Smearing Sy Hersh

Seymour Hersh is a rarity in America these days — an investigative journalist.

“Hersh is not a nice man in the Washington sense,” writes Eric Alterman of Salon, “he does not know how to make small talk, flatter his bosses, spin his defeats and conceal his fierce competitiveness. He is simply the best investigative reporter alive and expects his work to speak for itself.”

Because Hersh does what he does so well, the chicken hawk Richard Perle called him a terrorist on CNN the other day.

That’s right. Perle equated Hersh with Osama bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. “Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist,” Perle told Wolf Blitzer.

Perle slandered Hersh because the award winning journalist wrote in the March 17th issue of the New Yorker: “There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war.”

I have not read the New Yorker article, so I can’t comment on it. I don’t know if Perle set up a company situated to profit from his boss’ plan to mass murder possibly a half million Iraqis or not. But if Hersh said it, there must be something to it. Hersh is known for his meticulous research. He conducts interviews, double checks facts. Seymour Hersh does not make things up. Due to his professionalism Hersh has won more than a dozen major journalism prizes, including the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and four George Polk Awards.

On the other hand, Perle and the neocons are liars.

One big lie is that Mohammed Atta met with Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, an official at Baghdad’s embassy in Prague. US intelligence agencies went over records of Atta’s travels and concluded that during the period in question he was in Virginia Beach, not in Prague. Perle knew this was a fabrication. He attempted to pass it off on the American people as truth. There are many other lies, as well, but I will not bother you with enumeration.

That’s how the neocons make their case before the American people — through deceit, half-truth, fabrications, and outright lies. It should be a crime. But for now he is allowed to bend the ear of George W. Bush and prod the half-wit dictator into destroying America.

When Perle was working for Senator Scoop Jackson, he was investigated by the Justice Department and found to have violated US policies relating to unlawful transmission of sensitive classified US information to Israel.

“An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy,” writes Paul Findley (They Dare To Speak Out, Chicago, Ill, Lawrence Hill Books 1989).”He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he received substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting that, although he received payment for these services after he had assumed his position in the Defense Department, he was between government jobs when he worked for the Israeli firm.”

In other words, Richard Perle was spying for Israel.

Perle should be expatriated immediately — or made to share a cell with Jonathan Pollard, the spy who spent 18 months collecting and selling classified American intelligence to Israel from his position in U.S. Naval Intelligence. So pleased were the Israelis with the information passed on to them, two of the four government officials who had dealt with Pollard were promoted (Col. Aviem Sella, Pollard’s primary contact, was given full control of a major Israeli Air Force base). So arrogant are the Israelis that Sharon asked Bush to pardon and release Pollard.

If these are our friends, who needs enemies?

Okay, I’m going to use a word that will upset some of you — Zionist. These days if you use the word Zionist you’re going to be immediately accused of anti-Semitism. I receive hate email for using this word on occasion. You’d think I’m making excuses for the Holocaust (which is another subject that can get you in hot water, especially in France where you can go to prison for questioning the official verson of historical events). I’m not slandering Jews, I’m simply reporting the facts. Here’s an indisputable fact:

Richard Perle is a Zionist.

Now what exactly does this mean? It means Richard Perle — and Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and others in the Bush administration — are Israeli nationalists. “Wolfowitz and fellow Jewish neo-cons Richard Perle and Douglas Feith have emerged as the Pentagon’s Paladins,” writes Ann Pettifer, “their aim being to subdue the Islamic world through decisive, pre-emptive use of American military superiority.”

“Only in Washington does one get a true sense of the obsession of these Pentagon civilians,” writes Hugo Young, a Guardian columnist. “Conversationally, it is common talk that some of them, not including Rumsfeld, are as much Israeli as American nationalists. Behind nervous, confiding hands come sardonic whispers of an American outpost of Likud. Most striking of all, however, is how unmentionable this is in the liberal press.”

