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.
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.
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
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May 2003 - 5 - Outpost