Don't trust any argument premised upon a distortion. Per Media Matters, the reporter convicted of treason was, in fact, a Navy analyst sold photographs of a Soviet air craft carrier to Jane's Publications. The analyst, Samuel Morison, was convicted of espionage. No one at Jane's faced criminal sanction.

Hyperbole and deception aside, Hersh reports with varying degrees of specificity (but without naming a specific person, place, or time) that agents of these United States are covertly engaged in a campaign in Iraq without Congressional oversight.

Had similar information come from Ahmed Chalabi the Bush administration would have interpreted it as actionable intelligence. That's how Rumsfeld knew that the Iraqi WMDs were north, south, east, and west of Baghdad. (Reminder to trolls: there are no WMDs in Iraq.)

In a reality-based world, has Hersh revealed any operational data to Iran? I don't see anything of the sort. Iran has a long history of foreign involvement (Hammer recommends this book) including two CIA coup attempts (the CIA was 1 for 2, with 1 repressive Islamist state driven in.) Iran doesn't suspect American agents operating inside its borders. Iran knows there are American agents operating inside its borders.

What's the news value, though? Americans know as well as Iranians that we have operatives in country. The details provided add an element of intrigue, but don't really inform readers of much. Instead, the point of the story is in the lede -- that the Bush administration is consolidating intelligence gathering in the Defense Department and marginalizing the CIA. Hersh asserts that this transfer of authority "[E]nables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books -- free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees."

The wholly unsurprising reports of covert operations in Iran, then, are offered as details of growing Pentagon control over such missions. Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress. They surely could loosen restrictions on CIA activities in the name of counter-terrorism. Rather than ask for the permission they would surely get, the Bush administration intends to ask forgiveness, but only they get caught. End-runs around positive law are highly newsworthy and merit close consideration. Perhaps that's why the right is raising sedition as a red herring.

From The New Yorker, January 15, 2005

George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control -- against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism -- during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

..."This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah -- we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."

...Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books -- free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) "The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress," the former high-level intelligence official said. "They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ -- it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the CINCS" -- the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

...The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites, both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. "The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible," the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me.

Espionage by any other name

Town Hall, January 19, 2005 (also printed in the Washington Times)

This week in the New Yorker magazine, Seymour Hersh wrote the following words:

"The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran ... Much of the focus is on accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile sites. ... (The) American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts ... The American task force ... .has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations ... The task force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices ... "

Title 18 United States Code section 794, subsection (b) prohibits anyone "in time of war, with intent that the same shall be communicated to the enemy [from publishing] any information with respect to the movement, numbers, or disposition of any of the Armed Forces ... of the United States ... or supposed plans or conduct of any ... military operations ... or any other information relating to the public defense, which might be useful to the enemy ... [this crime is punishable] by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life."

Subsection (a) of that statute prohibits anyone "with ... reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates ... to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life."

...In the fairly recent past, at least one journalist writing for Jane's Publications has been successfully prosecuted under the statute, freedom of speech and the press not being a defense to espionage. Remember, in the famous Pentagon Papers case, the issue was prior restraint. Could the government stop a newspaper from publishing government secrets relating not to current operations but to prior planning? The answer then was no. But in the current matter of Seymour Hersh and the New Yorker, they have been free to publish the article. The question is whether or not any legal consequences attach to that decision.

I was shocked when I read Mr. Hersh's article. Note the tenses he uses to describe American military action: "The American commando task force ... is now working," "has been conducting secret reconnaissance." In other words, Mr. Hersh is revealing to all the world, including the Iranian government, that our commandos are currently behind enemy lines in Iran on a dangerous and vital military assignment.

Moreover, he helps the enemy by writing that our commandos have been "penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan." That considerably reduces the areas the Iranian military and counter-intelligence forces have to search and monitor to try to catch our brave commandos.

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Freepers chime in

• So why isn't this SOB being prosecuted? Rumor or not, he is a domestic enemy!
• Seymour Hersh is a bitter, treasonous, old sot.
• And .. the really big question is - WHERE DID SEYMOUR GET THAT INFORMATION ..??
  ANOTHER DISGRUNTLED MILITARY GENERAL TRYING TO GET BACK AT RUMSFELD ..??
  Seymour is just a putz - but whoever leaked this is a monster - and probably one of Hillary's minions at the Pentagon.
• Wasn't there a time when traitors were shot during a time of war? Ah, for the good old days.
• What's to stop a "citizens suit" against Hersh for giving aid to the enemy in war time and placing our lives in danger?
• The Seymour Hersh Affair will no doubt be looked into as soon as the somnolent DOJ is done fiddling around with trying to decide if Sandy Burglar did anything wrong and if so, if they should bother trying to prosecute him, and if so where and who will work up the case, and where in the budget the money will come from and what ramifications the case would have on looking like a witch hunt against a Liberal and friend of bill clinton.
  These clinton holdovers are past masters of the "slow- roll". Hersh will never see the inside of an interrogation room, much less a prison cell.
  (July, 2004 reports stated that Sandy Berger had been cleared of wrongdoing, albeit with much less fanfare than the original charges. Several right-wing sites are now reporting that the case is before a grand jury. -Hmr)
• Luv yuh Jag, you're one of the best...If the gov. would burn, hang, or whatever to just a a few of the rotten scumbags, there would be fewer Dan Rather's, including make-it-up writers like Seymour Hersh.