REAL JEAN ISAAC: SEYMOUR HERSH UNRAVELED A LONG TIME AGO…..SEE NOTE PLEASE

Posted By on January 21st, 2011

Investigating Seymour Hersh by Rael Jean Isaac….Yesterday I posted a column called Seymour Hersh Unravels

SEYMOUR HERSH UNRAVELS

In fact he unraveled a long time ago and the media ignored it. Isaac’s  first article on Hersh appeared in Midstream almost twenty years ago (in 1992) called Seymour Hersh’s Obsessions. This column appeared in 2006 in the book The Jewish Divide over Israel published in 2006 by Transaction. (Editor/authors Paul Bogdanor and Edward Alexander. rsk

Character assassination. A simplistic moral universe in which the U.S. is the villain and Israel the only country yet more villainous. Anonymous sources that cannot be checked. Dark charges based on a crazy patchwork of suppositions. Far-out conspiracy theories. Con men as sources. Reputable sources misquoted. These constitute the decades-long modus operandi of Seymour Hersh, the man now serving as star investigative reporter of the New Yorker.

That modus operandi is clearly in evidence in Hersh’s only book-length assault on Israel, The Samson Option (about Israel’s nuclear deterrent), published in 1991.  Typically for Hersh, he even gets the Biblical account wrong.  Explaining the book’s title, Hersh writes that “Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured after a bloody fight.” 1 What the Bible records – as any literate person  knows — is that Samson became helpless after Delilah seduced him into telling her that the secret of his strength lay in his long hair, and she summoned one of the Philistines to cut it off as he slept in her arms.

Anyone who had followed Hersh’s career as a 1960s style “Movement” journalist would have expected Hersh to take up cudgels against Israel sooner or later.  His books and articles are permeated by the theme of America-the-enemy; indeed The Samson Option was his first book without that theme. Here the U.S. government is the innocent, deceived victim of Israel and the nefarious Jewish lobby. It took Israel to purify (however briefly) America.

Although the reader would never guess it from the book, with its tone of awe-struck disclosure, there had been a series of books about Israel’s development of a nuclear capability.  Hersh himself  cites four books in English (mention of them is buried in the footnotes) specifically devoted to the subject. 2 What Hersh offers that is “new” is his sinister interpretation of supposed behind-the-scenes American Jewish machinations and a series of sensational revelations about the actions of Israeli leaders, all of them false, the fantasies of his source, a delusional con man, served up as fact.

Hersh’s thesis is that Israel, impelled  by the megalomania of its leaders, built an atomic bomb facility at Dimona, deceiving the United States until the wicked deed was done. Part of the deception, according to Hersh, was self-deception: American political leaders did not dare face up to what their intelligence agencies had uncovered for fear of the Jews.  Jewish fund-raisers, says Hersh, warned political candidates in no uncertain terms that they were finished if they did not toe the line.  American Presidents, including John F. Kennedy, were resentful, but helpless in the face of what Hersh describes as the message of the Jewish lobby: “We’re ready to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.”3

Any intelligence (or other) official who tried to alert his superiors to Israel’s secret development of a nuclear arsenal, Hersh alleges, was fired or (if lucky) demoted or set back in his career.  And so bureaucrats soon got the message – keep quiet or you will be ruined. 4

In dark suggestions more appropriate to the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby than an American Jewish journalist,  Hersh implies sinister motivations on the part of Jewish Americans in high places.  For example, Hersh goes on for pages assailing Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, as a closet practitioner of “dual loyalty.” Hersh writes that Strauss was a life-long opponent of Zionism 5 and an adamant opponent of nuclear proliferation.6 On what basis then is Strauss accused of secretly forwarding Israel’s nuclear ambitions?   Hersh claims that Struass ignored his responsibility to tell John McCone, his successor at the Atomic Energy Commission, of what he knew about the existence of the Dimona reactor. He writes that “Strauss’s [Jewish] background and his strong feelings about the Holocaust cannot be disregarded in analyzing why he did not tell anyone – especially John McCone – about Dimona.” 7 In reality, what explains Strauss’s “silence” is the simple fact that there was nothing to tell.  Strauss left the AEC in 1958.  As Yuval Ne’eman, the distinguished physicist, government adviser and former Israeli cabinet minister, told this writer, construction at Dimona did not begin until 1960 – in 1958, says Nee’man, Dimona was no more than “a gleam in somebody’s eye.”8

Other “evidence?”  “The strongest evidence,” according to Hersh, for Strauss’ “sympathy for the Israeli nuclear weapons program” was that in 1966 Strauss recommended Ernst David Bergmann as a two month visiting fellow at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. 9 But this reveals nothing. Bergmann, an outstanding scientist, was chairman of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s, and he and Strauss would have come to know each other, as Hersh himself admits, at the conferences on peaceful use of the atom.  Does Hersh have any more “proof” of Strauss’s dual loyalty? Yes, says Hersh, Atomic Energy Commission official Myron Kratzer found out, after Strauss had left the Commission, that he “followed the tradition of fasting during Yom Kippur.”10 In Hersh’s Elders of Zion mentality, that clinches it!

