sustained criticism of Hersh's use of anonymous sources. Critics, including Edward Jay Epstein and Amir Taheri, say he is over-reliant on them. Taheri, for example, when reviewing Hersh's Chain of Command (2004), complained: In response to an article in The New Yorker in which Hersh alleged that the U.S. government was planning a strike on Iran, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Bryan G. Whitman said, "This reporter has a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources." In his Bin Laden story, "Hersh relied at least 55 times on an anonymous retired senior intelligence official." In 2015, Vox's Max Fisher wrote that "Hersh has appeared increasingly to have gone off the rails. His stories, often alleging vast and shadowy conspiracies, have made startling — and often internally inconsistent — accusations, based on little or no proof beyond a handful of anonymous 'officials'." Slate magazine's James Kirchick wrote, "Readers are expected to believe that the story of the Bin Laden assassination is a giant ‘fairy tale’ on the word of a single, unnamed source... Hersh's problem is that he evinces no skepticism whatsoever toward what his crank sources tell him, which is ironic considering how cynical he is regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy." Politico wrote in 2015 that Hersh's reporting had increasingly been called into question due to "his almost exclusive reliance on anonymous sources". In a 2003 interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, stated that he was aware of the identity of all of the unnamed sources used in Hersh's New Yorker articles, saying "I know every single source that is in his pieces...Every 'retired intelligence officer,' every general with reason to know, and all those phrases that one has to use, alas, by necessity, I say, 'Who is it? What's his interest?' We talk it through." Speeches In an interview with New York magazine, Hersh made a distinction between the standards of strict factual accuracy for his print reporting and the leeway he allows himself in speeches, in which he may talk informally about stories still being worked on or blur information to protect his sources. "Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people. ... I can't fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say." Some of Hersh's speeches concerning the