An Evening with Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh

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Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh will discuss his bestseller "Chain of Command" on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at Williams College. The talk is scheduled for 8 p.m. in Chapin Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is available on a first come basis. "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" chronicles the path from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to the American prisoner abuse scandals of Abu Ghraib. The book is based on articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. In a 2004 interview in Salon, Hersh said that he thought that Rumsfeld and senior administration officials had a chance in the fall of 2002 to set the limits and chose not to. "The chain of command is very responsive," he said. "If you put out the word that you're not going to tolerate this, it's not going to happen. But that's not the word they put out." Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and has written dozens of stories on military and security matters surrounding the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. One of the most controversial and award-winning journalists in the past 40 years, he was the first to expose the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War in 1969. He also revealed the wiretapping authorized by Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration and the C.I.A.'s sale of U.S. weapons to Libya during the 1980s. More recently, Hersh uncovered the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. His work has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and four George Polk Awards. His best-selling books, "The Dark Side of Camelot" about President Kennedy and "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," won major national awards and were on bestseller lists for weeks. His other book prizes include the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times award for biography, and the Sidney Hillman award. He won an Investigative Reporters & Editors prize for the Kissinger book in 1983, and another in 1992 for "The Samson Option," a study of American foreign policy and the Israeli nuclear bomb program. In 2004, Hersh won a National Magazine Award in public interest for his three pieces, "Lunch with the Chairman," "Selective Intelligence," and "The Stovepipe," an investigation of neoconservatives at the Pentagon. Richard Perle threatened to sue Hersh for libel after "Lunch with the Chairman" was published, but he failed to file suit. Hersh began his career in journalism working for The New York Times.
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Mount Greylock Schools Focus on Student Literacy

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School District is placing an emphasis on literacy instruction that is reflected in the preliminary budget that the administration put forth last week.
 
Interim Superintendent Joseph Bergeron and Director of Curriculum and Instruction Joelle Brookner laid out the reasons why literacy needs to be a priority for the district and the steps staff plan to take to address that need during the School Committee's Feb. 13 meeting.
 
Bergeron opened by emphasizing that while there are issues that need to be addressed, the district continues to do a good job educating the students of Lanesborough, Williamstown and surrounding towns.
 
He noted that Mount Greylock ranks 25th in the commonwealth and first in the Berkshires in the most recent U.S. News and World Report "Best High Schools Rankings" and pointed out that most of the Massachusetts schools ranking higher on the list are magnet or charter schools like No. 1 Boston Latin and No. 2 Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter of Hadley.
 
And in the area of literacy itself, 65 percent of Mount Greylock's students are above the national average in literacy benchmarks as assessed by the California-based FastBridge Learning system.
 
"So we're starting from a good place, but we're nowhere near perfect," Bergeron said.
 
To help address the 35 students performing at or below average on literacy assessment metrics, district faculty have been pouring over data and looking at what personalized instruction strategies will work for individual students, the administrators said.
 
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