redblueamerica.com

the way he repeatedly and very deliberately spun the Pelosi, Reid, Rockefeller, etc sign-off of the presidential finding for secret operations in Iran. Who was the intended real audience for the interview as well as the article? Psychological Warfare.

could be he's a piece in the game within a game within a game ... that would be my interpretation.

it felt like a slick propaganda rather than an expose, did you sense that?

The smoke sure is looking thick. [ cough ]

I'm still going to say it's not going to happen. You can say "nya nya nya" if I am wrong.

many a writer has also been an agent,

A different analysis and prospective, it’s good for me to be humbled occasionally by greater intelligence and challenged to investigate before I pop-off at the mouth. I think my long standing dislike for silly Sy caused me to attack him as opposed to addressing the human tragedy issues caused by his creative journalism.
Thanks Brother.

B. Hamilton Langrehr:

The Hamilton Post: www.thehamiltonpost.blogspot.com

blangrehr@gmail.com

The truth of the matter is the U.S.A. is afraid that Israel will attack Iran. If Israel does attack Iran then Iran said they will have no distinction from them and us. They will blame and attack them(Israel) and the U.S.

We do not want this to happen.

Kennedy research
Hersh's 1997 book about John F. Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot, made a number of controversial assertions about the former president, including that he had had a "first marriage" to a woman named Durie Malcolm that was never terminated, and that he had a close working relationship with mob boss Sam Giancana. In a Los Angeles Times review, Edward Jay Epstein cast doubt on these and other assertions, writing, "this book turns out to be, alas, more about the deficiencies of investigative journalism than about the deficiencies of John F. Kennedy."[20] Responding to the book, historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Hersh "the most gullible investigative reporter I've ever encountered."[21]

A month before the book's publication, newspapers, including USA Today, reported Hersh's announcement that he had removed from the galleys, at the last minute, a segment about legal documents allegedly containing JFK's signature.[22] A paralegal named Lawrence Cusack had shared them with Hersh and encouraged the author to discuss them in the book.[23] Shortly before Hersh's publicized announcement, federal investigators began probing Cusack's sale of the documents at auction.[23] After The Dark Side of Camelot became a bestseller, Cusack was convicted by a federal jury in Manhattan of forging the documents and sentenced to a long prison term.[24] The documents signed by "John F. Kennedy" included a provision, in 1960, for a trust fund to be set up for the institutionalized mother of Marilyn Monroe.[23] In 1997 the Kennedy family denied Cusack's claim that his late father had been an attorney who had represented JFK in 1960.[23]

[edit] Use of anonymous sources
Hersh makes frequent reference to anonymous sources in his reporting; some have criticized this usage, implying that some of these sources are unreliable or even made up. In a review of Hersh's book, Chain of Command, neo-conservative commentator Amir Taheri wrote, "As soon as he has made an assertion he cites a "source" to back it. In every case this is either an un-named former official or an unidentified secret document passed to Hersh in unknown circumstances... By my count Hersh has anonymous 'sources' inside 30 foreign governments and virtually every department of the US government."[25]

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, maintains that he is aware of the identity of all of Hersh's unnamed sources, telling the Columbia Journalism Review that "I know every single source that is in his pieces.... Every 'retired intelligence officer,' every general with reason to know, and all those phrases that one has to use, alas, by necessity, I say, 'Who is it? What's his interest?' We talk it through."[26]

In a response to an article in the New Yorker in which Hersh alleged that the U.S. government was planning a strike on Iran, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Brian Whitman said, "This reporter has a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources."[27]

[edit] Speeches
Those who criticize Hersh's credibility especially point to allegations Hersh has made in public speeches and interviews, rather than in print. In an interview with New York Magazine, Hersh made a distinction between the standards of strict factual accuracy for his print reporting and the leeway he allows himself in speeches, in which he may talk informally about stories still being worked on or blur information to protect his sources. "Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people... I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say."[28]

Some of Hersh's speeches concerning the Iraq War have described violent incidents involving U.S. troops in Iraq. In July 2004, during the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal, he alleged that American troops sexually assaulted young boys:

“ Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has. They’re in total terror it’s going to come out.[28] ”

In a subsequent interview with New York magazine, Hersh regretted that "I actually didn’t quite say what I wanted to say correctly...it wasn’t that inaccurate, but it was misstated. The next thing I know, it was all over the blogs. And I just realized then, the power of—and so you have to try and be more careful."[28] In his book, Chain of Command, he wrote that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy by a foreign contract interpreter at Abu Ghraib, during which a woman took pictures.[28]

At a Columbia University speech given by Hersh in June 2004, author Rick Perlstein reported:

“ [Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children and women prisoners, as the cameras run." [29] ”

In an interview with KQED host Michael Krasny on October 8, 2004 [30], Hersh reported speaking with a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border:

“ His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them.
He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?'
”

In a speech at McGill University in October 2006, after describing a video he had seen in which U.S. troops, following an attack on their convoy, had fired upon and killed a group of nearby soccer players, Hersh offered the assessment that "there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.” [31] However, in the same speech Hersh later said that there were other armies that had been worse than the Americans and that he did not believe in moral equivalence, when comparing the atrocities of one army to another.

[edit]

B. Hamilton Langrehr:

The Hamilton Post: www.thehamiltonpost.blogspot.com

blangrehr@gmail.com

Hamilton,

What a surprise...you know how to pick and choose your " fair and balance " sources.

