NOT THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

Seymour Hersh hit the airwaves this morning on "Meet the Press" and is scheduled tonight on "Dateline NBC" to talk about (OK, promote) his new book "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," which is being released Monday.

I didn't watch "Meet the Press" because it had Colin Powell about to do his spiel. Having just seen his non-responsive interview with George Stephanopoulos an hour earlier on "This Week," I thought, "No point in listening to that all over again." Wish I'd known Hersh was scheduled, too (along with Bob Woodward). So I'll tune in tonight to catch him on "Dateline." (West Coasters still have a chance to tune in to "Meet the Press" this morning.)

In any case, an early glimpse of the book was offered in Sunday's New York Times in a news story headlined, "New Book Says Bush Officials Were Told of Detainee Abuse." Among other things, it reports:

Mr. Hersh asserts that a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who visited the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the late summer of 2002 filed a report of abuses there that drew the attention of Gen. John A. Gordon, a deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser. But when General Gordon called the matter to her attention and she discussed it with other senior officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, no significant change resulted.

Times reporter John H. Cushman Jr. offers the caveat that "Mr. Hersh's account is based on anonymous sources, some secondhand, and could not be independently verified." I offer a reminder of our rant three weeks ago, DON'T MAKE SY HERSH LAUGH, about "systemic failure, the fondly brandished euphemism for failure to take personal responsibility," being used as cover for the criminal judgments of the top brass in the White House and the Pentagon.