But what Hersh’s book offers that is new are the fabrications of Ari Ben Menashe, a notorious tale-spinner who recently, in a scenario beyond the imagination of the most far-out screenwriter, served as chief witness in Robert Mugabe’s farcical treason trial of the leader of the chief opposition party in Zimbabwe.11 Ben Menashe first achieved  worldwide notoriety with his claim to have been with the first George Bush (then running for Vice President on the Reagan ticket) in Paris in October 1980 arranging for Iran to hold the hostages until after the Presidential elections – this on dates when Secret Service logs show Bush engaged in a large number of appearances in the United States, one of them before the Zionist Organization of America.12 Hersh swallows whole both Ben Menashe’s bogus credentials and wild allegations.

Hersh tells us that Ben Menashe “served more than ten years in the External Relations Department of the Israeli Defense Force, one of the most sensitive offices in Israel’s intelligence community” and left the ministry in 1987 “to work directly for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as an adviser on intelligence affairs.”13 Ben Menashe’s ties to Shamir, says Hersh, were also familial: his father had served with Shamir “in the fervently anti-British Stern gang before the 1948 War of Independence.”14 All this is pure hokum.  Iraqi-born Ben Menashe served as a low-level  translator for the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service,  was judged delusional, denied a security clearance, and resigned.15

Ben Menashe’s revelations, breathlessly recounted by Hersh, are of a piece with his biography: made up out of whole cloth.  According to Ben Menashe,  Begin, who became Prime Minister in 1977, had “strongly endorsed” existing plans to target Soviet cities and “gave orders to target more Soviet cities.” 16 Hersh also cites Ben Menashe as his source for the claim that Prime Minister Shamir personally authorized purloined U.S. intelligence obtained through Jonathan Pollard to be “sanitized, retyped and turned over to Soviet intelligence officials” 17 as part of Israel’s ongoing exchange of intelligence with the Soviets on U.S. weapons systems 18 (How this squares with Ben Menashe’s claim that Israel was using its stolen U.S. intelligence to target the Soviet Union, which, writes Hersh, “was always Israel’s primary nuclear target,” 19 is not explained.)  By Hersh’s account, Ben Menashe was a key player throughout.  He was assigned in 1980 to a small “working group” within Israeli intelligence to get around the arms embargo to Iran. 20 He was sent to London to get hold of the Vanunu photographs (taken inside the Dimona reactor) so they could be checked for authenticity in Israel and the damage done by their publication minimized. 21 He was privy to supposed nuclear weapons collaboration with South Africa.  (“[Ezer] Weizman came back, Ben Menashe recalled, “and said ‘We’ve promised these guys nuclear warheads’.…Begin responded by saying, in effect, ‘Yes. Do it.’”22

It is ironic, given the emphasis the book places on alleged U.S. self-deception concerning the Israeli bomb, that Hersh deluded himself on the bona fides of Ari Ben Menashe.  And Hersh was not merely guilty of failing to check on the credibility of a source making charges he himself calls “hard to believe.” (One of Ben Menashe’s claims – that Israel had planted nuclear mines along the Golan Heights 23 —  was too much even for a sycophantic reviewer in the New York Times who pointed out that such mines, if used at the start of hostilities, would mean “going nuclear” when conventional resistance was still possible while if overrun without being detonated, they would be a gift to the enemy.24 Writer Steven Emerson reports that Hersh refused to look at evidence urged upon him of Ben Menashe’s mendacity.  Nor did the proffered evidence come from a suspicious source, i.e. for Hersh one friendly to Israel.  It came from the chief investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times’ “Insight” team, Peter Hounam, who had broken the Vanunu story, complete with photographs, on the Dimona reactor.  Hounam warned Hersh not to rely on Ben Menashe,  offering to let Hersh go through his personal files on the Vanunu affair which showed that Ben Menashe’s claims did not hold up. Hersh was not interested. 25

Another illustration of Hersh’s propensity to be conned followed the book’s publication when Hersh, stung by challenges to Ben Menashe’s credibility, claimed to have confirming documents from a “private detective” on supposed logs of telephone calls supporting Ben Menashe’s claim that Robert Maxwell had worked closely with the Mossad. Five days later,  as Emerson tells it, “the Sunday Times revealed that the ‘private detective’ was actually a well known British hoaxer, Joe Flynn, who admitted that he had deceived Hersh in exchange for money. ‘I am a conman,’ Mr. Flynn told the Times.” What is of special interest, as Emerson shows, is that Hersh, before realizing it was a con, said he had acquired the documentation, when he had no such thing, for the promised phone logs did not exist. 26

