In Seymour Hersh's recent chronicle, Reporter: A Memoir, he recounts how difficult telling the truth has been when confronting government lies, one of the biggest obstacles being cowardly editors and publishers.

As the journalist who broke the story of the My Lai massacre (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process), Hersh has a long, heroic record of exposing lies and disinformation.

Hersh revealed illegal CIA spying on Americans . . . over 40 years ago. Soon afterwards, he was distressed that no person in the CIA had been held accountable for the crimes. Hersh also broke the disgraces of Abu Ghraib.

And of course, Seymour isn't afraid to get political.

He called the New York Times and its investigative journalists "pathetic," claiming "they [did] much more of carrying water for the president [Obama] than I ever thought they would," going on to suggest that "Obama [was] worse than Bush."

Calling them a "menace to civilization," he takes aim at America's neocons: those neoconservative defense intellectuals -- with their roots on the left, not the right -- who "are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist-Communist movement of the 1930s and 1940s."

More specifically, Hersh goes after the "8 or 9 neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years [who] had essentially overthrown the government of the United States—with ease.”

But uncovering stories, not pure politics or "sci-fi," but objective facts -- is what "Sy" does best; the ability of Seymour to "see more" -- and report it.

Perhaps one of Hersh's more interesting revelations is The Samson Option.

The book's title is the name for Israel's policy regarding its threatened reckless use of nuclear weapons against the West and others -- that is, its nuclear blackmail, poisonously referenced from some Biblical passage, Judges 16:30.

Hersh cites the 1973 Yom Kippur War as one example of this blackmail.

Unsurprisingly, Israel has failed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Samson Option also reveals:

• How Jonathan Pollard was a facilitator of Israel’s nuclear program (and how, following the specific instruction of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, some of Pollard’s information was given to the USSR);

• How Israel fabricated a phony control room at the nuclear reactor at Dimona expressly to mislead U.S. inspectors, falsely persuading them that the facility's sole purpose was research;

• How the Eisenhower administration failed in December 1960 to force Israel to acknowledge its nuclear ambitions;

• How Israel cooperated with the South African Apartheid regime by testing an Israeli-South African nuclear artillery shell.

In an appraisal of Hersh's memoir, one reviewer calls him "an unstoppable force exposing government lies . . . [who] deserves a very large statue placed near the White House that would constantly stare at the denizens therein, tamping down the lying emanations that continually pour [forth], and one in front of the Pentagon would also be an excellent idea."

Sounding the siren, Seymour urges today's journalists not to be timid -- to take action: "The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple."