Did Seymour Hersh get leaked on?

Maybe Skippy the Amazing Wonderdog has moved into his little tin foil house and is now picking up alien signals through his rabies tag but you know? He just may have something here.

It's possible -- even likely -- that Seymour Hersh's New Yorker nightmare, in which he reveals the Bush administration's fascination with a nuclear option for Iran, is simply a case of media manipulation.

With a few carefully planned leaks -- bearing in mind that all leaks should be presumed official leaks -- you put in play the idea that the administration is planning to nuke Iran. And then, with your official administration hat on, you get to say that you won't rule it out, while at the same time you don't have to do anything as wildly irresponsible as threatening a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear state with which you aren't at war.

Slick, that. And if Sy Hersh isn't looking in the mirror, feeling somewhat like a Montana rainbow trout that's just been released by a happy New York lawyer armed with a counterfeit Pale Evening Dun, then he's not as bright as you might think.

This is so twisted it could only come out of a mind like Karl Rove's -- and Skippy's of course.

Comments

[Bill Doskoch]

How can you be so sure that Skippy and Karl Rove aren't the same person?

Maybe that's how he knows!

More seriously, Hersh didn't just fall off a turnip truck. He's been doing high-level reporting on U.S. national security stories for more than 35 years.

He doesn't use one or two sources for his stories. Hersh talks to a wide range of people in a position to know.

Does Skippy think the administration knows who to leak the exact same story line to, in order to ensure Hersh gets their message?

Perhaps the White House is sophisticated enough to design a leak that would completely hornswoggle Hersh by putting just enough inconsistencies in the story to make it mouth-wateringly plausible.

It's a crazy world, and anything's possible -- although possibility and probability are two different things.

OTOH, maybe the White House -- which initially described both the New Yorker piece and a similar one in the Washington Post (hey Skippy, why didn't you mention that one?) as "wild speculation" -- thought, 'Hey, maybe there's some advantage for us in having Iran think we might nuke them,' thus leading to the change in tone and language?

Maybe, as some mild payback for previous aggro, the White House wouldn't mind if it looked like they did snooker Hersh.

I don't know.

What I do know is Hersh, while imperfect, deserves better than a cheap, ill-considered shot like the one Skippy gave him.

[Maz]

Maybe the Hersh story of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran by the U.S. was a form of sabre-rattling in which the old investigative reporter was used as the conduit by Rove & Company inside the Bush White House. Two things stand out. First, millions of people
around the world easily accepted and believed that George Bush would be insane enough to kick-start World War III; second, the
price of oil is now over $71 U.S. and Bush's pals in Big Oil are the
latest to join the Billionaires' Club while we peons fork over a loonie
(or more) for every litre of gas pumped into our cars. Have a nice day.

[Demosthenes]

It's possible, but it's even more possible that the Sy Hersh's reporting is accurate. It's not healthy to assume that "there's no way that the Bush administration would do something". They'll just keep surprising you.

[sooey]

okay. i may be snatching at bait like a big ol' trout, or sy hersh, but is it my imagination or is patrick clawson dropping the other shoe here: "But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

?!?

[Bill-Muskoka]

All I can say is 'Good doggy! Well done! Here is your treat for today!' Makes so much sense that we know it works.

[Ti-Guy]

The layers and layers of conspiracy are enough to drive you nuts if you pay too much attention to it. Bottom line is, where's the evidence? At this point, I'd ask Sy Hersh.

[Don Sellar]

Like many reporters, Seymour Hersh relies on diverse - or so we hope - unnamed sources to corroborate enough information for a credible story.
Forced to penetrate a thicket of anonymity, however, readers can be excused for at least wondering if someone has been sold a bill of goods.
Useful clues to informants' motives could well be found in a few closeted names. For sure, those protected are not accountable and that should give you pause.

[spek]

This reminds me of the lead-up to the Iraqi invasion, when we would hear, "They're just pretending to be KR-R-AY-ZEEEE in order to psyche out the enemy and improve their bargaining position." And here's what I've learned in the meantime: they are that crazy.

Skippy may be right that Hersh was played, but it hardly matters; a denial/non-denial of tactical nuke plans from the nutcases of the Bush/Cheney administration amounts to a real threat in any case.

[kingharvest]

I have to agree that it is unlikely that Hersh would even think about publishing such a detailed article without doing extensive fact-checking.

Which is not to say that the Busheviks did not leak some or all of the information as some sort of perverse trial balloon.

Nor can we deny that they would stand to benefit greatly if we were to become too obsessed with talking about Hersh, rather than debating -or even thinking about- the notion that Bush would certainly be quite willing to start another war. .

Personally, I'd much rather sit around with a glass of white and debate Hersh or just about anything else, anything rather than thinking about the real or even possible threat of a nuclear attack orchestrated by one of our allies.

[Dean]

Whatever is going on, gas is up to over $1 per litre and summer isn't even here yet. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but this little story has had a beneficial effect on the price of oil...if you're an oil industry exec.

[Tom Gray]

Newsweek published the article on teh Koran desecration with one source who thought he remembered reading about it in a report. They 'confirmed' it by presentig a story to the Pentagon and getting no reaction as to the veracity of teh account.

Now if this is the type of reporting that goes on in a reputable magazine such as Newsweek, I would tend to believe that fact checking is not a indisputable process.

Stephen Glass' stories in The New Republic were fact checked.

[wonderdog]

"What I do know is Hersh, while imperfect, deserves better than a cheap, ill-considered shot like the one Skippy gave him."

That's funny; I have great respect for Hersh, who I think is one of American journalism's greatest figures, unlike certain authors of cheap, ill-considered shots....

However, that does not mean that he cannot be manipulated. And I think he's smart enough to know that.

People must understand that 99.999 percent of leaks serve an agenda. Not many of Hersh's sources are talking to him out of the goodness of their hearts. They are either leaking the information for the administration, or in an attempt to damage it.

Whether the information is true has nothing to do with motivations. I did not suggest anywhere that the facts in the story are false. In fact, I suggested the opposite: you don't point your nookular pistol at the Clanton gang unless you are willing to use it. I suggested, in fact, that this would be a way of making a threat without having to actually make a direct threat. You leak out your direst plan, and then you deny the truth of the story while saying, darkly, that you won't rule out any option.

In fact, if you wanted to pull the little stunt I speculated about, you would have to leak true information, so that Hersh and other investigators would get confirmation when they followed up. You don't need to arrange a network of dozens of sources; you only need one or two, and you let momentum do the rest. Try to keep up, folks; it's not rocket science.