Close followers of the New Yorker magazine’s coverage of the war on terrorism were wondering when Seymour Hersh was going to turn. It looks to us like he did it earlier this month, with a 4,000-word dispatch taking to task Richard Perle for participating in public life while also having business interests. The most severe on-the-record criticism from an American in the article called this “an appearance of a conflict.” Mr. Hersh goes on in the article in his own voice to write that Mr. Perle, “in crisscrossing between the public and the private sectors, has put himself in a difficult position — one not uncommon to public men.” The article noted that Mr. Perle is “one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.”

Indeed it is not uncommon. As The New York Sun reported in its August 19, 2002, editorial, “Who Is Brent Scowcroft?” an outspoken and influential op ponent of the war with Iraq at the time, Brent Scowcroft, also has business interests. Since 1994, Mr. Scowcroft has been president of the Scowcroft Group, whose Web site describes it as “an international business advisory group.” The firm declined to disclose to The New York Sun the names of its clients, but its Web site says they include “industry leaders” and “foreign direct investors” in sectors that include “energy.”

Mr. Scowcroft, like Mr. Perle, serves the Bush administration. Mr. Perle is chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Mr. Scowcroft is chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Both bodies, incidentally, have mechanisms for members to make painstaking annual financial disclosures to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. No one is suggesting that Mr. Perle or Mr. Scowcroft failed to abide by those rules. Mr. Hersh’s article breathlessly reports, “Four members of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met most recently on February 27 th and 28 th, had not been informed of Perle’s involvement” with a certain company. But under the relevant federal rules, there’s no reason they should have been informed. The annual disclosure required is to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, not to the other board members. If the board members spent their meetings discussing their stock holdings with each other, they’d have no time left for anything substantive.

Then there is Chas. W. Freeman. Just this year, he’s been quoted in the Washington Post about Saudi Arabia, published an op-ed piece in the New York Times about the war in Iraq, and held a forum on Saudi Arabia in the Rayburn House Office Building. Our Smartertimes column noted on February 27, 2003, that Mr. Freeman is also the chairman of a company called Projects International Inc., which, as The Associated Press has reported, is “a Washington company that helps arrange global business deals.” Based at K Street, Projects International’s business dealings include prominent Saudi companies, such as the one run by Osama bin Laden’s family, according to an AP report.

Then there is the case of Stephen P. Cohen, the Middle East “expert” who has been quoted at least 40 times since 1995 in the columns of the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-affairs columnist, Thos. Friedman. In December 2002, the Israeli daily Ma’ariv broke the news that Mr. Cohen had been involved in a company involved in business between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Mr. Cohen eventually released a statement that did not name the company he formed, did not name the Israeli company that paid him, did not explain what services were provided, and did not explain what Mr. Cohen meant when he said the company engaged in one deal “of this kind.” Did the company engage in other deals of another kind? Nor did Mr. Cohen’s statement disclose the amount of the compensation, even as a range, or over what period it was received.

Mr. Perle, whose government service is part-time and unpaid, has certainly taken more of a drubbing from the New Yorker than have Messrs. Scowcroft, Cohen, or Mr. Freeman. (Among Mr. Perle’s business involvements is Hollinger International, an investor in The New York Sun.) But that just goes to prove the old adage that one man’s news sense is another man’s nonsense. Mr. Perle has been fighting for freedom and democracy since his days as an aide to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. The avidity with which the New Yorker has set out to question the business ties of but one official raises the perplex, what’s the real rub?

It may be about a lot of things — the war, say, or hostility to capitalism. Or even Israel, as Mr. Perle is among those many of us who support the Jewish state as a strategic ally of America that shares the American values of freedom and democracy. Back in the 1990s, Mr. Hersh wrote a book about Israel’s nuclear deterrent, “The Samson Option,” that was so hostile to Israel that even such a distinguished dove as the Washington Post’s Stephen S. Rosenfeld wrote in a review that it conveyed the message that “Israel is scarcely a state worth serious defending.” Mr. Hersh’s book, Mr. Rosenfeld wrote, “comes from a quarter not so much critical of Israel and American policy, as many people are, as fundamentally uncomfortable with the notion of a Jewish state.” Whatever Mr. Hersh’s beef with Mr. Perle, you can bet it’s not about his business ties.