Seymour Hersh - classic or dud

The guy's a fucking hero.

still haven't read his kennedy book.

And I say this being, now, anti-al-Jazeera.

“The policy has been to get rid of it. Drop it. Let it go,” said Hersh about Bush’s attitude toward Abu Ghraib and extraordinary-rendition. “I think there’s been a conscious effort to tamper it down by the administration. It’s been quite successful. The next question is: Are we still torturing? Has anything really stopped because of the legislation signed by McCain and passed by the president? You remember the president issued a statement when he signed it saying this is well and good, but he can decide what he wants to do based on his inherent power as Commander-in-Chief. I think the answer is: Nothing’s really changed. It’s just nobody’s talking about it anymore.”

isn't it about time for something new from this guy

He said last fall that there were a bunch of folks who said they would call him the day after the Bush admin was out of office.

isn't it about time for something new from this guy

This wasn't enough?

I saw him give a talk a while back... he lived up to his grumpy reputation. Some annoying lefty started spouting off the SWP manifesto on the Middle East, and Hersh interrupted him to say "sorry, do you have a question?"

SWP?

oh right Socialist Workers Party.

I hate those people

nothing like getting an earful of 50-year old pro-Stalinist propaganda

wicked revealer of things best left unsaid?

Most certainly NOT that! Government secrecy is needed at times, but busting through that secrecy and exposing nasty shit the government does is needed about X1000 times more. Any reporter with good sense knows when to deep six a story and Hersch probably has done his fair share of refraining from writing everything he hears.

his "nuclear assault on Iran imminent" stuff was kinda uh waht

it was alaramist, but i think he did a service by forcing those discussions out into the open. there were obviously people in cheney's orbit in particular who very much wanted to hit iran, and public discussion of the possibility put all of them on the defensive. bush might have already turned enough away from cheney by that point that he wouldn't have done it anyway, but i'm sure the public pressure had some effect.

public pressure? from who? since when did Cheney/Dubya ever care about public pressure? I would guess that it was more likely the military leaders who resisted (and fed the info to Hersh as a way to backstab Cheney), knowing that invading/bombing Iran was totally fucking insane

Shakey, apparently there was a plan in the works in 1962 for the US armed forces to plant bombs in the USA, kill a few dozen US civilians, and then blame it on Cuba in order to provide a solid pretext for an invasion and war. The Joint Chiefs were in favor of it, but Kennedy and MacNamara saw it as too risky. JFK okayed the Bay of Pigs instead.

If Hersch was hearing about plans for a nuclear assault on Iran, it would be only about 1/3 as insane as the Pentagon has been in the past.

bush might have already turned enough away from cheney by that point that he wouldn't have done it anyway, but i'm sure the public pressure had some effect.

Not public pressure per se, but the revelations and the subsequent emphasis on diplomacy served as more evidence that Bush had repudiated Cheney's way of doing things.

wasnt there something in the new yorker from this dude quite recently?

Shakey, apparently there was a plan in the works in 1962 for the US armed forces to plant bombs in the USA, kill a few dozen US civilians, and then blame it on Cuba in order to provide a solid pretext for an invasion and war. The Joint Chiefs were in favor of it, but Kennedy and MacNamara saw it as too risky. JFK okayed the Bay of Pigs instead.

If Hersch was hearing about plans for a nuclear assault on Iran, it would be only about 1/3 as insane as the Pentagon has been in the past.

And throughout the 1950s the Pentagon had drawn up plans (Dropshot and Plan Totality) for multi-nuke bomber attacks on the USSR before they could bring their ICBMs online.

I finished Ambrose's Eisenhower biography last week. My god, are we lucky that he was less trigger-happy than the Joint Chiefs.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/18/seymour_hersh_unleashed

"Just when we needed an angry black man," he began, his arm perched jauntily on the podium, "we didn't get one."

"He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta." "

er some bad quote marks there sorry

Can't wait to read what he writes next, as always. His speeches and Q-and-A's are always interesting because he tosses in nuggets that couldn't quite be substantiated enough to make it into his articles.

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins"

Apparently that is true:

http://twitter.com/#!/jeremyscahill/status/27465884440199170

Which is really creepy.

his arm perched jauntily on the podium,

yeah the writing there is slightly prejudicial

Scahill was my Facebook friend until I saw him pose unironically with Fidel, and his friends swooned. I still love his book on Blackwater.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. "The Pakistanis put out a report, don't get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.

the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever

If the death of bin Laden was all a hoax, then either OBL died a while earlier of some other cause, or else the USA cut a deal with him, bcz nothing would suit OBL more than to pop up in a video after loudly being proclaimed dead, making the USA look very bad indeed and would add to his legend - something he is quite vain about.

i don't think he's claiming it was a hoax, just that it didn't happen at all like the new yorker and kathryn bigelow said it did.

was just looking at my copy of Chain of Command this morning and wondering what Hersh was up to

If I were near NYC, I would go to Bethlehem and see him speak next week:

http://lehighcalendar.activedatax.com/LehighU/EventList.aspx?view=EventDetails&eventidn=25353&information_id=34070&type=&syndicate=syndicate

Seems like the necktie would draw attention when meeting a source in a parking garage.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2013/9/27/1380263187095/Seymour-Hersh-008.jpg

"The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple." And he implores journalists to do something about it.

