[Peace-discuss] How to read Hersh (and the US) on Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

  	July 1, 2008
	Two Months Later, Hersh and the New Yorker
	Strain to Catch Up With CounterPunch
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Late last week the New Yorker released a 6,000 word story by Seymour Hersh under 
the vague title, “Preparing the Battlefield”. The lead paragraph ran as follows:

     “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a 
major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and 
former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for 
which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in 
a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the 
country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the 
minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They 
also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.”

Beyond the assertion in the second paragraph that secret ops against Iran by US 
military and CIA are being “significantly expanded”, that was about it so far as 
hot news was concerned. There’s actually incredibly little detail in the 6,000 
words about the actual Finding. Most of the rest of Hersh’s essay led the reader 
in discursive fashion  through comical interludes of zero political consequence, 
fairly stale news, (such as the scale of differences between the White House and 
Admiral Fallon) and lengthy cites from Col. Sam Gardiner about the internal 
political situation in Iran. As traditional in Hersh’s pieces, there was a quote 
from Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer.

The comical interludes consisted of quotations, relayed with apparent 
seriousness by Hersh, from Democrats tying to rationalize the fact that the 
leaders of their party, now in a majority in Congress, had meekly signed on to 
Bush’s request for up to $400 million in secret funding.

Here’s a sample of whining and mumbling from Rep David Obey: “I suspect there’s 
something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted 
to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still 
don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little 
confidence that they give us information on the edge.”

And here’s another from an unnamed Democratic whiner: “A member of the House 
Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in 
November, ‘it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities 
under control.’ He went on, ‘We control the money and they can’t do anything 
without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this 
Administration.’ He added, ‘This Administration has been so secretive.’”

As Hersh’s hodge-podge narrative got play over the weekend, CounterPunchers read 
his supposed disclosures with an impatient and knowing sigh. They, after all, 
had learned of the Finding back on May 2, when Andrew Cockburn disclosed its 
contents here, with a good deal more pep and hard information, under the 
headlines, “Democrats Okay Funds for Covert Ops SECRET BUSH “FINDING” WIDENS WAR 
ON IRAN”.

Here the first 256 words of  Andrew Cockburn’s CounterPunch exclusive, a brisk 
narrative against Hersh’s 6,000-word boustrophedonic plod, but – as is instantly 
apparent – far more informative:

     Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert 
offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its 
contents, "unprecedented in its scope." Bush’s secret directive covers actions 
across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far 
more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and 
including the assassination of targeted officials.  This widened scope clears 
the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e 
Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on 
the State Department's list of terrorist groups.
     Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or 
"army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the 
Afghan border -- whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports 
cutting his brother in law's throat. Other elements that will benefit from U.S. 
largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi 
arabs of south west Iran.  Further afield, operations against Iran's Hezbollah 
allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the 
Syrian regime. All this costs money, which in turn must be authorized by 
Congress, or at least a by few witting members of the intelligence committees. 
That has not proved a problem.  An initial outlay of $300 million to finance 
implementation of the finding has been swiftly approved with bipartisan support, 
apparently regardless of the unpopularity of the current war and the perilous 
condition of the U.S. economy.

There are interesting differences between Andrew Cockburn and Hersh’s stories, 
not least on the matter of assassinations. CounterPunch’s story, in the lead, 
cites “assassination of targeted [Iranian] officials”, as part of the purview of 
the Finding. More than 1,100 words into his story Hersh gestures tactfully to 
“potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran”. In other words, 
if President Ahmadinejad suddenly detected a CIA operative about to stab him and 
drew out his revolver, the operative would be entitled, in self defense, to kill 
Ahmadinejad first. That’s the way the Agency is. Punctilious to a fault.

Actually, it’s at this point, after the hokum about “potential defensive legal 
action” that Hersh detonates a real bombshell. He admits in print that someone 
got the story before him, something he disdained to do in the case of My Lai, 
initially excavated with incredible courage by the late Ron Ridenhour. Nor, in 
the case of Abu Ghraib has Hersh been keen to correct admiring interviewers and 
remind them that this was a scoop of CBS News. But in this New Yorker he writes: 
“(In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding 
in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)”

He probably felt he had to. Hersh had called Andrew Cockburn’s home phone in 
Washington DC in early June, clearly peeved to have discovered that the  Finding 
had been described in detail on May 2 in CounterPunch. (By then it was not 
exactly a closely guarded secret, except to the traditional, near-dead U.S. 
press. At the time Hersh called, just under a million readers around the world 
had clicked directly onto the story on our site.) We would not go so far as to 
surmise that Hersh learned of the Finding from our story. But we do infer that 
Hersh’s stated informant on what was in the Finding, referred to by Hersh three 
times as “a former senior intelligence official”, as “the person familiar with 
the Finding” and as “the former senior intelligence official” knew less than 
what Andrew Cockburn’s source told him and thus what CounterPunch readers 
learned in timely fashion, and had their knowledge further enhanced by Andrew 
Cockburn’s follow-up story on May 30, “Rough Sledding for Bush's Covert Iran 
Finding” which disclosed, with pertinent detail, something readers of the New 
Yorker will not have learned, that  “So far, according to former officials with 
knowledge of the finding, the results have been in line with most other U.S. 
initiatives in the region, i.e. the strengthening of Iran.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn at asis.com