Report: White House Furious With New Yorker's Hersh

A new article penned by The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, which questions the accuracy of reports indicting Iran for secretly working to develop a nuclear weapon, has angered White House officials, according to Politico.

In his article, entitled, “Iran and the Bomb,” Hersh argues that the evidence to support the Islamic regime’s clandestine nuclear program is uncertain at best. Hersh, who has claimed several times in recent years that the U.S. is quietly looking for reasons to justify military action against Iran, writes that it is false to assume that Iran has resumed working on a weapon.

“Members of the Obama Administration often talk as if this were a foregone conclusion, as did their predecessors under George W. Bush. There’s a large body of evidence, however, including some of America’s most highly classified intelligence assessments, suggesting that the U.S. could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq eight years ago—allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state’s military capacities and intentions.”

Hersh later asserts that the “two most recent National Intelligence Estimates (N.I.E.s) on Iranian nuclear progress have stated that there is no conclusive evidence that Iran has made any effort to build the bomb since 2003.”

In email responses to Politico, senior White House officials expressed frustration with Hersh’s allegations. One official said the article “was met with a collective eye roll in the White House and in the intelligence community.” A second official called Hersh’s piece a “slanted book report on a long narrative that’s already been told many times over.”

The full version of the article will appear in the June 6 issue of The New Yorker.