As this claim by Hersh illustrates, he is more than a passive victim of his own gullibility.   In The Samson Option he says that “Ben Menashe’s account might seem almost too startling to be believed, had it not been subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who cannot be named.”27 Hersh has a pattern of claiming to have “independently corroborated” material that defies corroboration. Working on a book on John F. Kennedy several years later, Hersh fell for a stash of phony documents peddled by one Lawrence S. Cusack who claimed to have papers that included a contract in which Marilyn Monroe promised to keep silent about her affair with Kennedy for $600,000, as well as documents linking Kennedy directly to mobster Sam Giancana.28 In Cusack’s trial for defrauding “investors” in the documents, Hersh wound up on the stand, where he was asked to explain a letter he had sent to Cusack claiming he had “independently confirmed some of the most interesting materials in the papers.”  An embarrassed Hersh testified: “Here is where I absolutely misstated things.”29

Hersh’s  charges that Maxwell and Nicholas Davies, then foreign editor of London’s Daily Mirror, had spied for Israel  precipitated an in-depth investigation by Newsweek into assorted Ben Menashe claims.  Not surprisingly the magazine’s reporters found his credibility was zilch. 30 And Newsweek only investigated Ben Menashe’s more plausible allegations. Among the less plausible, which had not even made it into Hersh’s book, Ben Menashe claimed he had been Israel’s top spy, a commander of the Entebbe operation,  planted a homing device in the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak and declined an offer to become head of the Mossad. 31 Little wonder that John Barry, lead author of the Newsweek article, would tell CNN “If you were talking about the American civil war, he would tell you he was the guy who planned Lee’s campaign.”32 (Eventually Hersh himself would admit that Ben Menashe “lies like people breathe.”)33

Even when Hersh cites reputable sources, what he writes cannot be trusted.  Hersh cites Yuval Ne’eman as having told him that in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel went on nuclear alert twice.34 This writer interviewed Ne’eman who said  he had indeed spoken to Hersh and told him, based on public sources, that the United States – not Israel — went on nuclear alert twice.35

Hersh cannot be bothered to get the most readily available facts straight.  Chronicling Begin’s evil deeds as an underground leader (Hersh has something insulting to say in introducing each Israeli leader – even, as in the case of General Rafael Eitan, if it is only that his socks smell!), 36 Hersh describes the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel and says the British responded a week later by hanging three suspected Irgun terrorists. 37 In fact, the three Jews were hanged a year later for their role in the daring assault on the Acre fortress, which freed a large number of Irgun prisoners.

According to Hersh, the famed U.S. airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur war of 1973 was only undertaken because Israel blackmailed President Nixon, threatening to use its atomic arsenal if supplies were not sent immediately.  Veteran foreign correspondent Russ Braley, a friend of Nixon, wrote to ask if what Hersh wrote was accurate.  In a letter dated January 22, 1992 Nixon replied: “The story has no foundation whatever.”38 (Nixon added: “I have refused to read any of Seymour Hersh’s books or articles because I consider him to be totally unreliable.”)

What makes Hersh’s allegation that Israel engaged in nuclear blackmail more interesting than his other false claims is that, were it true, Hersh would have destroyed his thesis – that Israel was both immoral and foolish to create a nuclear capability.  For were Hersh correct, the Israeli leaders who insisted on producing an Israel bomb would, in this one incident, have proved they made the right decision.  In the crunch, Israel’s atomic arsenal had shown its effectiveness. Without having to employ it, Israel’s leaders had been able to use its existence to save their country.

Why does this not occur to Hersh? The answer is that he never for a moment considers Israel’s point of view.   Hersh has written a book about Israel’s development of a nuclear deterrent without asking himself why Israel might need or want it.  Hersh conveys no sense that Israel throughout its history has confronted Arab states seeking to destroy it.  He never points out that Israel was not even permitted to buy conventional arms from the United States throughout the 1950s. Hersh does not have to bother his head about how Israel is to survive, since it is by no means clear to him that Israel deserves to survive.  When he first describes Israel as a “pariah” state, he uses quotation marks. 39 Later he drops the quotation marks. 40

If Hersh conveys no sense of Israel’s dilemma, neither does he provide any context on nonproliferation.  Israel was not the only country outside the great power club developing nuclear weapons.  Given his theme that the U.S. should have “done something” about Israel, Hersh should have something to say about the U.S. posture on   Pakistan and India’s development of a nuclear arsenal.  But Hersh is not interested.  Indeed, so obsessed is he with Israeli misdeeds, that he only refers to Iraq’s nuclear bomb program in order to condemn Israel.  His reaction to the Israeli bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981, which mercifully ensured that Saddam Hussein would not have his finger on a nuclear trigger a decade later in the first Gulf War, is to complain of Israel’s “abuse” of U.S. photographic intelligence and the “misuse” of U.S. F-16s in the raid. 41

Why is Hersh so hostile that he can only see Israel as malign without motive?  To understand this, one must look at Hersh’s evolution as a journalist of the 1960s “Movement.”  Under the influence of assorted Marxist and Trotskyite groupings, the Movement increasingly came to interpret Zionism as the product of Western racism, colonialism and imperialism.  To attack Israel was to attack what was worst about the United States.

