Emmanuel Sivan, writing in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, relates how “Sharp-eyed reporters in Beirut read Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh’s article in astonishment,” so obviously were Hersh’s allegations about the Bush administration’s cooperation with al-Qaeda-linked groups in Lebanon untrue:
But it was published in The New Yorker, a magazine known for its meticulous fact-checking. The Lebanese reporters began investigating the story on their own.
Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent’s Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it “from all kinds of people.”
Thus are reports about the Middle East generated, I thought to myself. And this is a case involving two well-known journalists and an even more well-known magazine.
It is worth reading Sivan’s piece in full. It tells us a lot about how myths become facts when left in the hands of certain western journalists covering the Middle East. Crooke, incidentally, is also well known for his extreme anti-Israeli and anti-American views.