Seymour Hersh looked worried -- more worried than usual. He was on Wolf Blitzer's show on CNN, and Blitzer was interviewing him about his latest bombshell of a New Yorker article, which details the sordid ebb and flow of secret Bush administration and Saudi money through the intricate diplomatic and military plumbing of the Middle East.
"And a lot of this money, and I can't tell you with absolute certainty how — exactly when and how, but this money has gotten into the hands — among other places, in Lebanon, into the hands of three — at least three jihadist groups," Hersh was saying earnestly. "We are simply in a situation where this president is really taking his notion of executive privilege to the absolute limit here, running covert operations, using money that was not authorized by Congress, supporting groups indirectly that are involved with the same people that did 9/11, and we should be arresting these people rather than looking the other way…"
The article, "The Redirection," in the latest issue of the New Yorker, appeared on line yesterday and set off a huge internet buzz. In it, Hersh attempts to lay out the details of the intricate, confusing, and sometimes contradictory new administration policy of shifting favor away from the Iraqi Shi'a and their Iranian brethren, and tilting toward the Sunni.
Revealing the unvarnished facts, often sordid and unpleasant, of complex and sometimes baffling events and policies is nothing new for Hersh, who turned 70 this year. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1969, which won him a Pulitzer. He was strongly criticized in some quarters then, and continues to be, for telling the truth whether we want to hear it or not, and doing so has sometimes entailed great personal risk. For example, in "The Redirection" he describes the arrangements for his meeting in Lebanon for an interview with Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah, the Hezbollah leader:
"Security arrangements for the meeting were secretive and elaborate. I was driven, in the back seat of a darkened car, to a damaged underground garage somewhere in Beirut, searched with a handheld scanner, placed in a second car to be driven to yet another bomb-scarred underground garage, and transferred again. Last summer, it was reported that Israel was trying to kill Nasrallah, but the extraordinary precautions were not due only to that threat. Nasrallah’s aides told me that they believe he is a prime target of fellow-Arabs, primarily Jordanian intelligence operatives, as well as Sunni jihadists who they believe are affiliated with Al Qaeda."
In recent years Hersh has written mostly for the New Yorker and has also become a frequently interviewed guest on cable news shows, where he distinguishes himself as a reporter who actually does the hard work of closely covering events rather than just talking about them. In recent years, he published a series of 2004 New Yorker articles detailing the military's abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, and revealed that the torture there was deliberate and systematic, as part of a secret program ordered by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called "Copper Green."
In 2005 Hersh began working deep inside the Pentagon in order to lay bare the administration's determination to attack Iran, and his April, 2006 article, "Iran Plans" detailed Bush's and Cheney's intentions to use nuclear weapons as part of that attack, which Bush dismissed as "wild speculation."
His latest article, "The Redirection," is an anatomy of the administration's new Iraq War strategy and general mideast policy, which entails removing favor toward Shi'a elements in Iraq, because Iran, a Shi'ite government, is seen as the main threat against both Iraq and wider regional security right now, and tilting toward the Sunni in Iraq and elsewhere, especially Saudi Arabia. The problem with this is that supporting the Saudis and Iraqi Sunnis also entails support for Wahhabism and al-Qaida (!).
One of Hersh's sources, an unnamed "former senior intelligence official," explained it this way: “We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture.”
"High-risk venture" is a charitable way of putting it. Posting on her blog "Hullabaloo," the writer known only as "Digby" has this take on Hersh's revelations: "Today we have the DOD equivalent of Brownie running around with boatload (sic) of cash making deals with Muslim extremists and Saudi princes, whom the administration has divided up into completely useless designations of 'reformer and extremist.' Nobody knows who's talking to who or what agenda they really have. Liberals think up complex plots like this and make them into movies. Republicans steal billions from the taxpayers and actually try to implement their hare-brained schemes."
Hersh has done a remarkable job of detailing a sloppy, contradictory, and very frightening set of policies, conceived by amateurs, implemented by unsupervised spooks, and overseen and audited by no one. The same people who gave us the debacle of Iraq are now determined to broadcast their peculiar brand of ineptitude and clumsy ignorance over the entire region. I don't blame Hersh for being worried.
But worried or not, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this from Seymour Hersh.
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