Hersh was part of a group of young journalists whose perspectives were shaped by the Institute for Policy Studies, the radical left (and radically anti-Israel) think tank, founded in 1963, which served as ideological center of the Movement.  It was IPS which indirectly propelled Hersh to stardom, for he first achieved fame freelancing for Dispatch News Service, an IPS spinoff founded to disseminate anti-Vietnam war stories to the mainstream press.  A source called with a tip, and Hersh broke the story that the army was in process of court-martialing Lt. William Calley (whom Hersh interviewed) for the shooting of civilians in what became known as the My Lai massacre.42 Typically, Hersh insisted My Lai was not an isolated incident: the true villain, he wrote, was “the Army as an institution.”43

The My Lai story turned Hersh overnight into what A.M. Rosenthal, then New York Times managing editor, called “the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States.”44 The Times hired him and he remained there  from 1972 to 1979.  He wrote a series of stories attacking the CIA for covert actions abroad and for illegal spying on domestic groups (the material, which had been assembled by the CIA itself and turned over to the congressional committee with oversight of the CIA, was leaked to Hersh by CIA head William Colby.) 45 In the anti-establishment atmosphere of the period, Hersh’s stories had a major impact, playing an important role in launching congressional investigations by both houses of Congress into the CIA.  The upshot of the “reforms” Congress enacted was to seriously compromise our intelligence capabilities, setting up a firewall between the FBI and CIA, the piper being paid on 9/11.  It is significant that Rosenthal would say that a number of Hersh’s stories would not have been publishable under the standards he demanded of Times reporters a few years later.46

In 1979 Hersh left the Times to work on an anti-Kissinger book The Price of Power (published in 1983).  There are hints of the themes that would dominate The Samson Option: according to Hersh, foreign services officers, recognizing that those who reported critically on Israeli policy in State Department cables ran the risk of being labeled anti-Semitic, were forced into self-censorship.47 (Given the long domination of the State Department by highly partisan Arabists, this verges on the comical.)  Kissinger himself is treated as part of the Israel lobby, a notion, as international affairs expert Michael Ledeen observes wryly, “that has not previously occurred to anyone involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict.” 48

Hersh followed up his anti-Kissinger screed with a book in which he managed to get the entire story wrong. The thesis of his 1986 The Target is Destroyed, on the Soviet downing of Korean civilian airliner KAL 007, is that the Soviet pilot made an honest mistake, confusing the Boeing 747 with the RC-135, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and the U.S. “rushed to judgment” because “strong hostility to communism had led them to misread the intelligence.”  The “real story,” said Hersh, was the “politically corrupt” use of intelligence by the U.S.49 In 1991 Izvestiya took advantage of its new freedom to revisit the fate of KAL 007. It interviewed Lt. Col. Gennadi Osipovich, the Soviet fighter pilot who shot down the plane; he indignantly rejected the suggestion that he had mistaken the plane for an RC-135 and described how he had been fortified with vodka before going on Soviet state television to recite, on order, a wholly false account.50

Hersh had received an official invitation to do his research on KAL 007 in the Soviet Union and reports being taken aback when Deputy Foreign Minister George Kornienko told him his “assignment” was to find that the plane was on a CIA spy mission.51 Hersh did not oblige his hosts on this point but what is worth noting is that the Soviets deemed Hersh so sympathetic a journalist that they thought him amenable to such an outright order.  Presumably they were influenced in their judgment in part by the series of articles Hersh had written for the New York Times in 1979 on conditions in Vietnam, this at a time when vast numbers of  “boat people” were braving death on the open seas in their desperation to escape.  Hersh, one of a few selected American journalists the Communists permitted entry,  exhibited not a shred of the critical zeal with which he challenged U.S. government claims.  Instead he gushed Vietnamese propaganda – no claim of his hosts was too absurd for Hersh to parrot.52

In recent years, The New Yorker, for decades open to Hersh, has served as his exclusive platform. This has been a wonderful period for Hersh given that, especially since 9/11, he has been able to combine all his obsessions into one story line: an inept, morally odious American government works in tandem with/sometimes in opposition to evil Israel while a tiny cabal of Jewish neocons (Hersh tirelessly cites the trio of Perle-Wolfowitz-Feith)  manipulate policy.  Hersh marvels: “How did they do it? How did eight or nine neo-conservatives…get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities with so much ease?   How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military?” 53 Bizarrely, Hersh’s “answers” to his own paranoid fantasies are often published by the New Yorker under the bold heading “FACT.”

Hersh finds a perfect target in Richard Perle, one of his neocon leadership trio.  Perle embodies the attitudes Hersh finds most offensive – friendship for Israel and a belief that the United States is a force for good in the world.   In a March 17, 2003 article Hersh assails Perle, who then headed the unpaid Defense Policy Board (which meets several times a year to advise the Pentagon on strategic issues) for alleged ethics violations. The only substantive fact Hersh offers is that in the runup to the Iraq war, Perle met with two Saudi businessmen to discuss Iraq. One was Adnan Kashoggi, the longtime arms dealer and middleman, who arranged the luncheon meeting at the request of the other, Iraqi-born Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, who claimed to have come from Iraq with a negotiating offer from Saddam. All three agree that the only topic discussed was Iraq. On this frail stick Hersh builds a huge speculative edifice, concluding confidently that Perle’s “real” motive was to obtain investment in a venture capital company and that his views on Iraq were a product of his business interests.54 In the subsequent furor, Hersh succeeded in his aim – Perle resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.

