Excerped from Inside the Ring - by Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
Seymour Hersh has lobbed another bomb at Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his staff in the New Yorker magazine. This time, the Pulitzer Prize winner says Mr. Rumsfeld is responsible for prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison because the secretary wants terrorists killed or captured.
| What the hell else would you have us do with them? Give them a stern talking-to, like the Soddies? Give them money and government sinecures like Yemen? |
The Pentagon vehemently denied the charge, and the CIA called the story "fundamentally wrong."
| Ummm... The answer I'd have given would have been "Hell, yes!" |
This is not the first time Mr. Hersh and Mr. Rumsfeld have clashed. Mr. Rumsfeld has called some of Mr. Hersh’s reporting "fiction." Take, for instance, a May 12 , 2003, story that accused Mr. Rumsfeld’s staff of being a "cabal." The Pentagon believed the article was so inaccurate it mailed a protest letter on June 9 to New Yorker Editor David Remnick. "I am writing to express my concern over the inaccuracies in your May 12 Seymour Hersh story on Secretary Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense," wrote Bryan G. Whitman, a senior public affairs official. "There are more inaccuracies than can be addressed in this letter, and it is particularly disappointing given the time and effort taken by my staff to ensure The New Yorker has its facts straight prior to publication. During the week of April 28, my staff received from a New Yorker fact-checker a fax with 20 questions regarding the Office of Special Plans and Abe Shulsky, the former director of that office. Mr. Shulsky sat down with those press officers over a period of two days to answer those questions. Once the answers were compiled, they were sent by fax to The New Yorker and their receipt confirmed. When the article appeared the following week, we were disturbed to see that many of the answers provided were left out. In fact, in some instances, the article made statements in direct contradiction to the facts we provided. ... I do hope that you will ensure that this kind of lapse does not recur." Mr. Remnick, a former reporter for The Washington Post, has stood by his reporter. |