Here we go again! No, but seriously.

Last Thursday I edited an audio interview with journalist Seymour M. Hersh. Hersh has an article in this week’s New Yorker about how the Bush administration already has secret operatives in Iran hooking up with dissident groups to try and destabilize Tehran.

As cool as it was to be privy to Hersh’s findings a few days before the official publication date, the story has been on my mind all weekend. This is seriously scary stuff. Almost as worrisome as the approaching conflict itself is the degree to which the media here may either avoid this story or superficially report but play it down. Let us hope–and pray to the higher power of your choice– demand that they take this seriously.

Hersh (who as it turns out is a delightfully brusque character when the tape isn’t rolling–something like a film noir P.I.–and I don’t fault him based on what I’m sure he’s had to go through to tell this and the other important stories he’s broken during his career) had some great lines that I wish could have made in in the final edit, but alas the podcast is designed to get people to read the article, and it’s all in there.

One of the quotes in the final edit comes (via Hersh) from Sec. of Defense Robert Gates during an off-the-record meeting with Congress:

“If we bomb Iran, our grandchildren will be fighting jihadists.”

Got that? It’s Bush’s OWN secretary of defense breaking with the administration and giving his own (off-the-record) opinion on the dire consequences of going to war with Iran.

If there’s ever a time to NOT soften the edges in our reporting on Iran (as if there ever weren’t one), it’s now.