Plan of Attack

According to Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, President Bush is gearing up for another regime change, this time in Iran. What Hersh has learned from various sources is frightening: the White House has "intensified planning for a possible major air attack" that may call "for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon [. . .] against underground nuclear sites".

As fearsome as these findings are, the fact that Hersh's sources are largely unnamed officials within the Pentagon creates an interesting context in which to discuss officialized news. If these plans are, as one military planner contends, part of a "campaign of 'coercion'" - "[y]ou have to really show a threat in order to get Ahmadinejad to back down", Hersh quotes him as saying - should the press pass them on with so little exploration of the possibility that they are false or exaggerated?

And if Hersh is correct in his assertion that President Bush is set on "saving Iran" using nuclear weapons, then the lack of conspicuous coverage on the part of the mainstream media is astounding. Does the news's dramatization bias run so deep that no reportage about this story will occur until the mushroom clouds begin to bloom?