Far-left reporter Seymour Hersh has made a career of besmirching the reputation of the U.S. in the global arena. While tirelessly seeking out U.S. scandals to publicize, he perpetually ignored the barbaric crimes of our enemies, including the North Vietnamese, Saddam Hussein, North Korea and Islamic jihadists. Now, Hersh is embroiled in his own scandal. Recently, he claimed that major elements of the U.S. military are using the War on Terror as a cover for a “crusade” to conquer Islam for Christianity. The outburst provides a glimpse into the journalist’s paranoid world that has framed his stories.
In his speech for Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Seymour Hersh said that the secret agenda of the Bush Administration was to wage a war on Islam and steal Muslim resources, using language sure to please the ears of any radical Islamic propagandist.
“In the Cheney shop, the attitude was…We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody’s gonna give a damn,” Hersh claimed. “That’s the attitude. We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command.”
He then claimed that military leaders like General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta” and the Opus Dei. He then mentioned about how many military personnel are devoutly religious, and warned of the Christian extremist agenda that has hijacked U.S. foreign policy.
“They do see what they’re doing—and this is not an atypical attitude among some military—it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in[ the 13th century.” He also denigrated the U.S. military by saying “Right now, there’s a tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”
Hersh’s comments should bet met with fierce condemnation. He assumes that the Christian beliefs of many soldiers make them Crusaders and anti-Muslim bigots. General McChrystal has denied being a member of the Knights of Malta, with a spokesman saying the allegation is “completely false and without basis in fact.” As the Washington Post writes, the Knights of Malta “has evolved into a charitable organization” that sponsors medical missions trips, far from a conspiracy-orchestrating extremist group. The Opus Dei, likewise, promotes Catholicism and says it “has no views of its own on politics, economics, or social matters.”
His remarks are bizarre considering the persecution of Christians in Iraq, with at least half of the 800,000 fleeing the country since 2003. The U.S. government has not pressured the Iraqi government to give the Christians an autonomous region as they are requesting. U.S. forces, far from carrying out a “crusade,” have honorably protected mosques and Muslim civilians from sectarian warfare, terrorism and oppression. The invasion of Iraq replaced a secular dictator with a democratically-elected government that is more outwardly Islamic. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Muslim blood hasn’t been shed for the sake of Christianity, but non-Muslim and especially Christian blood has been shed for the sake of Muslims.
Hersh’s rhetoric went even further, accusing the Bush Administration of forming a near-dictatorship. He told the students that “eight or nine neoconservatives…overthrew the American government” and that he was amazed at “how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced.” Apparently, Hersh has forgotten the anti-war protests of 2003, the divisions within the Bush Administration, how close the 2004 presidential election was, the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 and the antagonistic relationship President Bush had with the press his entire time in office.
These outrageous accusations aren’t surprising given Hersh’s reports in the past. He reported that Vice President Cheney ran his own “executive assassination ring” with no congressional oversight that was free to kill terrorists in a dozen countries at will. The State Department’s ambassador and the CIA’s station chief were not informed of operations, he claims, and the leader overseeing them had to reduce the number of assassinations because “there were so many collateral deaths.”
Hersh also claimed that the U.S. was indirectly supporting Sunni terrorists to counter Iran and Hezbollah. He claimed that U.S. financial aid to the Lebanese government was supporting three terrorist groups tied to Al-Qaeda, including Asbat al-Ansar and Fatah al-Islam. The latter group is closely connected to the Syrian regime and was used to destabilize Lebanon, not fight Hezbollah. Fatah al-Islam was accused of making a hit list of 36 individuals in Lebanon that opposed Syria, not exactly the action of a group receiving covert Lebanese and American funding.
Hersh also offers a benefit of the doubt to radical Muslims that he clearly doesn’t give to the U.S. government and military, especially the Bush Administration. He writes that Iranian President Ahmadinejad has “reportedly been connected to Imad Mughniyeh,” as if Iranian support for the Hezbollah terrorism mastermind isn’t an established fact. He says, “I think [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah is his own man” that isn’t “controlled” by Syria and Iran and that “we can’t find any evidence of a significant [nuclear] weapons program” in Iran.
In his article raising alarm over the Bush Administration’s contingency planning for a war with Iran, he claims that a major fissure formed in the military over the Administration’s insistence that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran be a part of the planning. Instead of seeing the contingency planning as a responsible preparation for the worst, Hersh says “you can’t apply rationality to it, because I think it’s simply something Bush and Cheney want to do…they want to take out Iran.” Needless to say, the bombing campaign against Iran that Hersh feared the Bush Administration was setting the stage for never happened.
He even goes so far as to paint the Bush Administration as the war-mongers and the government of Syria as a peacemaker. He says that Syrian President Bashar Assad “with great pain” complained to him how the U.S. wouldn’t accept his overtures and wouldn’t respond to letters he wrote to President Bush begging for a new relationship.
“[W]e can do more for you in Iraq than any other country. Why aren’t you using it? We don’t need a Somalia on our borders. We’re not interested in chaos there,” he claims the Syrians and Iranians said when they tried reaching out to the U.S. He also quoted a Syrian intelligence official as saying, “We’re willing to even talk about our support for Hezbollah with you. We want to see you win in the war on terror.”
Obviously, if that was the case, Syria would not have put major resources towards sponsoring Baathist insurgents and radical Islamic terrorists including Al-Qaeda that were creating the chaos in Iraq the Assad regime and Iran claimed to fear. Hersh, by giving the Assad regime the benefit of the doubt he’d never give the Bush Administration, interpreted an ultimatum as a genuine overture for peace.
As an iconic journalist, Hersh is envied by reporters and the students he gives speeches to. In this case, the students that he told elements of the U.S. military are trying to “turn mosques into cathedrals” are in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service where they are training to become America’s next diplomats, policy-makers and officials. This is not the education we want the next generation’s media and government to receive.
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