{"id":58346,"date":"2015-05-18T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=58346"},"modified":"2015-05-18T12:15:41","modified_gmt":"2015-05-18T11:15:41","slug":"politico-gives-cias-worst-wmd-liar-a-platform-to-slam-seymour-hersh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/05\/politico-gives-cias-worst-wmd-liar-a-platform-to-slam-seymour-hersh\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Politico\u2019 Gives CIA\u2019s Worst WMD Liar a Platform to Slam Seymour Hersh"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Seymour<\/a>

Seymour Hersh accepts the LennonOno Grant for Peace (Brad Barket\/Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

14 May 2015 – <\/em>It\u2019s hard for anyone\u00a0to judge the accuracy of Seymour Hersh\u2019s blockbuster story<\/a> on the killing\u00a0of Osama bin Laden, given its reliance on unnamed sources. I personally would trust him more than most people\u00a0stuck in the\u00a0oozing miasma that is Washington, D.C., but he does ask readers to rely completely on his judgment. So it\u2019s certainly\u00a0appropriate and useful\u00a0for other journalists to provide context on whether Hersh\u2019s previous reporting has proven correct.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s neither appropriate nor useful is to give former government officials the chance to attack Hersh\u2019s story without giving readers the context of their<\/em> track record of veracity. But that\u2019s exactly what\u00a0Politico<\/em> did in this piece, \u201cU.S. officials fuming over Hersh account of Osama bin Laden raid\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you were to believe Sy, you would have to believe this massive conspiracy that President Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Mike Morell were all lying to you,\u201d said Bill Harlow, the [CIA]\u2019s former top spokesman, referring to two recent secretaries of defense and a former acting CIA director. \u201cIt makes absolutely no sense.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The next paragraph would have been the right place for\u00a0Politico<\/em> to say this:<\/p>\n

In 2003, Harlow himself participated in a massive conspiracy to lie to you about Iraq\u2019s purported WMD. Indeed, he personally engaged in some of most egregious government dishonesty on the issue when he blatantly lied<\/a> about\u00a0a Newsweek story published just before the war that strongly suggested Iraq had no remaining banned weapons. Since leaving the CIA, Harlow has co-written three books with former top CIA officials, all of which defend the agency\u2019s use of\u00a0torture, and\u00a0Sen. Dianne Feinstein recently accused\u00a0Harlow<\/a>\u00a0of making\u00a0\u201cfalse charges\u201d about the Senate\u2019s torture investigation.<\/em><\/p>\n

That would have provided a real service: readers would have heard what Harlow had to say about a specific news article, but\u00a0also learned that Harlow has a history of dishonesty when he wants to discredit accurate reporting. After all, \u201chistory matters,\u201d as Harlow himself said\u00a0in\u00a0At the Center of the Storm<\/em>, his book co-written with former CIA director George Tenet.<\/p>\n

But Politico<\/em> didn\u2019t say\u00a0that. What it did go on to say was that\u00a0\u201cIn recent years\u00a0\u2026\u00a0Hersh\u2019s reporting has increasingly been called into question,\u201d and that a 2013 piece by Hersh\u00a0\u201cwas turned down by both The New York Times<\/em> and The Washington Post<\/em>.\u201d In other words, it provided negative context for Hersh, but not Harlow. Then it quoted Harlow again, on how talking to Hersh is \u201ca psychedelic experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryan Bender, one of the authors of the\u00a0Politico<\/em> piece, responded to my questions, for which I give him credit. Bender writes:<\/p>\n

I felt burned by it at the time [in 2003] as a reporter asking questions about the case for war against Saddam. But a spotty record on the WMD facts or not, Bill Harlow remains a conduit to agency officials \u2014 current and former. He helped former acting CIA director Mike Morell write his new book. Given the assertions in the Hersh piece we were interested in the Intelligence Community\u2019s reaction. Which is why we talked to him. \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

If the alternative is to never talk to officials in the spy community who have made misleading public statements but continue to be consulted by agency leaders then how would we ever catch them if they mislead the public again?<\/em><\/p>\n

Bender also\u00a0makes the fair point that spokespersons like Harlow \u201care usually the least informed in the spy world\u201d and\u00a0in 2003 was possibly just\u00a0\u201cregurgitating what others on the inside were telling [him].\u201d<\/p>\n

And in fact, that was\u00a0Harlow\u2019s position when I asked him about his false 2003 statements on Iraq. \u201c[I]\u00a0was misinformed on that one question,\u201d Harlow said, \u201cbut to judge all of [my]\u00a0other comments going forward based on that single media inquiry response would be just as unfair as to judge Seymour Hersh\u2019s credibility as outlined in\u00a0this<\/a>\u00a0Newsweek<\/em> article from 1997 which details how Hersh was pushing a book and television project which involved at one point documents which turned out to be apparent forgeries.\u201d (Hersh never published anything based on the forged documents.)<\/p>\n

Asked who had provided him with the misinformation in 2003, Harlow responded:\u00a0\u201cI genuinely do not recall\u201d and \u201cI have no intention to engage in an exchange about that single answer to one of the thousands of questions I handled in that job more than a decade ago.\u201d However, Harlow said, he is not misinformed about Hersh\u2019s bin Laden story because \u201cThe information on the bin Laden case is based not only on Mr. Morell\u2019s participation in nearly every meeting at the CIA and White House leading up to the raid \u2014 but also detailed accounts from others like Leon Panetta, Robert Gates, and many others.\u201d<\/p>\n

The website of 15 Seconds, Harlow\u2019s communications consulting firm, states<\/a> that it can\u00a0give clients advice on \u201cMethods of deflecting difficult questions designed to bait you.\u201d<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: jon.schwarz@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s neither appropriate nor useful is to give former government officials the chance to attack Hersh\u2019s story without giving readers the context of their track record of veracity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}