Seymour Hersh Vs. Richard Perle

At the end of March, Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, forced out of the leadership role (he remained a member) by a firestorm of publicity concerning supposed ethics violations launched by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a March 17 New Yorker article and expanded in the New York Times. For Hersh, Perle is a perfect target, embodying attitudes Hersh finds most detestable -- friendship for Israel and belief that the United States is a force for good in the world.

On CNN, Richard Perle called Hersh "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist," a summation of Hersh's career it is hard to better. The only substantive "fact" Hersh offers in his article is that Perle met with two Saudi businessmen to discuss Iraq. One was Adnan Kashoggi, the longtime arms dealer and middleman, who arranged the 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 at the meeting was Iraq.

This does not stop Hersh from opining that Perle's "real" motive in meeting with the two Saudis was to obtain investment in Trireme, a venture capital company focusing on technology, goods and services useful for homeland security in which Perle is a partner. Indeed, Perle's views on Iraq, Hersh suggests, derive from his business interests. Hersh writes: "'If there is no war,' he [Kashoggi] told me, 'why is there a need for security?'" Apparently Kashoggi (and Hersh, since he makes no comment on this bizarre statement) has never heard of 9/11. From out of left field, Hersh hauls in Saudi Prince Bandar who had nothing to do with the meeting but states flatly: "I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took place."

Asked what element of Hersh's story was true, Perle told the New York Sun, "It's all lies from beginning to end." Given how few facts the story even pretends to have, it would be more accurate to say that it is fantastic speculation from beginning to end.

Hersh is on a roll these days. Within the month, also in the New Yorker, he wrote two articles, one berating the U.S. for circulating false documents and the other attacking Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for supposedly forcing General Franks to start the war earlier than the general thought militarily appropriate. As Hersh presents the case, the CIA had not been fooled by forged documents purporting to show that Iraq had attempted to buy nuclear material from Niger (TV viewers may remember Egypt's El Baradei announcing they were phony at the UN). Hersh relies on a series of anonymous sources to suggest a more sinister explanation -- the U.S. and Britain were deliberately spreading false information because they were losing the battle for public opinion. Hersh asks: "Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?" Hersh's claim that Rumsfeld overruled General Franks' request to delay the invasion was too much for General Franks who, questioned at a briefing, explained that Hersh had it exactly backwards: it was he who had requested and received permission to start the ground campaign early because of the opportunity to seize the southern oil fields.

The defects with these three stories encapsulate all that has been wrong with Hersh's journalism throughout his lengthy career. Anonymous sources that cannot be checked. Directly reversing what really happened. (One might think Hersh had factual dyslexia if the reversals were not so consistently in the service of his far left ideology.) Dark charges based on a crazy patchwork of suppositions. For anyone familiar with Hersh's earlier work, his article on the Bush administration's being taken in by false documents is especially outlandish because Hersh has repeatedly been taken in by con men peddling sensational phony stories.

Eleven years ago in Midstream (February/March 1992), I focused on what was then Hersh's most recent book The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear weapons program. The core of the book consisted of "revelations" by Ari Ben Menashe, a notorious tale-spinner who now, in a scenario beyond the imagination of the most far-out screenwriter, serves as chief witness in Mugabe's spurious treason trial of the leader of the chief opposition party in Zimbabwe. Among fantasies too numerous to count (he was Israel's top spy, a commander of the Entebbe operation), Ben Menashe claims to have been with the first George Bush in Paris in October 1980 arranging for Iran to hold the hostages until after the Presidential election -- 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. Writing in the Wall Street Journal of Nov. 27, 1991, Steven Emerson reported that Hersh rejected warnings of Ben Menashe's mendacity. Nor did the warnings come from a suspicious source, i.e., for Hersh, one friendly to Israel. They came from Peter Hounam, the chief investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times