This story gets printed because it is not a story about government lies and lying, but a story about Seymour Hersh complaining about goevernment lies and lying. Then the reporter and editor can say to themselves, maybe we didn't break a real story, but at least we sort of almost courageously hinted at one.

i wouldn't exactly accuse the guardian, of all papers, of being afraid to print stories 'about government lies and lying.'

point taken

Hey Sy if things have been so bad for the past five years, where have you been?

Is he saying he can't find an editor to print all these vast truths that everyone's ignoring?

I'm not one to defend the water carrying ability of the NYT, but guys like Hersh can get published anywhere they want.

^ this

first thought was yeah yeah yeah, wake me up when there's a story to go read somewhere

I'm not one to defend the water carrying ability of the NYT, but guys like Hersh can get published anywhere they want.

Hersh, re:Snowden:

Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game,"

Maybe Hersh is sitting on a trove of stories, but chicken-shit editors - and one might presume an implicitly chicken-shit Hersh - are afraid to publish them due to all the anonymous sources, lack of hard documentation, etc. Which is, you know, good journalism, but indeed perhaps counterproductive to breaking stories of secrets and lies.

Unclear, since Hersh is quick to qualify, but the whole Osama story is a lie line: does that include the New Yorker's take on it, or is he just ripping on the Times?

Hersh may still be under contract and in-house at the New Yorker, and so can't publish elsewhere other than in book form.

His recent pieces for the New Yorker have been surprisingly online-only, off in a corner:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/seymour_m_hersh/search?contributorName=seymour%20m%20hersh

...or he just means that chickenshit editors have less faith in putting journalists on the road for months and months in search of documents that may or may not turn up.

By chickenshit I assume you actually mean "broke." The major paper I often write for was just asked to shave $100 million off its budget.

dud, for inspiring anyone to work "within the system to change it"
― You've Got to Pick Up Every Stitch (tracerhand), Monday, September 6, 2004 7:01 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

geez....tough crowd...

I should've put "chickenshit" in quotes (Hersh's word, not mine).

I like it, but then I would. ...Where did I read recently that when Hersh first met Lieutenant Calley at Fort Benning, Calley vomited blood at the mention of My Lai, which was how Hersh knew he was talking to the right person? Is that fake?

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would"

hmmmm, I have to dock him IQ points for this surprise.

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/131080-40-years-later-hersh-on-my-lai/transcript/

New:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

Between this and the Bin Laden thing, I'm starting to wonder if Hersh has gone off the deep end. Is there any consensus emerging on how credible Hersh is anymore? Has someone done a really tough, critical interview with him lately?

here's the FP rebuttal piece
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/09/sy_hershs_chemical_misfire#sthash.Tr2j2WTW.HEFsZH7A.dpbs

Washington Post & New Yorker passed on Hersh's Syria story, as someone noted abouve the NYer does seem to be quietly edging him out
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/08/seymour-hersh-syria-report_n_4409674.html

In looking up reactions to the new article, I stumbled onto this from 2006:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/sy-hersh-nsa-listened-to-u-s-calls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2G39yJtyl0

The idea that the government wants to control the conversation about wars and foreign policy and it attempts to distort our opinions through lies and concealment is not a shock, but it certainly is a legitimate news story when they are discovered doing it. Presumably, Hersh has enough experience around disinformation campaigns that he would be difficult to use to 'plant' disinformation in the media. But it is not inconceivable he could be fooled into reporting well-crafted untruths.

Lots of backlash, but another Hersh piece on Syria.

Yowsa. Turkey looks pretty bad there, Al Nusra more evil than before, and Denis McDonough willfully ignorant in the Feith/Perle/Wolfowitz mold.

This is from back in December, but a good interview:

http://thepolitic.org/syria-snowden-and-obama/

Bio:

http://scoopartistthebook.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/cover.jpg

New interview:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/seymour-hersh-nsa-surveillance-useless

Come on, Sy. Publish the book.

Return to My Lai:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/the-scene-of-the-crime

Here's what he's been hinting about in speeches for the past few years:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

So--what happened to the body, according to Hersh's sources? I'll have to try wading though all that again later.

Small portion of the story, but:

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slighest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.

Oh yeah, I saw that, didn't know if I'd missed any more in skimming, thanks.

"Did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours": but what were they gonna do if if they had more time? Some of this just seems pretty squirrely, also for inst like Pakistan vs/ Saudis re each one being competitive/complicit/responsible for bin Laden's maintainance, and paranoid/threatening. Hope some other investigators can verify some of this.

ya amazing read but seems to be primarily based on one anon source

the idea that bin laden was being held captive by isi does make a lot of sense tho, some of the other details maybe not as much

If a feeling counts this feels more right than wrong!

narrative primarily based on one source but validation from others...typical for Hersh.

But who cares anyway, right?

new yorker clearly wldnt touch it

I care, but want verification, like with My Lai. A lot (maybe most) people thought that at least some Pakistan govt. elements had to know bin Laden had settled into that city, so why not say, Oh yeah, we were gonna use him as a bargaining chip, 'til that guy betrayed the secret, as Hersh put it. Yeah, whatta party-pooper/ And maybe that's true, but the whole thing w Saudis, like I mentioned also needs much more parsing---Hersh's paraphrasing of sassy insiders raises as many questions as it answers, at least.

My Lai was way past verified, even if the perps got off light.

I don't doubt that ISi played a role in Bin Laden's confinement to Abbottabad, that Pak air defense withheld response to the SEAL insertion, or that Saud intelligence maintain ties to Al Qaeda (their support of affiliate Al-Nusra in Syria is overt).

