Seymour Hersh's reputation has declined precipitously in the years since he was rightly hailed as a hero for breaking the Abu Ghraib story. He was pummeled for publishing, in the LRB, an all-but-refuted story claiming that the entire story about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was a lie (he relied on the secondhand story of a retired, anonymous defense department employee for his sourcing; his home publication, The New Yorker, refused to run it).

He's promoted a number of other stories that, to put it gently, an unusual quotient of support-among- journalists over impact-if-true. Among them, he believes that USSOCOM is run by a secret cabal of Opus Dei Catholics, and that the Syrian chemical attacks aren't just false, but actually a false flag operation run by Turkey. He believes that the US actively supports Islamist terrorists in Iran and in Lebanon, and that the US trained Iranian terrorists (the anti-regime MEK) on US soil.

This isn't a new wrinkle in Hersh's career. Early on, he made outlandish claims about the Kennedy administration, including that the Chicago Outfit fixed the result of the Presidential election.

Two tricky things about Hersh are first, and most obviously, that he occasionally breaks a story of immense national importance, and secondly, that he tends to orient his reporting in directions that are both largely valid and under-reported. Kennedy was almost surely one of our more crooked presidents. The Bush administration probably did play some kind of footsie with the MEK. But that doesn't make any particular story he reports actually true; in journalism, you can't just end up in the broad vicinity of right.