1/27/2005 10:53:43 AM|||Toni|||Digging Into Seymour Hersh
Hersh is the man who would have you believe that all in the US Military are evil war machines. The man has no shame.

Max Boot takes him to task:
Few facts in Hersh's stories are checkable by an outsider, but, of those that are, a number turn out to be false. In November 2001, he claimed that 16 AC-130 gunships participated in a raid (a "near disaster") on Mullah Mohammed Omar's compound in Afghanistan. There were only nine AC-130s in the entire region, and they are never used more than one or two at a time. In a story in October 2001, he claimed that Predator drones cost $40 million; the actual price tag is $2.5 million. In the latest article, he says two Pentagon policy officials would be in the "chain of command" for covert operations; the actual chain of command runs from the secretary of Defense to military commanders in the field.

OK, anyone can make a mistake, but all of Hersh's errors run in one direction: toward making the U.S. government look bad. His November 2001 article included a quote, hilarious in retrospect, from "one officer" who claimed, "This is no war for Special Operations." That ran a month before special operators toppled the Taliban. The April 7, 2001, issue of the New Yorker contained his article quoting a "former intelligence official" who said of the invasion of Iraq, "It's a stalemate now." Two days later, Baghdad fell.

Even his celebrated Abu Ghraib stories were marred by unsubstantiated claims that Rumsfeld had "encouraged" the "sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners." How does this square with the fact that the Abu Ghraib scandal — like the My Lai massacre — was uncovered first not by Hersh but by Army investigators?
|||110684479935941255|||Max Boot De-Bunks & Exposes the Maliciousness of Seymour Hersh