I do have doubts that the SEAL team members who've disclosed elements of the raid that they were privy to were pushing an administration fabrication; as a group they take these things very seriously, and arguably none would risk ostracism by peers. While I've no idea whether Bin Laden's remains are at the bottom of the Arabian Sea, the requirement that there be no locus for a martyr's cult adequately explains why his remains or even post-mortem photos weren't released.

It may have been an utter mess, with a totally desecrated body torn into a dog's breakfast, but the resolution of the mess through the 'burial at sea' was about as good a resolution as could have been planned, even if they'd thought it through a hundred times and decided on it months beforehand. Kind of an 'all's well that ends well' story.

Can't imagine Kathryn Bigelow being very happy, if there's a chance her movie told all of the potentially false parts of this story.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2012/images/04/26/t1larg.sitroomtomason.jpg

gosh that movie was such ponderous security porn garbage may it be repeatedly owned by irl forever

Recent interview in which Hersh praises Gawker and Buzzfeed.

Woman Allegedly Put Dead Foot Skin Shavings in Family's Milk

Seymour Hersh

new yorker clearly wldnt touch it

― lag∞n, Sunday, May 10, 2015 10:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they have all their credibility propping up the official story, which ran in their pages, and whose author (iirc) hasn't written for them again, right?

iffy sourcing seems the more likely culprit, not like theyve never published a story that contradicted a previous one

dont think it wld "ruin their credibility" or anything

lmao never mind

http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nicholas-schmidle

i mean unless u think they just stick to their original story always even when new info becomes available, doesnt seem quite right

The New YOrker is never wrong, they employ fact checkers and shit

hersh seems more and more willing to publish thinly sourced pieces which is certainly interesting from a readers perspective but i cld see how it wld make the nyer et al nervous, just from journalists reactions on twitter hes obvs someone who is widly admired but his rep has def taken a hit because of this pattern

the vibe of score settling from the sources in that piece too was pretty out there

Perhaps the most concerning problem with Hersh's story is not the sourcing but rather the internal contradictions in the narrative he constructs.

Most blatant, Hersh's entire narrative turns on a secret deal, in which the US promised Pakistan increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." In fact, the exact opposite of this occurred, with US military aid dropping and US-Pakistan cooperation in Afghanistan plummeting as both sides feuded bitterly for years after the raid.

Hersh explains this seemingly fatal contradiction by suggesting the deal fell apart due to miscommunication between the Americans and Pakistanis. But it's strange to argue that the dozens of officials on both sides would be competent enough to secretly plan and execute a massive international ruse, and then to uphold their conspiracy for years after the fact, but would not be competent enough to get on the same page about aid delivery.---Max Fischer, here:
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden

oh, speaking of credibility

Also, Peter Bergen, interviewer of bin Laden etc:

The evidence

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.

Let's start with the claim that the only shots fired at the Abbottabad compound were the ones that killed bin Laden. That ignores the fact that two SEALs on the mission, Matt Bissonnette, author of "No Easy Day," and Robert O'Neill have publicly said that there were a number of other people killed that night, including bin Laden's two bodyguards, one of his sons and one of the bodyguard's wives. Their account is supplemented by many other U.S. officials who have spoken on the record to myself or to other journalists.

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it. The compound was trashed, littered almost everywhere with broken glass and several areas of it were sprayed with bullet holes where the SEALS had fired at members of bin Laden's entourage and family, or in one case exchanged fire with one of his bodyguards. The evidence at the compound showed that many bullets were fired the night of bin Laden's death.

Common sense would tell you that the idea that Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden's expenses while he was living in Abbottabad is simply risible. Bin Laden's principal goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family as a result of which his Saudi citizenship was revoked as far back as 1994.

Why would the Saudis pay for the upkeep of their most mortal enemy? Indeed, why wouldn't they get their close allies, the Pakistanis, to look the other way as they sent their assassins into Pakistan to finish him off?

Common sense would also tell you that if the Pakistanis were holding bin Laden and the U.S. government had found out this fact, the easiest path for both countries would not be to launch a U.S. military raid into Pakistan but would have been to hand bin Laden over quietly to the Americans.

Indeed, the Pakistanis have done this on several occasions with a number of other al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9/11, who was handed over to U.S. custody after a raid in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 2003. So too was Abu Faraj al-Libi, another key al Qaeda leader who was similarly handed over by the Pakistanis to U.S. custody two years later.

Why cover it up?

Common sense would also tell you that if U.S. officials had found out that the Pakistani officials were hiding bin Laden there is no reason the Americans would have covered this up. After all, around the time of the bin Laden raid, relations between the United States and Pakistan were at an all-time low because the Pakistanis had recently imprisoned Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who had killed two Pakistanis. What did U.S. officials have to lose by saying that bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis, if it were true?

The fact is that the senior Pakistani officials Hersh alleges were harboring bin Laden were as surprised as the rest of the world that al Qaeda's leader was living in Abbottabad. The night of the bin Laden raid, U.S. officials were monitoring the communications of Pakistan's top military officials such as Kayani and Pasha and their bewildered reactions confirmed that the Pakistanis had not had a clue about bin Laden's presence there, according to a number of U.S. officials I spoke to in the course of reporting "Manhunt," a book about the hunt for bin Laden.

In his article, Hersh correctly points out that in the immediate aftermath of the bin Laden raid, White House officials initially made some false statements about the raid -- for instance, that bin Laden was using his wives as human shields during the raid -- but these were quickly corrected.

