, because she was an American. So she became a POW, and part of her job was to read out propaganda reports in comedy sketches and introductions to news reports. So she did, but she subverted them. She used part of the money she got from her POW work to help other American POW’s. Today she is the only American to be pardoned from treason.