Sigh Hersh

A couple of days back Dawn published a story quoting an interview with New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that supposedly ran on an Arabic television station. According to the story, which originally appeared in tons of Arabic newspapers and was subsequently republished in Pakistani newspapers and made the headlines of many television stations, Hersh claimed that a death squad, reporting directly to Dick Cheney, assassinated Benazir Bhutto and Rafiq Hariri of Lebanon.

Just a few hours later, Dawn retracted the story and ran a piece where Hersh denied giving any such interview. He categorically stated that he gave no interview claiming Cheney was responsible for Benazir's and Hariri's assassinations. Since no video has turned up of this alleged interview, it would be fair to give Hersh the benefit of the doubt on that point.

But Sy Hersh's denial went a step further, also saying this:

‘Vice President Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Ms Bhutto. I have never said that I did have such information. I most certainly did not say any thing remotely to that effect during an interview with an Arab media outlet,’ Hersh said.

‘General McChrystal ran a special forces unit that engaged in High Value Target activity. While I have been critical of some of that unit's activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Mr Cheney, as the published stories state.’

He is lying. In a speech at the University of Minnesota on March 10 (you can hear audio and read a transcript at the Democracy Now website, which did a segment on his comment), Hersh made the following accusation:

Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination wing, essentially. And it’s been going on and on and on. And just today in the Times there was a story saying that its leader, a three-star admiral named McRaven, ordered a stop to certain activities because there were so many collateral deaths. It’s been going in—under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.

Later, in an interview with Democracy Now's host Amy Goodman he said that this assassination ring reported to Dick Cheney, although he does include the caveat that Cheney only approved assassination targets and wasn't actually picking them.

Before any further criticism of Hersh, I should acknowledge that he has been breaking huge stories for about forty years, including the My Lai Massacre and Abu Ghraib. But he has also been spectacularly wrong on many occasions. Just search the New Yorker website for "Seymour Hersh+ Iran" and you will get at least half a dozen stories where he predicted that the US was going to invade the country within a matter of weeks (some examples of this). Hersh's book on JFK, The Dark Side of Camelot, was an embarrassment, that, among other things, concluded that JFK had a secret first marriage that had not been annulled when he married Jackie Kennedy. This story in NY magazine is the definitive account of Hersh's deficincies as a reporter.