The only source Hersh refers to by name in his 10,000-word piece is Assad Durrani, who was the head of ISI during the early 1990s, around two decades before the bin Laden raid occurred. Hersh portrays Durrani as generally supportive of Hersh's various conclusions.

When I emailed Durrani after the Hersh piece appeared, Durrani said there was "no evidence of any kind" that the ISI knew that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad but he still could "make an assessment that this could be plausible." This is hardly a strong endorsement of one of the principal claims of Hersh's piece.

Durrani added that he believed that the bin Laden "operation could not have been carried out without our cooperation." This glosses over the fact that the SEALs were flying in stealth helicopters through blind spots in Pakistan's radar defense and the Pakistani air force had virtually no capacity to fly at night when the raid took place, so in fact the bin Laden raid was relatively easily accomplished without Pakistani cooperation, according to multiple U.S. officials with knowledge of the bin Laden operation.

All sorts of things are, of course, plausible, but in both journalism and in the writing of history one looks for evidence, not plausibility.

Hersh has had a storied career. One hopes that he won't end it with a story about the Obama administration and the bin Laden raid that reads like Frank Underwood from "House of Cards" has made an unholy alliance with Carrie Mathison from "Homeland" to produce a Pakistani version of Watergate.

did anyone ever figure out who that woman was (pictured above)?

These guys might be wrong, but they're raising the right questions.

akm: just some white house bod iirc

God, i hope this doesn't mean Kathryn Bigelow is going to remake that piece of crap.

see now she's going to get it right

i've only been following hersh loosely since ~2004 (and as he started publishing less in the NYer) so i didn't realize he'd gone full-blown conspiracy theorist but when i first read the above bin ladin story i def thought that if it had been by anyone else it would be unbelievable. i guess even by hersh it's pretty unbelievable. challop up ahead: hersh sorta mirroring the left in general - the steady march from legitimate opposition to power to sputtering alienated ramblings. can't wait for his chemtrials/monsanto expose :/

conspiracy always been popular at the fringes and in the middle, just more visible now cause of online

i mean harpers been publishing equally dubious pieces since time imortal

why i haven't read harpers in about 10 years

expected more from hersh tbh - you'd think the guy who broke mai lai and abu ghraib would be very meticulous about his sourcing

or maybe he just got to a place where he was like "obv these evil fucks will do anything so who does skepticism serve"

feel like theres some sort of aging/impatience thing going on w him, obvs baseless speculation

shd be noted too that chemtrails is a rightwing cause, the lefts conspiracies are much closer to reality, like monstanto which is actually generally bad if not quite the deathstar its made out to be

oh lol i thought chemtrails were leftwing bc it tracked onto environmental / agricultural concerns. ok, vaccination/monsanto

first time i notice hersh being somewhat suss was that piece abt how bush wanted to invade iran that just seemed odd and vague and full of insinuations

vaccination is a cool one cause it cuts across political lines, equally popular on the left and right

i'm holding out hope that this piece is ~40% or more accurate

not that i'd put money on it, but the emotional chips are there

the pakistanis knew, (some) saudis were still paying OBL, obama is not entirely a straight shooter

yeah, man, chemtrails!!

A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out.

It's not totally insane I mean there is a country called Saudi Arabia

I'm not so certain what it is that is so shocking about this report anyway; the end result is the same, bin laden is still dead, not sure people really care about the details? I kind of don't.

who are "the saudis" in this story wld be a good question

its not so much that tons of stuff is totally unbelievable its just vague and gossipy

dude living in the pakistani equivalent of arlington for years is p strange; w/o interviewing all these people's sources myself, who knows? hersh's and the official story are about as equally plausible fwiw as a civilian

saudis did 9/11 btw

a lot of tenuous leaps of logic

"The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture" < this kinda gives the game away imo. They didn't want his presence revealed because he was a Saudi. what the fuck does that even mean.

like it either needs to be: "the saudis didn't want bin laden's presence revealed because THEY WERE BANKROLLING HIM" or "the saudis didn't give a fuck about the americans finding and killing bin laden."

The fact he was found in Abbottabad remains the main reason the Pakistanis i know all seem convinced it didn't go down like the original story. It's like choosing to hide from the US military in a secret compound just outside of Fort Myers. It's entirely plausible from their perspective that it's somewhere the ISI might have a safehouse. That said, it's tough to know how they managed to keep it secret.

The theory i've heard a number of times is that the ISI and the US had known where he was for a while and had been keeping him on ice for the most politically opportune time to announce his death - or that they had been detaining him for interrogation, he'd died of natural causes and they wanted to make a splash about a heroic takedown when he was no longer of any use.

I don't think there's much public appetite for going over the details though and it's all impossible to prove.

yeah agree w that everyone knows he likes to hide in caves in the tribal regions

I like how ppl are all "wow crazy conspiracist!" at Hersh but garbage like the Bergen thing - which is basically founded on "US gov't/military officials and two SEALs on a PR tour said things", are all good.

ppl were widely suspicions of the official story at the time iirc

That Pakistan was in on it is the most believable part of Hersh's story however iirc the day after OBL was buried ppl were already speculating about that, so he's got about as much to say as every internet commentator.

like it either needs to be: "the saudis didn't want bin laden's presence revealed because THEY WERE BANKROLLING HIM" or "the saudis didn't give a fuck about the americans finding and killing bin laden."

it's almost as if Saudi (and Pakistani, and American) politic and/or military class' actions could plausibly stem from there being different factions with different interests and goals and produce different - even contradictory, strategies.