In a number of essays Hersh emphasizes “close, and largely unacknowledged, cooperation with Israel”55 in everything from supposed joint U.S.-Israel contingency plans to take over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to conducting the war in Iraq to what Hersh maintains is the upcoming war with Iran. Hersh writes that no one wants to talk about this because it’s “incendiary.” 56 Given that such claims of secret joint actions are  impossible to disprove, the only effect of making these claims, as Hersh well knows, is to strain relations between the U.S. and Moslem states.  Indeed, an alarmed President Musharraf in his first meeting with President Bush brought up Hersh’s article and was told by Bush “Seymour Hersh is a liar.”57

According to Hersh, Israel is also working with the U.S. to “develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons and missile targets inside Iran.”58 Hersh made headlines with this piece, entitled “The Coming Wars,” that claimed  super-secret U.S. reconnaissance missions in Iran, conducted together with Pakistan, were laying the groundwork for destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities and invading the country.59 Of course, if true, Hersh was endangering the lives of the American commandos on these missions, especially since he pinpoints the areas in which they are operating.

In other articles Hersh forgets his close cooperation thesis and portrays Israel as a wild card, deliberately undermining U.S. policy. In “Plan B,” Hersh tells us Israel has poured money into a “potentially reckless move that could create even more chaos and violence,” sending her “intelligence and military operatives” to train Kurdish commando units and run “covert operations in Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria.”60 Hersh, pro forma,  quotes the Israeli embassy spokesman “The story is simply untrue and the relevant governments know it’s untrue.”61 Hersh’s own sources are the usual anonymous assortment of “high-level” this and that with whom he peppers his books and articles. So has Israel sent commandos to Kurdistan? The reader has no way of knowing.

Still,  common sense makes it obvious that much of what Hersh writes is balderdash. He warns that  Israel may “unleash” the Kurds on Sunni and Shiite militias,  splitting Iraq apart, that Kurds are being “programmed” to fight in Syria, Turkey and Iran and that an independent Kurdistan could become “an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier” on Iran’s border.62 But even if Israel had training personnel on the ground, the notion that Israel can “program” the Kurds to do its bidding or turn Kurdistan into an Israeli military base is silly: the notoriously independent Kurds will act in accordance with what they deem to be their own best interests. Indulging yet another fantasy , Hersh  credits Israel’s supposed presence in Kurdistan with alienating Turkey from Israel, producing “a major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran, Syria and Turkey.”63 It is true that the Turkish-Israel relationship has been strained for several years, but the reason lies elsewhere — in the rise to power, for the first time since Ataturk’s campaign of secularization, of an Islamic party in Turkey.

When Hersh’s articles are criticized for their reliance on anonymous sources,  New Yorker editor David Remnick counters that the magazine’s army of fact checkers carefully ascertain that each statement is true.  But there are a number of reasons why fact checking Hersh is a ludicrous exercise.  One is that the lowly fact checker will be extremely  reluctant to challenge the magazine’s star reporter; if he angers Hersh, he knows who will be fired. Even more important, Hersh generally cites only a single source for his major “disclosures.” Let us say the fact checker is given the name and phone number of this source. He can speak to someone but ultimately is in no better position than Hersh’s reader to know if the supposed “former high intelligence official” or “government consultant” or “retired CIA official” has the credentials he claims or has provided accurate information or interpretation (much of what Hersh offers is a web of sinister interpretation built on very few facts). The stubborn reality is that statements by people guaranteed anonymity require especially careful vetting because anonymity is an invitation to angry bureaucrats to take revenge on superiors or rival bureaucracies or to spin their own  far-out theories as fact.  It is Hersh who should be carefully checking and evaluating the reliability of his sources, but  based on his record one can have a high degree of confidence he does no such thing.  Under these circumstances, fact checkers are useful only in giving Hersh – and The New Yorker — cover.

Conde Nast, The New Yorker’s publisher, would do better to save the hundreds of thousands of dollars that  Remnick says he spends on fact checkers. Case in point: Michael Rubin,  formerly with the Pentagon, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, describes what happened when The New Yorker ostensibly fact-checked a Hersh piece that recycled anti-Semitic canards about the Department of Defense’s Office of Special Plans  that had earlier been purveyed by the far-out Lyndon LaRouche organization. Rubin reports that The New Yorker fact checker duly called the Office of Special Plans (where Rubin then worked) with a number of “inquiries,” that the Office responded immediately and made a great number of corrections, including on matters of simple fact.  But, notes Rubin, none of the corrections were incorporated into the article.64 And where were the fact checkers when Hersh, in 2001, wrote of a raid on Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s compound in which 16 AC-130 planes were used? The Air Force only has 21 of these large, heavily armed planes and they are not flown in groups. When John Miller, writing for National Review, asked Hersh if 16 of them would lead a small special-forces operation, Hersh replied that he may have “misheard.”65 Where were the fact checkers  when Hersh gave the price tag of a predator drone as $40 million when  in fact it costs $2.5 million?66 The list is endless.       .

