Seymour Hersh, the legendary U.S. reporter, talked to The Globe and Mail about what the Plamegate scandal is really all about.

Some excerpts:

He's going to save America," Hersh predicted, on the phone from his home in Washington, just days before Fitzgerald announced indictments against I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, on Friday.

"Because it's not just about Wilson," maintained Hersh, who, as a New York Times reporter in the late 1960s, first blew the lid off the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and, more recently, exposed abuses at Abu Ghraib, the prison west of Baghdad where U.S. forces engaged in torture and humiliation of prisoners. He appears in Toronto tomorrow to speak to the group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.

"Fitzgerald's going deep. He may just unravel the whole conspiracy," continues Hersh, who might be proven right. While Libby resigned after being indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements, Fitzgerald continues to investigate Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's influential deputy chief of staff.

All this to determine whether senior White House operatives leaked Valerie Plame's name to select reporters in order to discredit her husband, Wilson. Wilson had previously been dispatched by the Bush administration to Africa to verify reports that Saddam Hussein was buying nuclear technology from Niger, but had found no evidence to support those allegations. In a subsequent op-ed piece in The New York Times, he questioned the legitimacy of America's war in Iraq.

But Hersh said last week that the Plame/Wilson affair was only part of the saga. At its heart, the whole conspiracy -- in the minds of blue-state Americans that revile the George Bush presidency -- encompasses the notion that the Iraq war was planned and orchestrated long before the administration began to build its case for regime change; and that the case it attempted to build, as laid out by former secretary of state Colin Powell to the United Nations, was essentially a fraud (and known to be a fraud).

Two thousand U.S. military personnel and tens of thousands of Iraqis have since died in what many would thus consider an illegal war. In Hersh's eyes, anything that might hasten the departure of its chief architects, the hated neocons, would be welcome.

"We're so out of control," he says of the United States. "We have a colossus out of control. It's the end of the world, brought to you by the neocons."

Hersh recently got hold of a copy of the United Nations interim report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis on the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The document cited "converging evidence" that senior levels of the Syrian government were involved in the murder.

But according to Hersh, the Mehlis report is built on the same anemic foundations as Powell's UN presentation in February, 2003. "He is relying on intercepts of an unnamed source inside the Iranian air force, someone without inside stuff. It's not empirical." On the basis of this thin evidence, he says, the Bush administration is campaigning at the UN for sanctions on Syria.

Hersh will be in Toronto tomorrow to speak at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression gala.