Sy Hersh has been Frigthener-in-Chief of Black Ops journalism at the New Yorker for ages, and nobody (save, perhaps, the angry but still under-wraps Pentagon flacks) dare question his most recent screed; that the neocons inside the Pentagon have snatched up every camouflaged Special Forces operative to use them for not one war, but several. Plural. Except there's a detail everyone's missing.

In his piece, Hersh goes to great lengths to describe how the people referred to by Maureen Dowd as "Bushies" are girding for a military showdown with Iran after we mop up in Iraq, bug out and call it even. How they've shafted the hapless CIA right down to the last clumsy, khaki-wearing analyst and established a Rome on the Potomac where Rumsfeld reigns and will start a military domino effect.

Okay. Sy, you usually have at least a few retired members of the "silent professionals" to back up your claims, but this time, you're relying mostly on analysts, whom everyone even outside the Beltway knows are the last people with access to any military theater (what, did they get booted off the gravy train?). It's kinda like having those white guys with laser pointers in the TV studio during the run-up to the Iraq war; how out of the loop were they? Where are your Col. David Hackworths? Your Andy Mcnabs? We need more ex-boots on the ground here, Sy, not spreadsheet Joes.

Besides, how can anybody be surprised that someone finally takes the whisky and the car keys away from the CIA? Goodness sakes, weren't these the guys who went picnicking in Vietnam back when their tourist brochures said "Sunny Indochina?" Who left so many fingerprints on the Allende coup in 1973 they might as well have shot an advertising promo for Pinochet in the Langley cafeteria?

Stilll, Sy, you seem more peeved by the fact that the Pentagon will not be accountable, rather than the fact that they might look to cook Iran before Israel can. So...since the intel budget has been largely secret since the OSS changed its name back when TV sets showed us wars in black and white, what's the earth-shattering news? That Rumsfelf is consolidating power? That the U.S. is banking on Europe buckling to Iran and preparing for it? Foggy Bottom has done its own thing ever since Robert E. Lee and his boys went to Mexico on a little adventure back in the 1850s that got their Irish up for the Civil War. And even Kennedy signed the Phoenix program, which was so off the books nobody ever copped to it later.

Next time, give us the steak, Sy, not the sizzle. Please.