Terri Gross and Sy Hersh, both inside the machine while pretending to be outside the machine, have a little ’scoop’ here.

Speaking with NPR’s Terri Gross, Hersh revealed that the former Vice President — who he characterized as “really smart” — has individuals that report back to him from key positions in government. He called these individuals “stay-behinds,” an intelligence term generally applied to insiders left behind in foreign governments after the occupying power is driven out.

“He’s put people back,” Hersh said. “They call it a stay-behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay-behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do.

“Cheney’s left a stay behind,” Hersh continued. “He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.”

…”Cheney has enormous influence with a lot of the senior officers in the Pentagon,” he added. “So I have been told to put the word — it was the word that I was told about, what they call “stay-behinds.” He has people he can count on to keep him informed of what’s going on. That doesn’t necessarily mean he has much influence on policy. But he, certainly in the Pentagon. And I think because certainly at the National Security Council for weeks and weeks after the Obama Administration took over, there was a long delay in getting staff turned over. So there were a lot of people around in the first few weeks, in the first months of this administration that had served very closely with the Cheney/Bush operation.”

WTF? Is Hersh saying he was told to put the word out? That looks like a little slip to me.

You know, Sy Hersh has done some great stuff over the years, but Winter Patriot really flayed him alive a couple of weeks ago, and justifiably so.

The best and the brightest don’t join the militarization of America. They fight against it. The best and the brightest didn’t get all hyped up after 9/11 and decide to go kill people. The best and the brightest could see, on the day itself, that the government/media story was hogwash. The best and the brightest have been working for years — decades in some cases — to counteract the very propaganda Hersh is so fond of spewing.

But for all his inside connections, Hersh cannot see it any other way. By his own admission, he has no outside connections.

Hersh insists [...] that his close ties with the underside of the defense world are the reason he’s so confident about his understanding of that reality. “I’m not working with guys outside the system,” he tells me. “You do understand that, don’t you? I’m not outside the system in what I do. I’m really not.”

And don’t get me started on Terri Gross. The day I heard her voice choking up like she was personally stricken while she had a guest on discussing Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, in particular the use of white phosphorous, that was the last day I listened to NPR. The way I heard it, she was not choking up about the Palestinians, she was horrified that she was forced to discuss Israel’s crimes against humanity on her damn show. Exposing the dirty laundry for all to see.

What does it mean when people with impeccable liberal credentials like Sy Hersh and Terri Gross report that Dick Cheney has moles inside the Obama government? Seems like a little Hegelian mind-fuck to me — blame Dick give a pass to Obama — but what do I know. What do you guys think?