UNRELIABLE SOURCES
New York Post
By RAEL JEAN ISAAC
SEYMOUR Hersh, the New Yorker's star investigative reporter, has made headlines with a new expose — this time claiming the United States is conducting super-secret reconnaissance missions in Iran as groundwork for destroying Iran's nuclear facilities and/or invading the country.
If true, Hersh endangers the lives of the American commandos on these missions, especially since he pinpoints the areas in which they are operating. This is not likely to worry Hersh, who remains firmly rooted in the counter-cultural "Movement" of the 1960s which imbued him with the simplistic notions that pervade his work: America is the villain and Israel the only country yet more villainous.
But can what Hersh says be believed? Judging by Hersh's history, what he writes is likely to be a mishmash of impossible-to-separate truth and falsehood. Typical of Hersh, the article relies on a series of anonymous sources: a "former high intelligence official," a "government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon," a "retired senior CIA official" etc. Are they whom they claim to be? Is what they say reliable? The reader has no way of knowing and neither do the vaunted fact-checkers upon whom the New Yorker wastes its money.
Based on the record, Hersh himself cannot tell and may not care. Hersh based his 1991 book "The Samson Option" on Israel's nuclear weapons program on a series of far-out allegations by Ari Ben Menashe, a notorious con man whom Hersh falsely describes as an intelligence adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Among many sensational revelations, Ben Menashe tells Hersh that Shamir personally authorized purloined U.S. intelligence to be "sanitized, retyped and turned over to Soviet intelligence officials." In fact Ben Menashe (who would also claim, among fantasies too numerous to count, that he was Israel's top spy, a commander of the Entebbe operation and planted a homing device in the nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq) had been a low level translator for Israel's Mossad, judged delusional, denied a security clearance and resigned. Calling into question his own credibility, Hersh says "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."
This is not the only time Hersh has claimed 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 including a contract in which Marilyn Monroe promised to keep silent about her affair with Kennedy for $600,000. In Cusack's trial for defrauding "investors" in the documents, Hersh wound up on the stand. 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."
Though Hersh's key informants in his current article are protected from similar exposure by their anonymity, there are nonetheless clues to their unreliability. The Defense Department has issued a statement claiming the article is "riddled with errors of fundamental fact," citing as one that a "post-election meeting [Hersh] describes between the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not happen." The report of this meeting comes early in the article and Hersh uses the same source, "a former high-level intelligence official" for much of what immediately follows, including charges that the Pentagon had seized control over covert operations from the CIA and the administration was subverting Congressional authority over such operations.
But if Hersh's informant feeds him fiction on something as straightforward as the occurrence of a meeting, what credit can be given to the rest of his "disclosures"? Of one thing we can be sure: while Hersh may be able to get people to talk, he does not know how to evaluate what they say. His method is to hurl all the mud he can pick up, hoping at least some of it will stick.
Seymour Hersh has never paid any price for his decades of shoddy reporting. In this new season of media accountability, when even CBS cleans house, is it too much to hope that the New Yorker will follow suit?
Rael Jean Isaac, a political sociologist, wrote the "The Cult of Seymour Hersh" for the July/August 2004 American Spectator. |
