thenation | Fisher was too quick by half. For the rabbit hole indeed goes deep.
Just after he posted his piece, NBC news—not just “mainstream” but
solidly in the Obama White House camp—confirmed
one key claim in Hersh’s report: “Two intelligence sources tell NBC
News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a
‘walk in’ asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most
wanted man in the world was hiding—and these two sources plus a third
say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all
along.” Other sources likewise confirmed at least the broad outlines of
Hersh’s counter-narrative, and as they did, the pushback against Hersh
went, as Adam Johnson at FAIR put, from “this is a lie” to “what’s the
big deal, we knew this all along” (everybody should follow Johnson’s twitter feed).
Fisher’s not alone in accusing Hersh of frivolity (I had hopes for Fisher, who after the New Republic implosion wrote a thoughtful reflection on that magazine’s racism. But he’s since done one of the stupider pieces I’ve read on Ecuador’s Rafael Correa; Vox seems to be trying to fill the vacuum left by The New Republic when it comes to writing silly things
about Latin America). To accuse Hersh of falling under the thrall of
“conspiracy theory” is to repudiate the whole enterprise of
investigative journalism that Hersh helped pioneer. What has he written
that wasn’t a conspiracy? But Fisher, and others, believe Hersh went too
far when in a 2011 speech he made mention of the Knights of Malta and
Opus Dei, tagging him as a Dan Brown fantasist. Here’s Fisher, in his
debunking of Hersh’s recent essay: “The moment when a lot of journalists
started to question whether Hersh had veered from investigative
reporting into something else came in January 2011. That month, he spoke
at Georgetown University’s branch campus in Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address
alleging that top military and special forces leaders ‘are all members
of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.… many of them are
members of Opus Dei.’”
But here’s Steve Coll, a reporter who remains within the acceptable margins, writing in Ghost Wars
about Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey: “He was a Catholic Knight
of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his
mansion.… He attended Mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone
who asked his advice…. He believed fervently that by spreading the
Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance,
or reverse it.” Oliver North, Casey’s Iran/Contra co-conspirator,
worshiped at a “’charismatic’ Episcopalian church in Virginia called Church of the Apostles, which is organized into cell groups.”
Not too long ago, Ben Bradlee Jr. (son of no less an establishment figure than the editor of The Washington Post), could draw
the connections between the shadowy national security state and
right-wing Christianity: Iran/Contra was about many things, among them a
right-wing Christian reaction against the growing influence of
left-wing Liberation Theology in Latin America. Likewise, the US’s
post-9/11 militarism was about many things, among them the
reorganization of those right-wing Christians against what they
identified as a greater existential threat than Liberation Theology:
political Islam. Fisher should know this, as it was reported here, here, and here, among many other places.
Eager to debunk Hersh, it’s Fisher who has fallen down the rabbit hole of imperial amnesia.
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