*political

oh good so the explanation is that it's all very complicated so why can expect hersh to get it right

like say which saudis u r talking abt, that part was left completely unfleshed out while the internal pakistanti politics were delineated

maybe he hit a wall in his research and hes trying to provoke more ppl into talking to him

the saudis were bankrolling obl and didn't want him to get caught. which saudis? well you know, obl was a saudi...

also u kno i expect a lot a lot a lot more out of seymour hersh than i do the gvt propaganda line

That has always been the great unanswered question, though. It's assumed that people not that far away from the House of Saud are trying to overthrow them and are funding terrorism to advance that goal but nobody seems clear as to who they are. It's the kind of thing that both sides would want kept quiet - so either set would have a potential incentive to pay for him to be warehoused. Why that would necessarily end up with the US storming in to kill him is mostly unclear though.

It's easier to generalize about a country and its people when our government didn't almost conspire with Saudi Arabia to keep the latter so isolated from media coverage

if u had to speculate as to one saudi locus of power who wld most sympathize with bin laden it wld be hardline clerics, except that one of the keys to the house of sauds longevity has been their dedication to keeping those guys close so idk

that's the fulcrum of the conspiracy theory tho as i see it - hersh has to leave who the "saudis" are unclear bc the insinuation is that our "allies" in saudi arabia are funding al-q and hiding it from us ("The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida.") - or does he just mean that the rogue elements of Saudi society were afraid that obl was itching for the opportunity to spill all of al-q's funding sources from SA? the whole thing just breaks down under any scrutiny.

regardless who it was if it did really happen seems by far most likely it wld be a fairly minor faction that u wldnt just call "the saudis" like the heavy hitters dont want to fuck w someone who wants to overthrow them!

tho im not sure "the saudis" are central to this story really seems like he cldve left it out

idk maybe they were doing it to control him its vague i think we can all agree

so what are the other major points of the story? pakistan was more involved in the operation than the US led the world to believe? okay, i think everyone already assumed as much. that obl was never actually buried in the ocean but dropped out over the alps? the saudi bit is the only legitimate bombshell afaict?

xps Another line of thought is that he was being used as a means to an end to create chaos and a power vacuum. It doesn't necessarily have to be ideological.

If you wanted to be charitable to Hersh, it's entirely plausible that whoever gave him the information didn't know where it came from other than the country. The Sauds would also have an incentive to keep him "out of the picture" if they thought he could reveal in public where the divisions they're trying to paper over are.

Either way it seems pretty clear that the information Hersh has access to isn't enough to stand up to scrutiny even if it's true.

the #1 revelation as i see it is that bin laden was a pakistani captive and they handed him over to the usa, which seems v believable imho

super believable imo, and would be a bombshell if similar stuff hadn't been reported by other journalists:

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

if he could've gotten someone on the record to confirm that pakistan a. knew about the operation and b. knew obl was in abbottabad (either holding him there, or just monitoring him) it would've been good

yeah he hit it a lil harder but not ness w any better sourcing

That Peter Bergen post only contradicts hersh but doesn't really disprove anything

um lol? he said: "I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it. The compound was trashed, littered almost everywhere with broken glass and several areas of it were sprayed with bullet holes where the SEALS had fired at members of bin Laden's entourage and family, or in one case exchanged fire with one of his bodyguards. The evidence at the compound showed that many bullets were fired the night of bin Laden's death." so maybe you think he's lying?

military cldve fired a bunch of bullets to back their story up but the alternative seems more likely

idg why even insufferable feebs like deej care about whether this story is true or not except for lingering respect + awe for the amazing journalism hersh has produced earlier in his career. let's say everything in it is true - pakistan and the US worked together to kill obl, scatter his mutilated body over the alps, lie about other fatalities in the compound, etc. what exactly does that change? does it make obama seem less... manly? for having to rely on pakistan? what exactly are the consequences of this vast conspiracy theory that makes it so attractive?

yeah I don't give a shit tbh

even if it is all true it's all p inconsequential

if true its a p fascinating behind the scenes look at diplomacy / stagecraft/ true lies and so forth imho

well, the narrative is this is less a military maneuver executed with prowess and more like a mob hit with helicopters, plus OBAMA PERFIDY right?

man, if the motivations are as hersh describes, aren't there a ton of waaaaaaaay less risky ways to deliver that body with similar deniability and also what outis said

obama shdve worn UBLs skin as a mask when he made the announcement imho

Oh no an mra sympathizer called me a "feeb"

Even if individual parts of this aren't exactly correct the overall narrative requires a lot less suspension of disbelief than the official story. If it's even 51% correct it certainly upends the official story ... I'm hardly morbs about Obama either, not trying to prove anything about his manliness don't even know wtf you're trying to suggest there

please tell me, as you see it, what the overall narrative is.

what if its 18% correct

like what is the 51% that you think is correct and how does it "upend the official story"?

i don't even think there's anything in this story for morbz types. what is obama's perfidy? that the assassination wasn't as awesome as portrayed? pretty sure 100% of americans were just happy obl was dead and the details were inconsequential. like if he had announced: 'today, with intelligence from our partners in pakistan, our soldiers were able to apprehend and execute obl' there would've been no difference in how the story was received. the only particularly boldfaced lie would've been that the body was buried at sea and not mutilated and dropped out of a plane -- but most Americans would've preferred the second story! the lie about the burial at sea was specifically to make ppl sympathetic to obl less angry.

