Politico Gives CIA’s Worst WMD Liar a Platform to Slam
Seymour Hersh
By Jon SchwarzMay 16, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "The
Intercept" - It’s hard for anyone to judge
the accuracy of Seymour Hersh’s
blockbuster story on the killing of Osama bin Laden, given its reliance
on unnamed sources. I personally would trust him more than most people stuck
in the oozing miasma that is Washington, D.C., but he does ask readers to
rely completely on his judgment. So it’s certainly appropriate and
useful for other journalists to provide context on whether Hersh’s previous
reporting has proven correct.
What’s neither appropriate nor useful is to give former
government officials the chance to attack Hersh’s story without giving
readers the context of their track record of veracity. But that’s
exactly what Politico did in this piece,
“U.S. officials fuming over Hersh account of Osama bin Laden raid”:
“If 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,” said Bill Harlow, the [CIA]’s
former top spokesman, referring to two recent secretaries of defense and
a former acting CIA director. “It makes absolutely no sense.”
The next paragraph would have been the right place for Politico
to say this:
In 2003, Harlow himself participated in a massive
conspiracy to lie to you about Iraq’s purported WMD. Indeed, he
personally engaged in some of most egregious government dishonesty on
the issue when he
blatantly lied about a 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’s use of torture, and Sen.
Dianne Feinstein
recently accused Harlow of making “false charges” about the Senate’s
torture investigation.
That would have provided a real service: readers would
have heard what Harlow had to say about a specific news article, but also
learned that Harlow has a history of dishonesty when he wants to discredit
accurate reporting. After all, “history matters,” as Harlow himself said in At
the Center of the Storm, his book co-written with former CIA director
George Tenet.
But Politico didn’t say that. What it did go on
to say was that “In recent years … Hersh’s reporting has increasingly been
called into question,” and that a 2013 piece by Hersh “was turned down by
both The New York Times and The Washington Post.” In other
words, it provided negative context for Hersh, but not Harlow. Then it
quoted Harlow again, on how talking to Hersh is “a psychedelic experience.”
Bryan Bender, one of the authors of the Politico
piece, responded to my questions, for which I give him credit. Bender
writes:
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 — 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’s reaction.
Which is why we talked to him. …
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?
Bender also makes the fair point that spokespersons like
Harlow “are usually the least informed in the spy world” and in 2003 was
possibly just “regurgitating what others on the inside were telling [him].”
And in fact, that was Harlow’s position when I asked him
about his false 2003 statements on Iraq. “[I] was misinformed on that one
question,” Harlow said, “but to judge all of [my] other comments going
forward based on that single media inquiry response would be just as unfair
as to judge Seymour Hersh’s credibility as outlined in this Newsweek
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.” (Hersh never published anything based on the forged
documents.)
Asked who had provided him with the misinformation in
2003, Harlow responded: “I genuinely do not recall” and “I 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.” However, Harlow
said, he is not misinformed about Hersh’s bin Laden story because “The
information on the bin Laden case is based not only on Mr. Morell’s
participation in nearly every meeting at the CIA and White House leading up
to the raid — but also detailed accounts from others like Leon Panetta,
Robert Gates, and many others.”
The website of 15 Seconds, Harlow’s communications
consulting firm, states
that it can give clients advice on “Methods of deflecting difficult
questions designed to bait you.”
Email the author:
jon.schwarz@theintercept.com