Last week I mentioned that a Seymour Hersh piece would be coming out in the New Yorker attempting to show that the Syrian site Israel bombed in September 2007 was not a nuclear facility.

Well, Hersh’s piece is out now, and it’s a giant whiff, even by Hersh’s standards. He quotes a couple of people from left-wing American think tanks saying that claims of a nuclear-related target are “all political.” There are the standard anonymous quotes from diplomats close to the IAEA casting doubt on the operation. A staffer at the lefty New America Foundation in Washington says about the satellite imagery of the site, “all you could see was a box. You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.” Well, Jeffrey Lewis, maybe Israel has better satellite imagery than you do, and maybe Israel also has some people inside Syria who are supplying information on the mysterious box. Ever thought of that?

Hersh casts some legitimate doubt on the story of the Al Hamed, the ship that docked in Syria a few days before the strike and has been said to have originated in North Korea. But one of his sources is a Greenpeace employee who monitors illegal fishing, who he quotes saying “I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing–in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.” Well that settles it!

Hersh spent three months researching this piece and traveled several times to Israel and Syria to conduct interviews with his armies of anonymous sources. After all that time and effort, he couldn’t have simply said to his editors, “I’ve got nothing.” But if you read between the lines, that’s exactly the message he’s sending.