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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.
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© 2005, Jack Kelly | ||||||||||
