Have you heard of Abu Ghraib?

Most of his award winning journalism has relied upon anonymous sources.

This is how it has always worked.

This isn't how it's always worked for Hersh, though.

The Abu Ghraib report was published by the New Yorker, which has fact checkers on staff. You cannot tell their stuff "my source is anonymous" and not have them confirm that source: the public may not know Hersh's sources for that work, but the New Yorker does.

Hersh's recent work is self published and not fact checked. Moreover, it is wild, and often logically at odds with itself (This operation was extremely secret, and yet the Treasury department was involved?). So: times have changed.

I love Substack, but Substack doesn't solve your reputation problem for you: if you were reliant on your editor to check your work (as Hersh clearly was), Substack gives you nothing to help out with that. It's a different world now, unfortunately, and it's made a crank out of Hersh.

His ad hoc speeches during the Abu Ghraib reporting were also not fact checked, and he said some things which he later admitted were exaggerations. Some reporters need the discipline of fact checking; Hersh has always been very good when he had that, and very bad when he does not.

Abu Ghraib was over 20 years ago mate.

Journalists during Bush Jr's era were solid. Post Obama, the entire profession couldn't handle not being the under dog.

And now we're paying the price with untrustworthy or outright made up "anonymous sources".

For what it's worth, the Washington Post at least doubts it was Russia (december 2022): https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/21/...

And he got exactly the same reaction when he published the Abu Ghraib story. The Pentagon called it nonsense.

That seems like a risky rubric. Are we to conclude that anything the Pentagon denies is true?

* * *

Where is your source for the Pentagon calling it nonsense? Here's George W. Bush publicly apologizing for the abuses on May 7, 2004:

https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/07/bush.apology/inde...

Hersh's New Yorker article was published April 30. His reporting was based on the Army's Taguba report, which leaked broadly in the first week of May. Other reporters had access to and reported on the leaked report. There's absolutely grounds to criticize the Pentagon in terms of its lack of transparency with regards to the report, but once the story was broken it was way too well-substantiated to outright deny.