By Catherine Austin Fitts
Cover-Up, Solari’s Documentary of the Year for 2025, reviews writer Seymour “Sy” Hersh’s life and work as an investigative reporter, walking us down a memory lane of some of the most horrifying scandals of the U.S. national security state over the last 50-plus years. Scandals covered by Hersh include the 1968 My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, the criminal CIA operations admitted to in the 1975 Church Committee hearings and by the Rockefeller Commission, the torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the early 2000s, and the 2023 Nord Stream pipeline bombings.
Cover-Up is co-directed by documentary filmmakers Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. Poitras, who won a 2015 Oscar for her Citizenfour film about Edward Snowden, first had the idea of making an “in real time” documentary about Hersh and his journalistic oeuvre over 20 years ago. Though Hersh was not open to the idea at the time, Poitras stayed in touch with him, and when she reached out again in 2022, Hersh consented and connected her with Obenhaus, even providing the two directors with access to his rich 7,000-item archive.
Hersh is a fascinating and intense man—committed to serious investigative reporting and able to grapple with the evil committed by those in power. His work shows that evil’s playbook has changed little since being honed during the Vietnam War. When the U.S. military couldn’t find enough Viet Cong to kill—with “number of VC killed” being the metric for success—it simply killed civilians, including women and children, and called them “VC.” Cover-Up’s dissection of the various milestones in corruption reported on by Hersh, as well as the film’s glimpses of the power brokers’ playbook, furnish confirmation and a reminder of my adage, “Crime that pays is crime that stays.”
Hersh’s coverage of the 1975 Church Committee hearings helped expose the systematic nature of government-funded covert activities. In response, the Ford Administration appointed the Rockefeller Commission, ostensibly to further investigate U.S. intelligence agency activities. However, as I wrote in 2004 in “Meditations at the Crossroads,” an essay in which I reflected on the deeply suspicious circumstances surrounding my mother’s death, the Commission’s real goal was damage control “to make sure the deepest truths never saw the light of day.” As Hersh says in Cover-Up, “The power these people have is so immense, they would do anything to stay in power. Any lie, any story, bury anybody.”
Cover-Up provides a compelling overview of the trials and tribulations of American power. This is a film that helps you understand how we got to where we are. It is a haunting reminder of Mark Twain’s words that “every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction.”