In an interview with The Progressive, Hersh declared: “If the standard for being fired was being wrong on a story, I would have been fired long ago.”67 So what is the secret of Hersh’s enormous success?  Why, rather than being banished to supermarket tabloids, has Hersh attained what People magazine, in a fawning piece, called “a kind of mythic status as a journalist”?68

Perhaps the answer is that Hersh has an uncanny sense of what a significant sector of the reading public – an affluent  progressive intelligentsia (sadly many of them Jewish) that prides itself on reading The New York Times, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books — wants to hear.  Hersh knows how to flatter the intellectual pretensions of these people. He caters to their sense of superiority as intellectual insiders with sophisticated-sounding revelations about the source of the neo-con takeover in Straussian political theory at the University of Chicago. 69 These people don’t want to hear that a bunch of hillbillies behaved outrageously at Abu Ghraib prison; they want to be told the “real story,” that the responsibility goes to the top, to George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.  This helps them to validate the hatred and contempt they already feel for these leaders.    Hersh had a genuine scoop when he wrote of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib (someone had leaked to him the report of the government’s own investigation, by General Antonio Toguba earlier in the year). But typical of Hersh, he built on this a phony structure leading straight up to George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld as the true culprits. 70

Ironically, starting with My Lai, all of Hersh’s genuinely big stories have been of government  investigations into misconduct by institutions or individuals under its authority. The army had already charged Lieutenant William Calley with the murder of Vietnamese civilians when Hersh was tipped off to the story and in other hands the story might have redounded to the army’s credit – after all, it was not permitting this behavior to go unpunished. But for Hersh, perversely, what My Lai showed was that the real culprit was the Army.   Hersh’s next major story, as noted earlier, was based on an internal CIA investigation.   Most recently, of course, there was Abu Ghraib.71 For Hersh, and the audience he serves, these internal investigations and exposures of wrongdoing are not a sign of the health our institutions but proof that they are poisoned at the source.

What Hersh offers his public is a high-class version of the paranoid politics typified in the (once popular) conspiracy theory that fluoride was being used to poison the water. Hersh’s audience would have the greatest contempt for “low class” conspiracy theories of this sort. They consider themselves connoisseurs of all that is finest, such as the expensive merchandise advertised in The New Yorker. But they fall head over heels for junk journalism that spins tales of sinister cabals in high places, nefarious secret missions, any and every conceivable evil deed by top government officials. The writing itself may be convoluted, contradictory, incoherent – as Michael Ledeen has noted, Hersh cannot even write a logically consistent paragraph.72 It may be painfully obvious to a  reader less sophisticated than those subscribing to The New Yorker that Hersh has never heard of standards of evidence, is incapable of real policy analysis and is helpless to understand complicated issues.   None of this matters..

But if it is not hard to understand Hersh’s appeal, what accounts for the standing other journalists have given him? (It must be admitted that without their backing, his trendy audience would melt away.) This is the real issue, not Hersh himself, but the way his  profession views him.   Hersh has won over a dozen major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, four George Polk awards and last year’s National Magazine Award.  How could such dreadful stuff be so well rewarded? The answer would seem to be that Hersh’s long history of hewing to a simplistic unwavering political line – the United States and Israel are the world’s chief malefactors — resonates with a journalistic elite still moored in, or nostalgic for, the good old days of 1960s radicalism.

There is no worse indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism and the political bias of its elite than the flood of honors its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh.