"Insight" team, who had broken the story of the Vanunu affair, with documentation on Israel's Dimona reactor. When Ben Menashe's credibility was publicly challenged, Hersh claimed to have confirming "documentation" from a "private detective." Five days later, Emerson writes, "the London Sunday Times revealed that the 'private detective' was actually a well known British hoaxer, Joe Flynn, who admitted that he had deceived Mr. Hersh in exchange for money. 'I am a conman,' Mr. Flynn told the Times." In The Samson Option, on the rare occasions when he identifies a source (other than Ben Menashe), Hersh gets the story wrong. Hersh cites distinguished Israeli scientist and government adviser Yuval Ne'eman as having told him that in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel went on nuclear alert twice. I asked Ne'eman about this on February 8, 1992. Ne'eman said he had indeed spoken to Hersh and told him the United States -- not Israel -- went on nuclear alert twice during that war. According to Hersh, the famed U.S. airlift to Israel during the war was only undertaken because Israel blackmailed President Nixon, threatening to use its atomic arsenal if supplies were not sent immediately. Hersh does not even pretend to offer any evidence for this. Veteran foreign correspondent Russ Braley, who was friendly with Richard Nixon, wrote to the ex-President asking if there was any truth in what Hersh wrote. In a letter dated January 22, 1992 Nixon replied: "The story has no foundation whatever."

In dark suggestions more appropriate to the Liberty Lobby than an American Jewish journalist, Hersh implies sinister motivations by Jewish Americans in high places. For example, Hersh goes on for pages assailing Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s, as a closet practitioner of "dual loyalty." "The strongest evidence," according to Hersh, was that in 1966, Strauss recommended Ernst David Bergmann as a two month visiting fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. In fact 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. But Hersh has yet more "proof" of his dual loyalty charge. He reports that AEC official Myron Kratzer told him that after Strauss left the AEC, he "followed the tradition of fasting during Yom Kippur." In Hersh's Elders of Zion mentality, that clinches it.

It is worth noting that The Samson Option is unique among Hersh's oeuvre in treating the U.S. as innocent, deceived victim (of Israel and the nefarious Jewish lobby). The rest of his books and articles are permeated by the theme of America-the-enemy. It took Israel to purify America, however briefly.

Seymour Hersh is a product of the "Movement" of the 1960s, which saw America as the focus of world evil and Israel as the fusion of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. Hersh had his start with Dispatch News Service, a Movement outfit founded in 1969 as an "alternative" news agency to disseminate anti-Vietnam war stories to the mainstream press. A source called Hersh with a tip on what became known as the My Lai massacre. The army was in the process of court-martialing Lt. William Calley and investigating 36 others for their part in the shootings of civilians, and Hersh pursued the story, which Dispatch then distributed. Typically, Hersh insisted that My Lai was not an isolated instance; the true villain, he wrote, was "the Army as an institution."

My Lai 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." The Times hired him and he remained there from 1972-79. He wrote a series of stories in the Times attacking the CIA for covert actions abroad and for 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). 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, with the piper being paid on 9/11. The passage of the Patriot Act has finally begun to undo the mischief Hersh helped to wreak on our intelligence services.

In 1979, Hersh left the Times to write a hatchet job on Henry Kissinger. As it turned out the chief victim of The Price of Power, published in 1983, 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 1989, when the suit went to a Chicago jury, Desai was 93 and too ill to come to the U.S.

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 testifed that former CIA director Richard Helms had told him he would be on "safe ground" in testifying that Desai was not a paid CIA informant. Nonetheless, Desai lost. He could not prove that no one in the CIA had told Hersh that he was on the payroll because the judge ruled that Hersh need not identify his sources. Furthermore, Desai's attorney was prevented from questioning anyone in the CIA's employ. Hersh never even took the stand. Hersh's lawyer announced that the outcome proved "that even a person as prominent as Morarji Desai cannot intimidate an American journalist entitled to his First Amendment protections." What the case really showed was that as long as he did not need to reveal his sources, an unprincipled journalist could label any public figure a CIA agent with impunity. After the Kissinger book, Hersh went on, in 1986, to get the story wrong in The Target is Destroyed, on the Soviet downing of Korean civil airliner KAL 007. Typically, the U.S. comes out worse than the Soviets. While the latter made an honest mistake, confusing the Boeing 747 with the RC-135, a U.S. reconnaisance aircraft, the "real story," says Hersh, is the "politically corrupt" use of intelligence by the U.S. which had rushed to judgment because of "strong hostility to communism that led them to misread the intelligence and then, much more ominously, to look the other way when better information [that the Soviet pilot misidentified the plane] became available." In 1991, with the end of the iron hand of Soviet communism, the Soviet fighter pilot who brought down KAL 007 would tell his story to Izvestiya. He indignantly rejected the suggested he had mistaken the plane for an RC-135, describing how he had been ordered to lie after the incident. While Hersh could not have been expected to obtain the true story in the Soviet Union of 1984, if he had not worn anti-American blinkers he would have been less confident of his simplistic thesis that bad American anti-Communism led to the U.S. "lying" about the incident, misrepresenting an innocent, if tragic, Soviet mistake.

