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Seymour Hersh loses his marbles? 18, January 2011

Posted by thegulfblog.com in American ME Relations.
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Working out when to leave the lime-light, put down the pen or stop treading the boards so as not to sully one’s reputation is a fine balancing act. Some can seemingly continue forever (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) while we wish that others had quit years ago. Who cannot have felt slightly creepy watching Sean Connery in Entrapment or finished watching Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau without a tinge of sadness?

I’ve talked before about this feeling with Robert Fisk. Once a great of the journalism world, a literal by-word for thorough fact checking and rigour, not only was his most recent tome utterly riddled with mistakes but his regular articles can be similarly error-strewn and one gets the impression that they are based on friends’ anecdotes more than a thorough appreciation of the ‘macro’ situation. (This doesn’t preclude him from the occasional super article, though).

So too must we now kindly ask that Seymour Hersh retire. Once – like Fisk – one of the brightest, most diligent and investigative of investigative reporters, uncovering government malfeasance and reporting it to the public, today he appears to have crossed over into a realm where every oddity or curious connection is automatically part of a grand conspiracy. At a talk that he just gave in Doha, Hersh recounted that:

Regarding the looting in Baghdab in 2003:

In the Cheney shop, the attitude was, ‘What’s this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they’re all worried about some looting? … Don’t they get it? We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody’s gonna give a damn…That’s the attitude…We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command.

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.

“They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins…They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”