FOOTNOTES

  1. Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: lIsrael’s Nuclear Policy and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), 137
  2. Ibid, 323.  The books Hersh cites are Israel and Nuclear Weapons by Fuad Jabber, 1971; Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal by Peter Pry, 1982, Israeli Nuclear Deterrence by Shai Feldman, 1982 and Dimona: The Third Temple? By Mark Gaffney, 1989.
  3. The Samson Option, 97
  4. Ibid, 168, 239-40
  5. Ibid, 88
  6. Ibid, 83
  7. Ibid, 89
  8. Interview of Yuval Ne’eman by Rael Jean Isaac, February 8, 1992
  9. The Samson Option, 86
  10. Ibid, 89
  11. Ben Menashe eventually settled in Canada where he went into partnership with former U.S. businessman Alexander Henri Legault, who had repeatedly been indicted on fraud charges in the U.S. After a corporation they established to sell commodities failed, the pair reconstituted themselves as a political consultancy with the confidence-inspiring name of Dickens and Madsen Inc.  They snared Morgan Tsvangirai, head of the Movement for Democrat Change in Zimbabwe, as a client, Ben Menashe promising to raise $2 million for the party in the United States.  Unbeknowst to Tsvangirai, Ben Menashe was working for Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, his assignment to set Tsvangirai up so treason charges could be brought against him. The effort was something out of Inspector Clouseau.  At one meeting it turned out the tape recorder was not working. Ben Menashe tried again with video but the result was barely audible. The transcript showed that Ben Menashe kept saying that Mugabe would have to be “eliminated,” while Tsvangirai talked of setting up a “transitional government.” On the stand Ben Menashe told a collection of his usual crazy, easily disprovable stories. Sample: Ben Menashe claimed thugs hired by Tsvangirai had attacked his assistant – who appeared in court limping – and had threatened his wife and six year old daughter, leading to the breakdown of his marriage. In fact, the assistant had fallen from a bicycle; Canadian police had arrested Ben Menashe himself on charges of assault filed by his wife and mother-in-law.  All this was too much even for the usual slavish-to-Mugabe judge who finally ruled in favor of Tsvangirai. At this writing the government has appealed the decision. (See Rael Jean Isaac, “Africa’s Saddam,” The American Spectator, 36 (June/July 2003), 50-51.
  12. Newsweek, November 4, 1991, 38
  13. The Samson Option, 260
  14. Ibid, 297-98
  15. Steven Emerson, “The Man Behind the ‘October Surprise’ Lie,” Wall Street Journal, November 27, 1991
  16. The Samson Option, 260
  17. Ibid, 286
  18. Ibid, 298
  19. Ibid, 139
  20. Ibid, 309
  21. Ibid, 312
  22. Ibid, 276
  23. Ibid, 312
  24. Lawrence Freedman, “What Do They Have and When Did We Know It?” New York Times Book Review, Nov. 17, 1991, 3
  25. Emerson, “Man Behind the ‘October Surprise’ Lie”
  26. Ibid
  27. The Samson Option, 299
  28. Hersh had pulled down a huge contract with ABC for a Kennedy documentary based on the documents which fell apart when ABC concluded they were phony. Journalist John Miller has observed that Hersh came up “with desperate rationalizations for skeptics who wondered why documents containing ZIP codes were dated before ZIP codes even existed.” Rael Jean Isaac, “The Cult of Seymour Hersh,” 37 (July/August 2004), 19
  29. New York Times, May 3, 1999. Comically, in one of his letters to Cusack, quoted in the Times article, Hersh wrote: “We got along so well at that dinner Tuesday night because, I like to think, we are all what we seem to be.”
  30. Newsweek, November 4, 1991, 36-38.   Maxwell and Davies sued but Maxwell died the following month, an apparent suicide, and his reputation was shattered amidst revelations of his extensive financial misconduct.  The Mirror Group decided to get out of the action on any basis it could, paying Hersh undisclosed damages and his legal costs. It was a clear win for Hersh. New York Times, August 19, 1994
  31. Emerson, “Man Behind the ‘October Surprise’ Lie”
  32. Ibid
  33. John J. Miller, “Sly Sy,” National Review, December 3, 2001, 33
  34. The Samson Option, 233
  35. Interview of Yuval Ne’eman by Rael Jean Isaac, Feb. 8, 1992
  36. The Samson Option, 288-89
  37. Ibid, 259
  38. Letter from Richard M. Nixon to Russ Braley of January 22, 1992
  39. The Samson Option, 264
  40. Ibid, 274
  41. Ibid, 12-13
  42. Russ Braley, Bad News: The Foreign Policy of the New York Times (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1984), 340
  43. Seymour Hersh, Cover-Up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 (New York: Random House, 1972), 267
  44. Bad News, 340
  45. Ibid, 534
  46. Joseph C. Goulden, Fit to Print: A.M. Rosenthal and His Times (New Jersey: Lyle Stuart, 1988) 192
  47. Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 224
  48. Michael Ledeen, “Getting Kissinger,” Commentary 75(September 1983), 77.   As it turned out, Hersh’s chief victim was not Kissinger but India’s former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Hersh quoted anonymous intelligence officials “recalling” Desai had been paid $20,000 yearly as a CIA informer during the Johnson administration.  Desai, 87 years old, reacted in outrage, calling it a “sheer mad story” and brought a libel suit seeking $50 million in damages.  By the time the suit went to a Chicago jury in 1989 Desai was 93 and too ill to come to the United States.  Kissinger testified on Desai’s behalf, flatly contradicting Hersh’s report in the book that he had been delighted to have someone of Desai’s stature on the payroll and had playfully chastised CIA officials elsewhere for failing to recruit cabinet level informers.  He also testified that former CIA director Richard Helms had told him he would be on “safe ground” in testifying that Desai had not been a paid CIA informant.   Nonetheless Desai lost. Hersh never even took the stand.  The judge ruled Hersh need not identify his sources and Desai’s attorney was not allowed to question anyone in the CIA’s employ. Hersh’s “take” on his victory?  “What this court said today is that a reporter like me can write a story based on confidential sources—even to the effect that a former Prime Minister of India had been a CIA asset—then not be compelled to identify those sources, and still have a jury of six people who don’t know him or anything he writes conclude that what he wrote was true.”  (New York Times, Nov. 7, 1989) What the case really showed was that an unscrupulous journalist could label any public figure a CIA agent with impunity.