"we only killed obl. we didn't kill anyone else in the compound." american public: "WHAT THE FUCK ONLY OBL???"

well the whole deification of the seals hit squad is p gross imo tho obvs completely standard

do you remember that whole right-wing meme about how obama took too much credit for the assassination and didn't give enough due to the seals? that was pretty lol.

they were really burnt that he got him

lol obv i'm now waiting for deej to read the original article and figure out what he thinks about it. don't worry about it, bro. go back to yr forte which is apparently explaining how tabloid media operates.

well the whole deification of the seals hit squad is p gross imo tho obvs completely standard

^^^

also completely irrelevant to what actually happened, ie no "facts" are going to undermine it

"hate is useless we shd all love each other" --mordy

lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEuxkTWW8AA33UM.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEuxleDXIAAV-eV.png

https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/597766639434788865

COMMUNITY-SOURCED CONTENT PRODUCTION IN ACTION (and pettiness given the source of the screenshot)

man, u dont want to see how the sausage gets man

sadly i am v familiar with the process i work in #content marketing

but yeah point being it's definitely exhibit 93,728 in vox being dumb as hell

yeah i dont think "explaining stuff" is quite the powerful vision they expected

I’ve always been convinced by the ideas that

- Pakistan officials did not know about the raid as it was happening
- they claimed to have known about it after the fact, so as not to appear to be fools/not in control of their own airspace

in fact IIRC different folks in the pakistan gov't/military alternately:

- complained about US incursion into Pakistan -- sovereignty etc.
- claimed to have been in on it

seems to me like the incoherent response of a gov't that was caught off guard

regardless of what you think of this story's merits, i think dismissing it as a "conspiracy theory" and likening it to chem-trails et al is pretty unfair.

Abu Gahrib was a conspiracy theory for a while too. Bad Apples, etc.

yeah calling it a "conspiracy theory" just seems to imply that no administration/u.s. intelligence agency/etc has ever flat-out lied about similar scenarios and that it's unthinkable even to suggest this.

it's a theory of a conspiracy w/out evidence or motive. i mean call it what you want.

tonspiracy cheory

conspiracy report

Xps, Pakistan complains about incursions for a domestic audience and claims credit for an international one. It's not consistent but both have a purpose. I'm not sure you can read much into it.

really the only reason why it's not really a conspiracy theory is bc it's such a mild one, but written in the style of a far more lurid one. bush did 911 is a much better conspiracy theory.

It's late in the article, but this substantial if a vaccination program outed as the CIA's way of obtaining Osama DNA was actually just a vaccination program:

It was soon reported that the CIA had organised a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad with Afridi’s help in a failed attempt to obtain bin Laden’s DNA. Afridi’s legitimate medical operation was run independently of local health authorities, was well financed and offered free vaccinations against hepatitis B. Posters advertising the programme were displayed throughout the area. Afridi was later accused of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison because of his ties to an extremist. News of the CIA-sponsored programme created widespread anger in Pakistan, and led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying.

The retired official said that Afridi had been recruited long before the bin Laden mission as part of a separate intelligence effort to get information about suspected terrorists in Abbottabad and the surrounding area. ‘The plan was to use vaccinations as a way to get the blood of terrorism suspects in the villages.’ Afridi made no attempt to obtain DNA from the residents of the bin Laden compound. The report that he did so was a hurriedly put together ‘CIA cover story creating “facts”’ in a clumsy attempt to protect Aziz and his real mission. ‘Now we have the consequences,’ the retired official said. ‘A great humanitarian project to do something meaningful for the peasants has been compromised as a cynical hoax.’ Afridi’s conviction was overturned, but he remains in prison on a murder charge.

Also, whenever I read "retired senior military official" in his War on Terror reporting, I pictured Colin Powell.

welp

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistanis-knew-where-bin-laden-was-say-us-sources-n357306

nbc report confirms some aspects, maybe contradicts others http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pakistanis-knew-where-bin-laden-was-say-us-sources-n357306

dick

it's kind of funny that hersh's critics are either calling him an insane conspiracy theorist who's lost touch with reality or going "even if it's true, so what? no big deal!"

feel like the vast majority of ppl are saying "this story reads very sketchy" tho maybe those are his supporters not his criticts

idk why both can't easily be true. Xp

Bush lied about flight 93 it didn't crash in PA - it crashed in Ohio. < conspiracy theory that also doesn't matter

Obama lied about the number of people killed in the compound: also a conspiracy theory. Also afaict doesn't matter

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/seymour-hersh-plagiarism-accusation-117827.html

feel like theres some sort of aging/impatience thing going on w him, obvs baseless speculation

Won't disagree with that speculation. I like Hersh and it's dismaying to see him get further histrionic with the conspiracy kindling. My b.s. detector went off when a single, unnamed source of his blamed the Ghouta chemical weapon attack on Turkey. If Hersh's name wasn't on that, would that piece be all that different from something linked on Above Top Secret?

FWIW, I feel the same way about Bob Woodward.

Woodward has been a laughing stock outside the Beltway for years though.

woodward cashed in all his cred to be official Court Stenographer to the executive over the last 20+ years

not bad work if u cn get it i guess

Woodward jumped the shark with his awful book about SCOTUS, and that came out a few years after Watergate

lol obv i'm now waiting for deej to read the original article and figure out what he thinks about it. don't worry about it, bro. go back to yr forte which is apparently explaining how tabloid media operates.

