Jewish World Review Jan. 25, 2005 / 15 Shevat, 5765

Has Sy Hersh finally done something productive?

By Jack Kelly

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Muckraking journalist Seymour Hersh has finally, if inadvertently, done his country a service, thinks my friend Jack Wheeler.

Hersh came to fame through exposing the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam war, and has since specialized in poorly sourced stories which cast the U.S. military in a bad light.

In a New Yorker piece posted Jan. 17th entitled "The Coming Wars," Hersh asserted that U.S. Special Forces already are in Iran, preparing for full scale war.

"Mr. Hersh's article is so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed," said Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita.

A post-election meeting between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Hersh describes never took place, Di Rita said.

A supposed new chain of command for commando operations headed by Rumsfeld is also a product of Hersh's overheated imagination, he said.

Liberals outraged by the inadvertent outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame in the Niger uranium kerfuffle have uttered not a word of complaint about Hersh's purported exposure of ongoing intelligence operations, though Plame has been safe in Georgetown, while Hersh's disclosures, if true, could put lives at risk.

Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley suggested that Hersh could — and probably should — be prosecuted under the section of the U.S. Code which makes it a crime to, in time of war, communicate to the enemy "any information with respect to the movement, numbers or disposition of any of the armed forces..."

Blankley should chill, said Wheeler, a real life Indiana Jones who spent much of the 1980s with anticommunist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola.

"Eastern Iran is a desert," he said. Iran's nuclear facilities...are in central Iran south of Tehran. Special ops teams would be sent in via Iraq, not Afghanistan. The story was planted by (CIA Director) Porter (Goss) with Hersh, a left wing sleaze whose claims could be easily denied — in order to rattle Iran's cage.

"Did it ever. Iranian government newspapers were stupid enough to explode in denunciations of Hersh's article, and the speech Iranian leader Ayatollah Khameini gave in response to it was nothing short of off-the-wall hysterical. Exactly what Porter and GW (Bush) wanted. And yes, a boatload of covert ops are being launched in Iran, but not like Hersh describes," Wheeler said in his newsletter, "To the Point."

Vice President Dick Cheney ramped up the psyops in an interview on the Don Imus radio show. If Iranian nuclear development continues, the Israelis might take out the plants, Cheney said.

But the biggest psyop was the president's inaugural address itself. Liberals profess to having difficulty understanding what Bush meant by his paean to freedom, but his target audience did not.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman observed: "The one country on this side of the ocean that would have elected Mr. Bush is...Iran, where many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.

"An Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were 'loving anything their government hates,' such as Mr. Bush, and 'hating everything their government loves.' Iran, he said, is the 'ultimate red state,'" Friedman said.

"Reports from across Iran are stating about the massive welcoming of President George W. Bush's inaugural speech and his promise of helping to bring down the last outposts of tyranny," said the Student Movement Coordinating Committee for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI).

"Millions of Iranians have been reported as having stayed home on Thursday night which is their usual weekend and going out night, in order to hear or see the presidential speech," SMCCDI said.

"What had always been missing in order to create a wide scale Iranian democratic revolution...was till now a firm and noticeable world pressure on the Islamic regime.

"Many Iranians, who were looking for the World's super power firm moral support and financial aid to credible secularist opposition groups are now becoming sure that Mr. Bush's agenda is indeed to help them gain Freedom, Secularity and Democracy," SMCCDI said.