One thing the National Review and the Israel Lobby can't do, however, is to accuse Hersh of being anti-semitic like the right did in Israel with Admiral Fallon a few months ago.

That’s exactly where I get my real, honest information; Iranian television news and the MSM in this country. We can accurately believe everything we hear from those two unbiased ethical sources.

B. Hamilton Langrehr:

The Hamilton Post: www.thehamiltonpost.blogspot.com

blangrehr@gmail.com

Hersh and Rather may have alot in common.

Why is lying OK in journalism and politics? Is it a pre-requisite? Is it taught in journalism school?
Pants on Fire 101

This article is from 2001, I have a copy saved because there is always some poor liberal using him as an expert.
Please notice the very last passage!
Sly Sy
A journalist’s latest tricks.

By John J. Miller
EDITOR'S NOTE: The man behind many of the most provocative Abu Ghraib stories — Seymour M. Hersh of The New Yorker — is one of the best-known reporters in the business. But that doesn't mean he always gets his facts right. "If the standard for being fired was being wrong on a story, I would have been fired long ago," he once said. Hersh has admitted to lying to his sources and one former editor accused him of blackmailing them. Can he be trusted today? John J. Miller profiled Hersh in the December 3, 2001 issue of National Review.
This was disputed, just as virtually everything Hersh writes is disputed. It's become a ritual: Hersh publishes an eye-popping story, and then the complaints pour in. Sources say they weren't quoted properly. Others claim Hersh takes material out of context and ignores facts that don't comport with the point he wants to make. According to a Vanity Fair profile of Hersh, A. M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of the New York Times (where Hersh worked in the 1970s), once heard him "practically blackmailing" a person he was supposed to be interviewing.
Hersh has admitted mistakes in the past. His 1991 book The Samson Option, which said the Israelis owned nuclear missiles, relied for much of its information on a man Hersh now admits "lies like people breathe." In an interview three years ago with The Progressive, Hersh said, "If the standard for being fired was being wrong on a story, I would have been fired long ago."
His methods came under severe criticism following the publication of his 1997 bestseller The Dark Side of Camelot and its negative portrayal of John F. Kennedy. While conducting his research, Hersh came across what looked like his biggest scoop since My Lai: a cache of unknown JFK documents offering apparent proof of an affair with Marilyn Monroe, among dozens of other tantalizing factoids. Hersh gained access to them through Lawrence X. Cusack, a man who claimed his father was a lawyer for Kennedy. The papers eventually were shown to be forgeries-Cusack is now in prison-but Hersh refused for months to disbelieve them, coming up with desperate rationalizations for skeptics who wondered why documents containing ZIP codes were dated before ZIP codes even existed. Hersh was so eager to get his hands on the papers, he wrote a letter to Cusack stating that he had "independently confirmed" the relationship between JFK and Cusack's father. This was a lie. "Here is where I absolutely misstated things," testified Hersh during Cusack's trial. Assistant U.S. attorney Paul A. Engelmayer accused Hersh of playing "a little fast and loose with the facts."
Ultimately Hersh stepped back from the brink. He tried to develop a television documentary about the JFK papers, and his partners were able to prove convincingly that they were fakes. The final version of his book did not cite them. But critics complained about the material he did use, because of its thin sourcing and its treatment of speculation as fact. "In his mad zeal to destroy Camelot, to raze it down, dance on the rubble, and sow salt on the ground where it stood, Hersh has with precision and method disassembled and obliterated his own career and reputation," wrote Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books. Conservatives enjoyed the controversy, because it involved liberals attacking each other and made JFK look bad. Yet Wills was essentially correct in his assessment.
Hersh defended his interest in Kennedy's sex life. "I put in all the sex stuff because it goes right to his character, his recklessness, his notion of being above the law," he told the New York Times. Hersh did not apply this same standard to what he called the "Clinton sex crap." One year later-and a month before Bill Clinton's impeachment-he lambasted the press for "climbing into the gutter with the president and the Republican radicals . . . the same Republicans who say you can't have Huckleberry Finn in libraries." When he did criticize Clinton, it was always from the left, for "what he's done to welfare, what he's done to the working class, what he's done to habeas corpus."
It is difficult to double-check Hersh's work because of its heavy reliance on anonymous sources. Perhaps in time the full truth of October 20 will come out. For now, though, there is a single assertion in Hersh's story whose truth can be independently assessed. Hersh writes: "The mission was initiated by sixteen AC-130 gunships, which poured thousands of rounds into the surrounding area but deliberately left the Mullah's house unscathed."
The next time he seems to break a big story in The New Yorker, though, it's important to remember that General Hersh wasn't there-and also to recall a line from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, in which an editor advises a war correspondent: "If there is no news, send rumors instead."

This is of course not the entire article I left much out in an attempt at brevity. You can find the full story online at the National Review archives. I would like to point out the comment about unnamed sources; if you count the number of unnamed sources in the article Mercy just referenced…well I stopped at a dozen, with four pages left to go, it is a long article.
There are dozens of experts, real experts who believe as I do, that President will not bomb Iran despite the fanciful creation of Silly Sy. As Bull-y pointed out, we may indeed assist Israel covertly, with slight- of- hand and deception but Bush knows he would indeed be impeached if he blew-up Iran

B. Hamilton Langrehr:

The Hamilton Post: www.thehamiltonpost.blogspot.com

blangrehr@gmail.com