― Mordy, Monday, May 11, 2015 2:41 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol wtf I've been on this message board over a decade and have posted on political threads et al intermittently throughout that time, I didn't just pop up one day to argue about media (which btw is ...the very industry I work in & might just have insights about?)

At any rate I think it's a pretty big deal that the story about what happened is very different than what we were told! And that the spun version was an invasion instead of what it may really have actually been: an execution. That's a pretty radical difference! I'm not saying we should impeach Obama over it but I don't know how you can't read this piece and find it at least vaguely fascinating

Aspects of hersh's story make a lot more sense than the initial account imo, shrug emoji

Whether every detail--every motive has been captured accurately--is true or not--and it's hard to imagine it would be--the overall story isn't farfetched, is it? For a conspiracy theory it's not "jet fuel can't melt steel beams"

"the CIA manufactured a trove of al-q documents that al-q themselves later referenced" is pretty farfetched

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/13/al-qaeda-files-bin-laden-documents-reveal-struggling-organization/

"Analysis of the seized documents — which reportedly number in the thousands — was led by the CIA, with support from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the NSA and the Pentagon’s National Media Exploitation Center."

Do you think all these organizations are in on it?

"And that the spun version was an invasion instead of what it may really have actually been: an execution. That's a pretty radical difference!"

this is insane btw. it was an execution either way. 'invasion' i've never heard anyone refer to the assault on the compound like that. assassination/execution/etc.

some more important details about the obl execution found within:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/pakistan-tv-report-contradicts-us-claim-of-bin-laden-s-death/25915

Hersh on Chris Hayes' show as I type.

fwiw NYT is kind of buring report on Hersh's article. some could read this as a further conspiracy, I read it as cautious since his article is poorly sourced.

burying, i mean

His loudest complaint on "All In" was...the Obama people were precipitate about getting the news out about the killing because it was an election year. Talk about scoops.

invasion was the wrong word, sorry i was kind of rushed over the phone—i just mean the idea that it was an attack on enemy soil without their knowledge as opposed to an execution cosigned by Pakistan seemed farfetched.

This glosses over the fact that the SEALs were flying in stealth helicopters through blind spots in Pakistan's radar defense and the Pakistani air force had virtually no capacity to fly at night when the raid took place

ooh black helicopters snuck into another country without their knowledge and assassinated bin laden in a resort town! that sounds like the plot of a tom clancy movie not irl

foreign soil, not enemy soil, you get the point

since his article is poorly sourced.

― he quipped with heat (amateurist), Monday, May 11, 2015 9:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is it?

Obama lied about the number of people killed in the compound: also a conspiracy theory. Also afaict doesn't matter

take it from an omelet-maker egg-breaker realpolitikker, guys

if this conspiracy theory is so boring why is the entire world reading about it w/ great interest

the other thing i found very believable abt hersh's version was all the incompetence, it's not written as much like a conspiracy as it is a quick-lets-capitalize-oh-fuck-we-have-to-backtrack bureaucratic / expediency-based incompetence, not men in tinfoil hats

R.J. Hillhouse, a novelist and health care executive, reported in August 2011 on a her national security blog, “The Spy Who Billed Me,” that a Pakistani intelligence officer gave up bin Laden to try collecting the $25 million reward. She attributed the information to “sources in the intelligence community.”

Hillhouse wrote that the Saudis financed keeping bin Laden in the Abbottabad compound. “The cover story was going to be a drone strike in Pakistan,” but after one of the SEALs' helicopters crashed in the compound, the White House issued the administration’s story, she wrote on her blog. Four days later, Hillhouse dismissed Schmidle’s inside account as a “puff piece.”

Hersh told HuffPost he was unaware of Hillhouse’s reporting before publishing his story.

By phone Monday, Hillhouse said she found it “very difficult to come up with a scenario” in which Hersh hadn’t come across her work, which was picked up by international outlets, including The Telegraph. In a Monday blog post, Hillhouse said she deserved credit.

Hillhouse's blog post on Monday was her first since those centered around the bin Laden raid in August 2011.

Hillhouse said she blogs on national security as a sideline activity. Her posts about the bin Laden raid, she said, "hit a nerve" in the intelligence community and prompted her to stop blogging out of concern for her sources.

"it's my truth!"

ya dont really care abt that part but it is interesting she had the same infos

If the Hersh facts are right, the people who were fucked over by believing the cover story will step up, I think. (Again, the Zero Dark Thirty crew for starters, if they find themselves having been suckered.)

this "the saudis" bit is still drivin me nuts

"Analysis of the seized documents — which reportedly number in the thousands — was led by the CIA, with support from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the NSA and the Pentagon’s National Media Exploitation Center."

Do you think all these organizations are in on it?

afaict, the theory doesn't hinge on them all being fake. The documents could be real but not sourced from the compound. Idk, it seems like one of the easier things to stage if anything was.

Also it's a lot more plausible to me that those particular organizations would be in a conspiracy together than, say, the Shriners, Proctor & Gamble, and the reverse vampires. Intelligence agencies are kinda in the conspiracy business.

This monumental conspiracy was undertaken in the same period that an unprecedented amount of information was leaked from the very same organizations. Doesn't seem smart. And as people has pointed out, what was the motive and what was the effect? Plus there is no proof. It's all very very dumb.

What is it about the original account that doesn't make sense?

