To follow up on this afternoon’s post, various news outlets are reporting that the Pentagon steadfastly, firmly, or — put in your tough-sounding adverb here — denied the claims Sy Hersh makes in his new piece in The New Yorker.
But read the actual statement by Pentagon Spokesman Larry Di Rita, posted at the Pentagon website. This is not a denial of anything. It’s a classic non-denial denial — a bunch of aggressive phrases strung together to sound like a denial without actually denying anything.
The one thing Di Rita terms an error is, I believe, largely a matter of semantics rather than one of substance.
I don’t fault Di Rita. This program Hersh says exists is even more secret than the normal classification system allows. So even if Di Rita had wanted to come out and say Hersh got everything right, he probably couldn’t.
But reporters who characterize Di Rita’s words for their readers should read them a bit more closely before describing them as any sort of blanket denial.