  49. Seymour Hersh, “The Target is Destroyed”:What Really Happened to Flight 007 and What America Knew About It, (New York: Random House, 1986), 103
  50. John Barron, “KAL 007: The Hidden Story,” Reader’s Digest, November 1991, 73.  Osipovich disclosed that he had been ordered to say the Boeing had been flying with its lights out, ignored warning tracer shots and a radio message before he destroyed it.  Hersh recited all these untrue Russian claims sympathetically in his book.  Hersh also shows no interest in the fate of the plane’s black boxes.  If Soviet officials had found them, they would have known the plane was not on a spy mission. And indeed Izvestiya also interviewed the divers who had found the black boxes.  So Hersh’s claims that Soviet officials believed their own version of events was also untrue.
  51. “The Target is Destroyed”, 190-91
  52. The New York Times ran the series of six articles in August 1979. Although everyone had been treated with “humanity” and “clemency” after the U.S. departure, the so-called boat people had fled “because they have guilty consciences and, secondly, they were used to the easy life under American aid.” (August 7)  People in general were “happy,” those in the New Economic Zones were “reasonably content;” and  reeducation camps (Hersh interviews two graduates) involved “mostly political education lectures and conditions were good.”(August 14) The ethnic Chinese who were paying huge bribes to flee Vietnam as boat people did so because they falsely believed this was necessary although they were free to leave at any time. (August 12) In fact, of course, the new economic zones were uneconomic wastelands to which those deemed politically undesirable were sent, many to starve; and the reeducation camps were brutal in the extreme.
  53. Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 362
  54. Seymour Hersh, “Lunch with the Chairman: Why Was Richard Perle Meeting with Adnan Kashoggi?” The New Yorker, March 17, 2003, 76-80.  In the first heat of anger Perle threatened to sue, calling Hersh the “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.” He did not sue, probably wisely, given the difficulty a public figure has in prevailing under U.S. libel law.  But the failure to sue was treated by both Remnick and Hersh as proof of the accuracy of Hersh’s charges. (Chain of Command, xvii)
  55. Seymour Hersh, “The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret,” The New Yorker, January 24&31, 2005, 43
  56. Seymour Hersh, “Moving Targets: A Vietnam Style Mission in Iraq”, The New Yorker, December 15, 2003, 48
  57. Musharraf’s question and Bush’s reply,  from Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War, are quoted proudly by NewYorker editor David Remnick in his introduction to Hersh’s Chain of Command (xix).  Perversely, Remnick seems to take any testimony from government leaders regarding Hersh’s falsehoods as tributes to his accuracy and integrity.
  58. Seymour Hersh, “The Coming Wars,” 43
  59. Ibid, 42-43. Actually, as Michael Ledeen points out, the article is not about American foreign policy at all, but “an overwritten and hyperventilated assault on Secretary Rumsfeld, for, according to Hersh, crushing the CIA in the interagency battles over control of intelligence operations,” a claim which Ledeen says, like much else in the piece, is ridiculous. (“The Hersh File: Sy Gets it Wrong, Again,” http://nationalreview.com, January 21, 2005)
  60. Seymour Hersh, “Plan B: As June 30th Approaches Israel Looks to the Kurds,” New Yorker, June 28, 2004, 65
  61. Ibid, 55
  62. Ibid, 65
  63. Ibid, 55
  64. Michael Rubin, “Web of Conspiracies,” NationalReview online, May 18, 2004. While Rubin shows that Hersh bases himself on LaRouche-disseminated material here, in his attack on Perle “Lunch with the Chairman” Hersh accuses the Defense Policy Board of receiving a briefing from  Rand Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec, who was a former editor of La Rouche’s Executive Intelligence Review: Hersh describes LaRouche as a “conspiracy theorist and felon.” (78-79)
  65. John Miller, “Sly Sy,” 32-33
  66. Max Boot, “Digging into Seymour Hersh,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2005
  67. Quoted in “Sly Sy,” 33
  68. Montgomery Brower, “Reporter Seymour Hersh Unravels the Tragic Mystery of Flight 007,” People Magazine, October 15, 1986, 58
  69. Chain of Command, 219-20
  70. Ibid, 362
  71. Occasionally Hersh gets carried away by his success in turning government investigations into scoops. He wrote a huge 25,000 word article called “Overwhelming Force” (The New Yorker turned over most of its issue of May 22, 2000 to it) recycling ten year old charges that U.S. soldiers, under the command of General Barry McCaffrey, had opened fire on armed Iraqis in the first Gulf War.  The trouble this time was that the government had exhaustively investigated these charges and found them to be false.  For all the verbiage, Hersh produced no new facts and the story, while successful in infuriating  McCaffrey, sank like a stone.
  72. Michael Ledeen, “The Hersh File.”
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