From the April 18, 2005, New York magazine:

It doesn’t take much prompting for Hersh to supply an example of the sort of story he keeps out of The New Yorker’s pages but will discuss freely elsewhere. He tells me a long tale of the ghastly killing of some Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers. He frames his account as a hypothetical set piece: "You’re a soldier on a patrol...and you see people running, and you open fire, okay?...Maybe they were bad guys, but then they run into a soccer game." He gradually modulates the story to its climax: "You’re a bunch of young kids. And so maybe you pull the bodies together and you drop RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] and you take some photographs about it because you’re afraid you’re gonna be investigated. And maybe somebody there tells me about what happened."

Moving back into straight, declarative talk, Hersh lays out how this no-longer-quite-so-hypothetical scenario shaped his on-the-job news judgments. Investigating the tip, he discovered that, even though the photographs he obtained of the incident could suggest a terrible lapse of responsibility in the field, there was nothing here to qualify it as a Hersh story. "It was stupid, it was wrong, it was terrible, but it wasn’t murder. Do I write that? No. I don’t write that. Because then six, eight, ten American kids who did nothing but panic, and did what anybody would, would get in trouble. Do I have some photographs that are interesting? Yes. Do I publish those? No."

But does he talk about it? Sure. Did this event happen? Who knows? Hersh never subjects these sorts of stories to any kind of public truth test, but he bandies them in his lectures, as part of the ongoing effort to bring his speaking audiences closer to that other reality of the Iraq War. He does it so frequently, in fact, that it’s hard to accept that he’s only doling out information for its own sake. In part, one senses, Hersh’s stump performances are of a piece with the sort of one-upping bravado that makes up many conversations journalists have with their colleagues—only done here in public and for hire. Again, Hersh is refreshingly candid about the showman aspect of his anecdotage: "I get paid to do speeches...And I’m not there to be on straight. I’m there to tell, you know, give somebody, exchange views with people."

Occasionally, Hersh’s half-confirmed spoken accounts of key events in the Iraq War do get significantly revised when they make their way into print. Last July, not too long after the Abu Ghraib story broke, Hersh spoke to the annual membership conference of the American Civil Liberties Union. He stood before the crowd and in mid-speech appeared to talk to himself. "Debating about it," he muttered, then paused. "Um." Clucked his tongue. "Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. Okay? Videos," he said. "And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has. They’re in total terror it’s going to come out."

What Hersh said wasn’t entirely correct. His book Chain of Command would deliver the authoritative Seymour M. version: "An attorney involved in the case told me in July 2004 that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy by a foreign contract employee who served as an interpreter at Abu Ghraib," Hersh wrote. "In the statement, which had not been made public, the lawyer told me, a prisoner stated that he was a witness to the rape, and that a woman was taking pictures."

Horrifying stuff. But key details were different from the impression Hersh gave to the ACLU crowd. And the Sy version raced halfway across the Internet before Seymour M. could get his boots on.

"Key details were different." Cripes. Exactly how many levels of hearsay IS that in the actual reference? But that first version, as the article says, now shows up in thousands of internet references, including, as I recall, a few on this board.