Sometimes I wonder about Hersch, I really do. Just my two shillings.
I wonder too. And FP editor Hounshell is scratching his head too. But I suspect we all have different questions, possibly all related ones. I want to try to be clearer about my questions.
It seems pretty clear that Hersh does have CIA sources, or at least has over the years. He's got lots of people talking to him all over government and elsewhere. Some of my questions have to do with a hunch he's not always been good about ferreting out the angle his sources are pursuing when talking to him. It's not easy to figure out when you're being feed a line and what purpose that line serves.
As far as it goes with the remark he heard about Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, that certainly rings true, at least follows with US and French policy towards his regime.
And Hersh's remark about the passing of crusader coins sounds like something he actually witnessed; that is I suspect some military contacts showed him some coins rather than that Hersh just heard about officers passing coins. That's just what I suspect, I have no evidence for it.
I was interested in the Knights of Malta bit because I've seen online Bunker Hunt in connection with Knights of Malta. Bunker Hunt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bunker_Hunt has a long connection with the John Birch Society. As fascinating a character Bunker Hunt is, there is surprisingly little about him online; that is if you exclude conspiracy theory sites.
H. L. Hunt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunt was a really interesting character and it seems strange to me there's not much about him online either. There is a biography of H.L. Hunt by Stanley H. Brown published in 1976 http://www.amazon.com/H-Hunt-Biography-Stanley-Brown/dp/0872234495/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295420793&sr=8-1. I haven't read the book, but to see it going for nothing on the used book market primes me to get it. Anyhow I'm hardly an expert about H.L. Hunt.
Ray Lee Hunt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Lee_Hunt inherited along with his three sisters Hunt Oil.The status of what Hunt owns now isn't clear to me Hunt Oil was sold to XTO Energy in 2008 for 4.2 billion dollars. I haven't researched it carefully, but from what I understand none of Ray Lee Hunts personal assets were involved in that sale. Anyhow Ray Hunt was a close supporter of G. W. Bush and served in some interesting capacities during the administration. He is also the Chairman of the Compensation Committee of Haliburton http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ray_L._Hunt
H.L. Hunt was a serial bigamist and had 14 children by three different wives. This greatly complicated inheritance claims. Although Bunker Hunt was a son from H.L. Hunt's first wife, the fortune he made was his own.
So far as I can tell there is no relation between H.L. Hunt and E. Howard Hunt.
H.L. Hunt's name comes up with all sorts of deep state activities, most notably in the JFK assassination. Bunker Hunt was implicated in the Iran/Contra affair. It's worth reading this account of Bunker and his brother William Herbert Hunt's attempt to corner the silver market in 1970's culminating in 1979. This article http://silverbearcafe.com/private/01.09/circlek.html has a point of view, worth taking with a grain of salt, but seems overall to be an accurate account of what happened.
Then there's Ray Hunt and more recent history. All of them point to deep state activities.
I don't know very much and I posted the link from the FP about Seymour Hersh hoping a discussion here might shed some light.
Hersh's talk in Qatar reminded me of questions about the Hunt family. And those questions are probably tangential to what he said. The only connection was the reference to the Knights of Malta in the JOSC.
Another bit of background perhaps even more tangential is an article in the recent Atlantic by Cynthia Freeland "The Rise of the New Global Elite" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/. It's a fascinating article and a very cheep summary of it is that the new rich are mostly people from working class backgrounds, "working rich" as Freeland calls them. And Freeland suggests they're so different that they identify primarily with each other rather than holding national identity or identifying with the old rich.
John Robb takes a different bit from the article which seems worth copying a snippett http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/01/the-winner-take-most-economy.html
Here's an expansion of her drivers of the winner take most economy. They are, in order of onset:
Financialization. Extreme economic leverage (from derivatives to debt). The rise of transactional morality.
Globalization. Wage, regulatory, and tax arbitrage. The collapse of moral standards via relativism. A willingness to enable mercantilists (China/Japan/Germany).
Internetization. Globally portable productivity. Network effects that lock-in success. Extreme technological leverage.
In short, these drivers have made it possible to concentrate wealth like never before over the past 30 years (and it's accelerating).
How this relates is probably quite idiosyncratic on my part. Rich people need the military to get rich among other things. Jeff Sharlet wrote about the Family in Harpers (then a book). I was fascinated by the Harpers article because it seemed to put some pieces together between my adolescent religiosity and right wing politics. Then Sharlet wrote again in Harpers about the religion in the military and how mainstream denominations became marginalized. Anyhow what I got from Sharlet's pieces was a glimpse of a network developed out of religious organizations. Quite simplified Young Life for High School, Campus Crusade for Christ in college and The Family for business and government leaders. There's sort of a feeder system.
What's strange for people in the UK to imagine is how fascinated many Americans are with Heraldry. We're famous for all sorts of bogus "knights." This document about the rise of the Christian Right is from a source that requires some skepticism called Cephas Ministries, however it provides a very short history of some of the developments of the Christian Right http://www.cephas-library.com/nwo/nwo_history_of_the_christian_right_movement.html Some of the information there is easily corroborated. Showing my lack of rigor, I'd say there's a ring of truth to it. In that Bunker Hunt's brings up the connection between Bunker Hunt and the Knights of Malta. Lots of other sites do too, but so much of what is online about Bunker Hunt is dodgy it's hard to pin that down. Bunker Hunt's connection to Campus Crusade for Christ is solid. The connection between a Catholic organization and fundamentalist Protestant ones seems strange. But even if the connections between Hunt and the Knights of Malta are primarily on dodgy sites, there seems there maybe some fact there. so I have questions.
J. Peter Grace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Peter_Grace was a member of Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Grace is associated with deep state activities too. G.W. Bush flew planes for him and Pat Robertson worked for Grace.
What I've written here is just very rough background that makes me ask rather off topic questions about what the heck Hersh was on about in Qatar.
I threw in Freeland's article about the new rich because I question the just how big the fault lines really are between the new rich and the old. There are old rich clubs and they are quite organized. The exchange of crusader coins hardly seems something to hide from Hersh or the public for that matter. Hersh is an outsider looking in. He knows a little bit about the connections, but probably isn't initiated into any of the clubs, at least to any level of importance. I suspect that the coins suggested to him connections that he couldn't quite piece together. As they say in church, a sacrament is an outward visible sign of an inward spiritual grace. He got the visible sign part and recognized the significance, but not necessarily all of what the significance represents. That's what I suspect. New rich need association with armed forces. There are layers of institutions that no matter how rich they simply cannot crash through. I suspect crashing through isn't on their minds anyhow, but rather to become initiated into these institutions. The fundamentalist Christian aspect of the military is somewhat new, begun in the 1970's, accelerated during the Reagan era and at full bore today.
I think the Hunt family plays a significant role, as the Grace family and a hand full of others. I think Hersh is onto something. I'm not sure what exactly and I'm not sure he's figured it out. But I don't discount that he really is onto something.
, which is a kind of consensus, or supposed to be one even for "left" radical critics. 
