Speaking as the Awl-reader who wrote that piece, I'd like to mention something borderline newsworthy that I neglected to put in my WhoWhatWhy/Salon.com-sanctioned piece of Media Criticism®.

Blake Hounshell (and it would appear the entirety of the "Foreign Policy" staff) seems to have felt it unimportant to fairly publicize Hersh's ameliorating statements about the Knights of Malta---which were made in literally the next breath, judging from the transcript Blake Hounshell posted after his initial salvo:

Look, Knights of Malta does great stuff. They do a lot of charity work; so does Opus Dei. It's a very extreme, extremely religious, Roman Catholic sect, if you will [...]

[ The rest is here, and I really encourage you all to read it: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/22/transcript_the_obamabush_foreign_policies_why_cant_america_change?page=0,1 ]

In that ellipsis, for the record, is a very adorable, avuncular, 1960's reference to a joke about Werner Von Braun, wherein Hersh would appear to have confused Tom Lehrer and Mort Sahl.

God that Hersh! What an asshole, AMIRITE? PPL?

The problem is that Hersh is trying to reference a song (He calls it a ditty) that Tom Leher wrote, and not the quip Sahl made prior:
http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008/03/15/thats-not-my-department-says-wernher-von-braun/

Clearly, we can't trust Seymour Hersh to remember the authorship of a decades old joke about a Nazi rocket scientist. But fortunately, we can trust Blake Hounshell to use the internet to score cheap points on a septuagenarian investigative reporter.

(In fairness, I promise to leave open to the possibility that Hounshell is an obsessive 30-something-year-old Mort Sahl fan. I mean, I watched A LOT of "Get Smart" on Nick@Nite growing up. We live in postmodern times.)

It's been over a month since Hounshell published the 1st half of his Hersh transcript, and he's yet to put out part two. I respect that a huge chunk of North Africa is undergoing regime change and Hounshell has to cover it.

However, I still think it's a little inexcusable to say a man gave "a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe" when it's pretty clear from your own transcript that he's trying to explain a dynamic between intense religious belief in the military and a "tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling" noticed by talking to members of the military.

I've also done enough transcribing in my life to know you could make anyone speaking off-the-cuff or conversationally sound like they are rambling.

I think it's especially great when that happens just because the interviewer treats their subject's words like Canonical Literature.

Perhaps you have read such an interview? In a music-related zine? Or web-zine?