The legendary reporter spoke Tuesday with Democracy Now! to elaborate on an article in the current New Yorker: Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq war headed next?

An excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. So, can you just lay out what you understand at this point and who your sources are telling you what the administration's plans are, or hopes are, next?

SEYMOUR HERSH: I’m not going to hold you literally to who your sources are. But obviously, for the last four years, I've been talking to people pretty much on the inside, or at least have a good smell of what's going on. And, as you said, it's real simple. We are -- I think the President will probably agree to a pullout. He could not, because he is totally committed to what he's doing. But for political purposes, a pullout won't end the war. That's the critical thing.

It won't bring victory to us. It will simply change the color, if you will, of the people who die there. Instead of American boys dying -- certainly change the nationality -- there will be more Iraqis. It doesn't mean victory. It just -- we're going to -- the Iraqi units, most of them, very few can stand up by themselves. But there's the belief in the military is that an Iraqi battalion that’s hapless as it may be now, supported by more American air, any time they have a whiff of the insurgency, they can call in an air strike, that would give them enough wherewithal to withstand, at least stand up, for a couple of years, long enough to mask a complete withdrawal.

AMY GOODMAN: Why hasn't the Bush administration done this yet?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, they are doing more bombing. One of the great x-factors of the war -- this is something else that I noted in the article, is we know nothing about the bombing. Clearly there's all sorts of anecdotal reason to believe that the bombing has gone up exponentially, certainly in the last four or five months in the Sunni Triangle, the four provinces around Baghdad. There's been a lot of -- more provinces. Every day, we read about bombs falling. And we now have planes that loiter, hornets, and we have planes that come from a base in Kirkuk, I think, and they loiter in the air above potential combat areas. You know, there go three guys, throw a bomb there.

And there's no statistics. I’m one of those people that goes back to the Vietnam War, where every day we got a description and an official account of how many sorties, one mission by one plane, how much tonnage. We don't get any of those numbers in this war. We’ve never had those numbers. There's no embedded American journalist at an airbase – at one of the bases in the Gulf region. I think many of the air bases right now -- some of our air bases are obviously inside Iraq. But that's pretty much, I presume, to be a classified secret, or a secret, anyway. We don't have reporters at the air bases. We don't know what's going on with the air war.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh, wrote a piece in this week's New Yorker, called "Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next?" Sy, can you talk about John Murtha, the congressman, and the significance of what he said?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Murtha is one of those oldies, in his 70s now. He’s somebody like me, I always try to get to. I can talk to some of his aides. He's on the Defense -- he’s one of the leading players on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He's a very conservative military guy, who controls the budget, not only the budget we know about, but the black budget, the covert budget. He's one of those people trusted. Jerry Lewis in the Congress is another one, a House member. In the Senate, it would be Senator Inouye of Hawaii and Senator Ted Stevens, both in their 80s, of Alaska. They run the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. These are the guys that the generals talk to. And Murtha is one, in particular. He’s known for his closeness to the four-stars. They come and they bleed on him.

And so, for Murtha to suddenly say it's over, as he did three weeks ago or two weeks ago, as I wrote in this article, it drove the White House crazy. They were beyond mad, as somebody said to me, because they know that the generals are talking to him. So here you have a case where we don't have -- you know, the generals are terrified pretty much, as they always are. That's just the nature of the game. But they don't speak truth to power. They're not telling the American people exactly what's going on, and they're clearly not telling the White House, because the White House doesn't want to hear.

So Murtha's message is a message, really, from a -- you can consider it a message from a lot of generals on active duty today. This is what they think, at least a significant percentage of them, I assure you. This is, I’m not over-dramatizing this. It's a shot across the bow. They don't think it's doable. You can't tell that to this President. He doesn't want to hear it. But you can say it to Murtha, you can say it to Inouye, you can say it to Stevens.