Ain’t that the truth.

But then the corporate press in America rarely criticizes the Zionists. Notice how Perle can jump from one TV news show to another and nobody mentions his spying for the Israelis or working for an Israeli arms manufacturer. Nobody mentions his “dual loyalties,” which are common knowledge in Washington. Nobody calls him a traitor. Nobody in the corporate media dares — that is if they want to keep their jobs.

Perle can insult the Germans and French at the same time and the corporate media looks the other way. In fact, he is allowed to denigrate the whole of Europe. “I think Europe has lost its moral compass. Many Europeans have become so obsessed by the prospect of violence they have failed to notice who we are dealing with,” he told the Guardian.

Gee, Richard. Maybe the Germans remember the horror of American Flying Fortresses dumping gasoline bombs on Dresden in 1945, an act of barbarity that resulted in the murder of 100,000 people. Maybe the French recall the Nazi occupation. Maybe there’s still thousands of Dutch, Italians, Poles, and other Europeans alive who remember none too fondly the systematic and engineered mass murder of the Second World War. No doubt, as well, there’s plenty of Jews who remember the monstrosity of Hitler’s concentration camps.

I bet if you asked them if Saddam Hussein is Hitler reborn they would laugh in your face.

Actually, Saddam is not a threat to a single person in the United States. Perle and the Zionist neocons know this, of course. They also know that Iraq is not a serious threat to Israel, especially after a decade of war and sanctions have reduced Iraq to one of the poorest countries in the world. “We don’t lose sleep over Iraq’s military threat to us,” Lt Gen. Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s Chief of Staff, told the New York Times.

So why are the Zionists pushing for a US invasion of Iraq?

First, the Zionists believe that bad relations between the US and Arab nations is good for Israel. It’s no mistake Iraq and Iran were specifically fingered as part of an “axis of evil,” nations the Bushites have singled out for invasion and “democratization.” Sharon told fellow Zionist and U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton last month he wants Syria and Libya attacked next. As if to make sure he received the correct marching orders, Bolton also met with Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Housing and Construction Minister Natan Sharansky.

The Israeli Zionists don’t care if perpetual war destroys the American economy. It does not bother them if Americans will die in the thousands.

Second, the Zionists are itching to “transfer” — i.e., to ethnically cleanse — as many Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza as possible. Israel will do this while the US is busy slaughtering Iraqis. “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories,” Netanyahu told students at Bar-Ilan University in 1989. Americans may be clueless about the intentions of Zionists toward the Palestinians, but in Israel ethnic cleansing is a popular subject of discussion. Fifty percent or more of Israelis think ethnic cleansing is a good idea. This from a nation that supposedly remembers the Holocaust.

“The idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century,” remarks Israeli historian Benny Morris. Moreover, the Palestinian “demographic threat” was something that “once left Golda Meir sleepless at night and now serves as the subject of obsession for Israeli conferences and nervous policy analysts,” notes Will Youmans.

Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, and their fellow travelers from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Hudson Institute — as well as defense contractors and conservative foundations bankrolled by far-right American Zionists — are calling the shots on Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

It has nothing to do with the security of the American people. It has everything to do with Israel and the Likudites.

The Zionists in the Bush administration are pulling a fast one on the American people. It’s criminal behavior. It should not be tolerated. The Zionist plan to bomb and kill Arabs across the Middle East will result in dismal failure and pointless mass murder. It will destroy America. It will wreck our economy and kill our sons. Perle and his cronies are mountebanks, swindlers, hypocrites.

If Richard Perle — and Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, and all the other Zionists embedded in the Bush administration — love Israel so much, they should pack their bags and go there.

If they won’t go on their own, they should be forced to leave.

In the meantime, their treacherous deceits need to be exposed.

KURT NIMMO is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent online gallery. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com

We highly recommend regular visits to Nimmo’s website, Another Day in the Empire

 

KURT NIMMO is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/ . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair’s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com