FYI
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-boot27jan27,1,802685.column
COMMENTARY
Digging Into Seymour Hersh
You don't have to scratch too deeply to find an enormous reservoir of left-wing
bias.
Max Boot
January 27, 2005/Los Angeles TIMES
It has become a clich� to call Bob Woodward and Seymour Hersh the greatest
investigative reporters of their generation - Woodward the consummate insider,
Hersh the ultimate outsider. In truth the differences outweigh the similarities.
Though he achieved fame by bringing down a Republican administration, Woodward
is no ideologue. His only bias, as far as I can tell, is in favor of his
sources. Within those parameters he produces invaluable, if incomplete,
accounts of government deliberations.
Hersh, on the other hand, is the journalistic equivalent of Oliver Stone: a
hard-left zealot who subscribes to the old counterculture conceit that a deep,
dark conspiracy is running the U.S. government. In the 1960s the boogeyman was
the "military-industrial complex." Now it's the "neoconservatives." "They
overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and
they overran the military!" Hersh ranted at UC Berkeley on Oct. 8, 2004.
Hersh doesn't make any bones about his bias. "Bush scares the hell out of me,"
he said. He told a group in Washington, "I'm a better American than 99% of the
guys in the White House," who are "nuts" and "ideologues." In another speech he
called Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft "demented." Hersh has also compared what
happened at Abu Ghraib with Nazi Germany. (Were American MPs gassing inmates?)
He has claimed that since 2001 a "secret unit" of the U.S. government "has been
disappearing people just like the Brazilians and Argentinians did." And in his
lectures he has spread the legend of how a U.S. Army platoon was supposedly
ordered to execute 30 Iraqis guarding a granary.
Hersh hasn't printed the execution story, which suggests it may not meet even
his relaxed reportorial standards, but what he does run is a confusing farrago
of fact and fiction. His latest New Yorker article, "The Coming Wars," is a
perfect example.
Based almost entirely on anonymous sources ("a Pentagon advisor" is not to be
confused with "a Pentagon consultant"), it starts off with the allegation that
the United States is planning strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. I
hope so. But planning isn't the same thing as doing. Hersh's article offers no
reason to think a war really is "coming."
In the rest of the piece, he writes about how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
is expanding the Pentagon's covert anti-terrorism activities and
intelligence-gathering. True enough. According to Bart Gellman of the
Washington Post (a real investigative ace), Rumsfeld has created a new spy unit
to make up for the CIA's deficiencies. Gellman's Jan. 23 story has all sorts of
specifics that the New Yorker piece lacks, including the unit's name (the
Strategic Support Branch). Hersh's contribution is to spin this into something
nefarious by including anonymous speculation that military operatives might
sponsor foreign "execution squads" or even carry out "terrorist activities."
Umm, guess we'll have to take your word for it, Sy.
But how good is Hersh's word? His record doesn't inspire confidence. In 1986 he
published a book suggesting that the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner
because they mistook it for a U.S. spy plane - a claim debunked by the opening
of Soviet archives. In 1997 he published a book full of nasty allegations about
John F. Kennedy that was widely panned. As part of that project he tried to
peddle a documentary based on forged documents.
Few facts in Hersh's stories are checkable by an outsider, but, of those that
are, a number turn out to be false. In November 2001, he claimed that 16 AC-130
gunships participated in a raid (a "near disaster") on Mullah Mohammed Omar's
compound in Afghanistan. There were only nine AC-130s in the entire region, and
they are never used more than one or two at a time. In a story in October 2001,
he claimed that Predator drones cost $40 million; the actual price tag is $2.5
million. In the latest article, he says two Pentagon policy officials would be
in the "chain of command" for covert operations; the actual chain of command
runs from the secretary of Defense to military commanders in the field.
OK, anyone can make a mistake, but all of Hersh's errors run in one direction:
toward making the U.S. government look bad. His November 2001 article included
a quote, hilarious in retrospect, from "one officer" who claimed, "This is no
war for Special Operations." That ran a month before special operators toppled
the Taliban. The April 7, 2001, issue of the New Yorker contained his article
quoting a "former intelligence official" who said of the invasion of Iraq,
"It's a stalemate now." Two days later, Baghdad fell.
Even his celebrated Abu Ghraib stories were marred by unsubstantiated claims
that Rumsfeld had "encouraged" the "sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners." How
does this square with the fact that the Abu Ghraib scandal - like the My Lai
massacre - was uncovered first not by Hersh but by Army investigators?
It's hard to know why anyone would take seriously a "reporter" whose writings
are so full of, in Ted Kennedy's words, "maliciousness and innuendo." That
Hersh remains a revered figure in American journalism suggests that the media
have yet to recover from the paranoid style of the 1960s.
[Max Boot is a neocon.]
JD
