DECEMBER 2005

 The Washington gadfly

By Michael Posner
Hersh recently got hold of a copy of the United Nations interim report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The document cited "converging evidence" that senior levels of the Syrian government were involved in the murder.But according to Hersh, the Mehlis report is built on the same aenemic foundations as Powell's UN presentation in February, 2003. "He is relying on intercepts of an unnamed source inside the Iranianvair force, someone without inside stuff. It's not empirical."
Globe and Mail
31 October 2005

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Seymour Hersh, one of journalism's crankier bulldogs, was in an upbeat mood. At least for him. A confidential, well-placed source had told him that U.S. special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's
22-month inquiry into the outing of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson IV, would go further than anyone had heretofore thought.

"He's going to save America," Hersh predicted, on the phone from his home in Washington, just days before Fitzgerald announced indictments against I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, on Friday.

"Because it's not just about Wilson," maintained Hersh, who, as a New York Times reporter in the late 1960s, first blew the lid off the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and, more recently, exposed abuses at Abu Ghraib, the prison west of Baghdad where U.S. forces engaged in torture and humiliation of prisoners. He appears in Toronto tomorrow to speak to the group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

"Fitzgerald's going deep. He may just unravel the whole conspiracy," continues Hersh, who might be proven right. While Libby resigned after being indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements, Fitzgerald continues to investigate Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's influential deputy chief of staff.

All this to determine whether senior White House operatives leaked Valerie Plame's name to select reporters in order to discredit her husband, Wilson. Wilson had previously been dispatched by the Bush administration to Africa to verify reports that Saddam Hussein was buying nuclear technology from Niger, but had found no evidence to support those allegations. In a subsequent op-ed piece in The New York Times, he questioned the legitimacy of America's war in Iraq.

But Hersh said last week that the Plame/Wilson affair was only part of the saga. At its heart, the whole conspiracy -- in the minds of blue-state Americans that revile the George Bush presidency --
encompasses the notion that the Iraq war was planned and orchestrated long before the administration began to build its case for regime change; and that the case it attempted to build, as laid out by former secretary of state Colin Powell to the United Nations, was essentially a fraud (and known to be a fraud).

Two thousand U.S. military personnel and tens of thousands of Iraqis have since died in what many would thus consider an illegal war. In Hersh's eyes, anything that might hasten the departure of its chief architects, the hated neocons, would be welcome.

"We're so out of control," he says of the United States. "We have a colossus out of control. It's the end of the world, brought to you by the neocons."

Hersh recently got hold of a copy of the United Nations interim report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The document cited "converging evidence" that senior levels of the Syrian government were involved in the murder.

But according to Hersh, the Mehlis report is built on the same aenemic foundations as Powell's UN presentation in February, 2003. "He is relying on intercepts of an unnamed source inside the Iranianvair force, someone without inside stuff. It's not empirical." On the basis of this thin evidence, he says, the Bush administration is campaigning at the UN for sanctions on Syria.

But what seems to gall him even more is the behaviour of the American press, not excluding his alma mater, the Times -- Hersh now writes mainly for The New Yorker. "The problems there go way beyond Judith Miller," he says, referring to the Times reporter jailed for 85 days for refusing to disclose the name of the White House source who is alleged to have leaked Valerie Plame's name. She was released only after one of her sources, Lewis Libby, signed a personal waiver allowing her to discuss their conversations with prosecutor Fitzgerald. The Miller affair has caused a serious internal rift at the Times and, says Hersh, damaged its reputation. "It's still the most important newspaper in America," he says. "But it was the standard bearer, and I don't get that sense now."

Meanwhile, about to sign a contract for a new book on Iraq, Hersh is pleased to find that he's no longer a lonely voice on the issues. "I'm almost superfluous," he says. "A lot of stuff I was writing
about, everybody is now writing about. So I'm just sitting back collecting notes for the book."

Still, he thinks his colleagues in the press are missing something in Iraq. The so-called insurgency isn't rooted, he maintains, in "Jihadism." It's about the Sunnis making a stand against the Shia. "Ninety per cent of the Arab world is Sunni. They do not want another Shia society and Shia government that dominates the oil. That's the real issue."

America's current troubles in Iraq might be less severe, he says, if Al Gore had won the election. But Hersh is under no illusions. Even before Bush, "the Clinton administration had made it repeatedly clear that it was interested in only one thing in Iraq -- regime change. And Al Gore was part of that policy."

Although Bush is sometimes seen as a political marionette, manipulated by unseen masters, Hersh isn't so sure. He recalls a Saturday Night Live skit from the Reagan years that portrayed the then-president as a doddering fool who, once the cameras were off and the doors closed, calls a National Security council meeting, starts speaking Chinese and gives a detailed assessment of strategic threats.

"So sometimes I wonder," says Hersh. In Toronto, he says, he will talk about responsibility and war crimes and "make the case that gets Bush in the middle of it. There is a case for the President's
direct participation. It's not something that happened without his acquiescence. I'd like to think he knows what's going on."

In the meantime (Hersh is waiting to see if Fitzgerald drops more indictment bombs), "he's the sleeper, a true unassailable. The White House calls him Eliot Ness [the Prohibition-era federal agent whose team of 'Untouchables' helped bring down mobster Al Capone], not with affection, so I've heard."

Hersh predicts that "every day will get worse in Iraq. Another 30,000 Iraqis will die if we keep going. Fewer will die if we get out. There are only two options, as I see it: Pull out now or pull
out tomorrow."

Seymour Hersh speaks at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression
Gala tomorrow, at the Arcadian Court in Toronto