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We devote a lot of space today to a profile of the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh by James Kirchick in Commentary. Hersh is an example of the mendacity and partisanship of that magazine. Another example of the New Yorker’s bias is a list of pieces published in the last six months;
February 3, 2012 Jobs Report Makes It a “Super Friday” for WH – John Cassidy, New Yorker (This was writen the day of the report.)
October 21, 2011 Will Stunning Success in Libya Help Obama? – David Remnick, New Yorker
October 12, 2011 Can Obama Win? Not This Way – John Cassidy, The New Yorker
October 3, 2011 A Hysterical Overreaction to Solyndra – James Surowiecki, The New Yorker
September 27, 2011 GOP Is Dedicated to Destroying Obama – Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker
September 12, 2011 President’s New Plan Will Boost Economy, Jobs – John Cassidy, New Yorker
September 10, 2011 President Obama vs. the Nihilists – George Packer, The New Yorker
September 9, 2011 Barry Gives ‘Em Hell – Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker
August 30, 2011 Obama’s Quiet Victory in Libya – David Remnick, The New Yorker
August 26, 2011 Leading From Behind to Victory – David Remnick, The New Yorker
Here are some excerpts from Kirchick’s piece;
Last June, the distinguished American journalist Seymour Hersh published an article in the New Yorker entitled “Iran and the Bomb: How Real Is the Nuclear Threat?” His answer: not very. There exists no “irrefutable evidence of an ongoing hidden nuclear-weapons program in Iran,” Hersh asserted, relying upon the words of anonymous “intelligence and diplomatic officials.” Hersh concluded with a quote from Mohamed ElBaradei, who had retired as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) two years earlier: “During my time at the agency,” ElBaradei said, “we haven’t seen a shred of evidence that Iran has been weaponizing, in terms of building nuclear-weapons facilities and using enriched materials.”
A week before Hersh’s piece hit newsstands, news came of a letter sent by Yukiya Amano, ElBaradei’s successor, to the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. The IAEA had received “further information related to such possible undisclosed nuclear-related activities.” Amano wished to “reiterate the concern about the existence of possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.” Iran, as it has always done, dismissed the evidence collected by the IAEA as forgeries.
In September, the IAEA revealed it had received information about Iranian “activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.” Two months later, the agency released yet another report confirming what everyone already knew: The regime is pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. Among other information, the agency revealed tests “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” “the acquisition of nuclear-weapons development information and documentation from a clandestine nuclear-supply network,” and “work on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components.” The IAEA cited more than 1,000 document pages of “credible” information related to Iranian weaponization, accumulated by “more than 10 member states.”
The damning IAEA report was a long time coming. In September 2009, at a joint press conference on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the declassification of intelligence that revealed a secret, underground uranium-enrichment plant near the holy city of Qom—a highly inconvenient place to produce fuel rods for medical isotopes. Obama said that he delayed releasing the information for months, as it “is very important in these kind of high-stakes situations to make sure the intelligence is right,” and that the revelation of the plant “represents a direct challenge to the basic foundation of the nonproliferation regime.”
Hersh—the man described by the Financial Times as “the last great American reporter”—was unfazed. There remains “no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,” he wrote in a November 18 blog post. To account for the IAEA’s increasingly harsh tone toward Tehran, he suggested that the agency’s new head, unlike ElBaradei, was a lackey of Washington, telling a radio interviewer that “Amano has pledged his fealty to America.”
Indeed, the IAEA report was nothing more than “a political document,” Hersh said, before revealing a hint as to why he was so adamant in denying the obvious about Iran’s nuclear intentions:
‘I wish we could separate our feelings about Iran and the mullahs and what happened with the students from 1979, into the reality, which is that I think there’s a very serious chance the Iranians would certainly give us the kind of inspections we want, in return for a little love—an end to sanctions and a respect that they insist that they want to get from us.’
As for the Obama administration’s posture toward Iran, it was little better than that of its predecessor. “The new report, therefore, leaves us where we’ve been since 2002, when George Bush declared Iran to be a member of the Axis of Evil,” Hersh wrote, “with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program.”
What could explain the positions of Obama and Clinton—liberal Democrats who, in Hersh’s eyes, have made the cardinal sin of expressing such distress about a nuclear-weapons program that doesn’t even exist? “Money. A lot of the Jewish money from New York. Come on, let’s not kid about it,” Hersh said in a 2007 interview on the far-left Democracy Now! radio show, in a discussion about the Democratic presidential primary. “A significant percentage of Jewish money, and many leading American Jews support the Israeli position that Iran is an existential threat,” he continued. “And I think it’s as simple as that.” …
… For his reporting on My Lai, Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize, and the story made him, in the words of then-New York Times managing editor A.M. Rosenthal, “the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States.” The Times promptly hired Hersh to work in its Washington bureau, where the sloppiness that would come to define his journalism career soon became evident. In 1974, he claimed that the former U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, was involved in a coup d’état the previous year. It wasn’t until 1981 that Hersh would write a 3,000-word, front-page retraction exonerating Korry that Time referred to as “the longest correction ever published.” …
… When not accusing Republicans and Israelis of warmongering, Hersh downplays or ignores the actual warlike behavior of rogue states. In this role, he has been a literal court stenographer to tyrants. In February 2008, Hersh wrote in the New Yorker that a Syrian facility bombed by Israel the previous September “apparently had little to do with…nuclear reactors.” Three months later, the Bush administration released a series of images of the facility before it had been destroyed, revealing nuclear fuel rods similar to ones used in North Korea, as well as a photograph of the head of North Korean’s Yongbyon nuclear plant meeting with Syria’s nuclear agency director. Last April, IAEA’s Yukiya Amano unequivocally stated that the site was “a nuclear reactor under construction.” And in November, UN investigators found evidence that Syria was working with rogue Pakistani nuclear-weapons scientist A.Q. Khan on its facility.
The following year, Hersh authored a piece suggesting that Bashar al-Assad—inserted into power in 2000 after his father, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades, died—was eager for a peace deal with Israel. Communicating with Hersh by e-mail, the dictator wrote that, while Jerusalem was “doing everything possible to undermine the prospects for peace…we still believe that we need to conclude a serious dialogue to lead us to peace.” Hersh met with Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, who assured the New Yorker correspondent that “Syria is eager to engage with the West”—a genuine desire for peace that, of course, “was never perceived by the Bush White House.” …
Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.
Conan: 82-year-old Christopher Plummer is the oldest actor ever to win an Academy Award. Of course, when the show started, he was only 79.
Conan: ‘The Artist’ won five Oscars. That works out to one Oscar for every person who saw the movie.
Fallon: Feb. 29 was Leap Day, something that only happens once every four years — or as Newt Gingrich calls that, ‘a sit-up.’
Fallon: Today marks the 158th anniversary of the Republican Party. While tomorrow marks the 158th Republican debate.
If you hang around Colorado folks, you’ll hear about 14ers – mountains over 14,000 feet high. We found a breathtaking picture of Mt. Everest taken from a Napal hut located at 14,000 feet. Only three more miles to go.