WASHINGTON -- Seymour Hersh, his sleeves rolled up and a pen sticking out of his shirt pocket, looked every bit the dogged journalist as he talked Tuesday about his latest piece in the New Yorker magazine.

Hersh’s remarks came on the heels of a speech by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., at the Center for American Progress’s yearly student conference, called Campus Progress. Sitting cross-legged in an easy chair, the famous investigative reporter warmed up by commenting on the glare of the stage lighting.

“What can we do about these lights? They’re brutal,” said Hersh. “I’m bitching already.”

But it didn’t take long for Hersh, taking questions from former Wall Street Journal reporter and activist Asra Nomani, to describe his reporting in Vietnam and his most recent work, an account of Army Major General Antonio Taguba, the officer tasked with investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Taguba’s report on Abu Ghraib was leaked to Hersh, who broke the story about the infamous prison in Iraq three years ago.

Hersh’s story (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh?printable=true), which appears in the latest issue of the New Yorker, has prompted a renewed look at what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew about Abu Ghraib when he testified before Congress in May of 2004. Rumsfeld told members of Congress at the time that he had been blindsided by the report and learned about photographs of abused and humiliated detainees at the prison from news reports.

Hersh, speaking at the conference, recalled setting up interviews for the story: “About a year and a half ago, I ran into somebody that knew him (Taguba) and finally he agreed to have a cup of coffee, and we spent a year talking.”

“You hear all these stories about (the) ‘ferocious reporter.’ All I did was just deal with him like a human being for a long time. No pen, no pencil, ‘let’s just talk about it.’"

Taguba, who had avoided speaking to any media after the report was leaked, ultimately decided to have Hersh write the story about how Taguba was treated by the Pentagon after his critical report..

In his speech, Hersh was critical of the Bush administration, but he also had some thoughts about the previous president.

“I get so mad at Bill Clinton I can’t see straight,” Hersh said. “I was just telling John Podesta,” the former Clinton White House chief of staff who is president of the Center for American P:rogress..

“But you gotta’ give him his due … In 1999 Clinton authorized the bombing of Kosovo, 79 days of bombing,” Hersh said. “At that point he was the first American president since the end of World War II to bomb white people.”