In subsequent years, Hersh has continued his penchant for believing outright frauds. Working on a book about John and Robert Kennedy, he initially fell for a stash of phony documents peddled by one Lawrence X. Cusack (convicted in 1999 for defrauding more than 100 investors in a scheme to sell the documents, which he claimed to have found in the papers of his late father, a prominent lawyer). One was a purported contract in which President Kennedy agreed to pay Marilyn Monroe money to keep silent about their affair; another supposedly linked Kennedy directly to mobster Sam Giancana. What is most interesting is the bizarre way Hersh "validated" the documents. Called as a prosecution witness, Hersh tried to explain a letter he sent to Cusack claiming he had not only independently confirmed that Cusack's father had known Kennedy through an interview with Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln, but had also "independently confirmed some of the most interesting materials" in the papers. Hersh had to admit that he had misspoken, including what he said about Evelyn Lincoln. "When I wrote this letter," he testified, "I selectively recollected the good and didn't remember the bad." Cusack's lawyer had a field day: "If there were a Pulitzer Prize for backtracking and eating one's words, I think he could add it to his trophy chest."

Hersh is an ideological yellow journalist. With his tenacity, lack of scruples, narrow vision, and white hats versus black hats view of the world, he might, in an earlier era, have been a successful police reporterparticularly in the earlier journalistic world described by Ben Hecht, where letting the facts interfere with a sensational story was a mark against you (indeed, Hersh started out as a police reporter in Chicago). But Hersh is unable to handle complicated material, unable to understand or analyze policy issues. He never seems to have heard of standards of evidence. Unable to sift out the wildest, most absurd allegations, he tosses them into the pot, as long as they contribute to his being able to say "the target is destroyed."

Hersh cannot even get the Samson story right. Explaining why he chose the title The Samson Option, Hersh writes that "Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured after a bloody fight." What the Bible records, of course, is that Samson became helpless after Delilah deceived 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. Every school child knows that -- but not Seymour Hersh.

Of greater concern than Hersh himself is his reputation among journalists. Hersh has won twenty major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. There is no more serious indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism than the flood of awards its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh.

What explains the high standing among his peers of a journalist whose work should be anathema to any publication with standards higher than those of a supermarket tabloid? The journalistic world that celebrates him still largely identifies with the juvenile politics of the Movement that Hersh unabashedly purveys in his books and articles. During Gulf War II, embedded in the armed forces, U.S. journalists showed signs of growing up. Another welcome sign would be the long overdue banishing of the tawdry journalism of Seymour Hersh from reputable journals and publishing houses.

The claim that Hersh is an "ideological yellow journalist" is absolutely true. I would also claim that as an ideological bushwhacker who fires from ambush he has no equal (Gary Sick is a neophyte in comparison).

Time after time and decade after decade his informants have either been con men or left-wing ideologues who held a grudge for one reason or another. For example, in 1986 he received inside information from a State Department intelligence analyst who argued with anyone who would listen that the United States, not the Soviet Union, was responsible for the downing of the Korean airliner.

The analysts made both the State Department and Hersh look bad -- but who cares? Hersh takes out his blunderbuss, blasts away, and slinks off to take on someone else.

Middle East list

If people want on or off this list, please let me know.

Seymour Hersh is a product of the "Movement" of the 1960s, which saw America as the focus of world evil and Israel as the fusion of racism, colonialism, and imperialism

Well, actually, Israel is in fact a product of colonialism and imperialism (not racism, though). This is an undeniable fact. Israel only exists because the British empire decided to colonize Palestine with Jews. Not that there is anything immoral about this decision; it was just a stupid decision.

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