SOOO badly sourced. There are 55 instances of 'the retired official' in the text, 42 'the retired offical said' as well as 5 'according to the retired official'. And the badshit Saudi claims come from this esteemed source as well.

afaict, the theory doesn't hinge on them all being fake. The documents could be real but not sourced from the compound. Idk, it seems like one of the easier things to stage if anything was.

idk about that, a lot of the documents are obl directing operations over the last couple of years. hard to understand how that could be if a. they didn't get it from the compound and b. obl wasn't really involved in alq at that point which is the central contention of hersh.

this has been buried everywhere AFAICT; maybe FOX is running with it? CNN pooped on it and then turned to other things.

"buried" afaict it got much more attention than it deserved and the only person who is protected by the media not running w/ it more is hersh.

was enjoying this classic hersh from 2011 earlier today:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/18/seymour-hersh-unleashed/

He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.”

Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited to “defence of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering,” according to its website.

“Many of them are members of Opus Dei,” Hersh continued. “They do see what they’re doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.”

“They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins,” he continued. “They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”

lock thread

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEz5EXUUEAAz2XW.jpg

Watching a couple minutes of FOX and even "Morning Joe," I saw a lot of resistance to the story, not even from people from whom you'd expect "Sy Hersh, ULTRA LEFT WING REPORTER questions White House story!"

is jessica chastain good at twitter?

if that was a joke RT then yes

it's not a conspiracy theory, it's just a theory that lots of conspiracy theorists are really into

i've heard about those malta coins, and not from hersh! didn't jeremy scahill say he was shown some of them? pepe escobar maybe?

thinking about polling 'bush did 911' on ilx. bet you a majority of posters think bush either did it, or knew about it beforehand and didn't try to stop it.

lol no way

i might vote for it ironically tho

can we poll 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' too

prob a lot of ppl here ironically think he did it

im surprised yr not more up on conspiracy theory culture mordy btw seems like something u might be interested in

ime among leftists it's like lubavitchers believing the rebbe is the messiah. everyone pretty much believes it, but won't talk about it.

feel like ilx is p strongly in the anti conspiracy culture

well - i know a lot of rl leftists who believe bush did it. "ironically" maybe, but no more "ironic" than right-wingers i know who believe obama is a muslim. all these conspiratorial beliefs get wrapped in some level of ironic distance / posturing etc.

lol except on this thread :P xp

how many ilxors believe the CIA was directly involved in trafficking crack into the US

idk 35?

well - i know a lot of rl leftists who believe bush did it. "ironically" maybe, but no more "ironic" than right-wingers i know who believe obama is a muslim. all these conspiratorial beliefs get wrapped in some level of ironic distance / posturing etc.

― Mordy, Tuesday, May 12, 2015 11:44 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh c'mon. by "rl" do you mean "on the actual internet"?

idk maybe the ppl i know are just liberals and not leftists

I mean flesh and blood humans some of whom are even related to me

i dont believe bush did 9.11 but would vote that way in a poll on ilx

i read this piece of investigative reporting but cant make heads nor tails of it

much more entertained by the twitter of the woman who believes that obama is osasma bin laden in disguise

i know people who believe all sorts of conspiracy theories mostly of the wishy washy hippie variety and they are def a world apart from the ilx mentality which is way on the intelectual/critical side of the spectrumn

how many ilxors believe the CIA was directly involved in trafficking crack into the US

― Mordy, Tuesday, May 12, 2015 11:45 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*raises hand* this is one of the few "conspiracy theories" i generally subscribe to but mostly bc its not that implausible and is maybe a bit more complex than the blanket statement "
directly involved"

I used 'directly involved' to distinguish it from the probable theory that the CIA either worked w/ ppl who brought crack into the US, or turned a blind eye. this is more the theory that the CIA brought in crack specifically + directly + intentionally to destabilize US communities.

the conspiracy theory is that the cia invented crack and seeded the hood with it, the reality is that the cia looked the other way while assets of theirs trafficked large amounts of cocaine into the country

afaik there's evidence that they protected some people from prosecution when they were caught by local authorities but i'm not really up on my 80s CIA hijinks

right, my thinking has always been more along the lines of they weren't exactly bummed out by the resultant crack pandemic and everything that came with it as a result of shit the agency did to finance the contras, rather than they did it with bond-villain-esque direct intent, tbh i'm not sure which one is more depressing

i also remember an argument on ilx not long ago about whether the claim that the CIA is secretly funding Vice as a 'cultural asset' is a conspiracy theory or not and iirc I was feeling pretty lonely on the side of "this is a conspiracy theory."

the CIA and National Security people in the Reagan administration were complicit in the Central American drug trade -- this ain't a surprise.

the CIA funded the iowa writer's project and supported abstract expressionism in the 50s & 60s.

while i can see some security apparatchiks being taken with a gavin mcinnes type i kind of doubt the vice thing, never heard that theory tbh

Alfred otm

bill casey died over it iirc

the Contra part of Iran-Contra makes for fascinating reading, and it's amazing that Ronnie still gets called a great president after all the data has emerged (and that's the trick: there's thousands of documents).

the canadian cia funded vice iirc

their record had been weak after foisting martin short on us, sick op

going to a vice exec's wedding next month will ask about secret funding and report back fwiw

just show your sov order of malta token they'll tell u

not big into conspiracy theories rlly but like...my lai massacre was real, tuskegee experiment was real, the difference between "the CIA tried to poison urban communities" and "the CIA allowed the poisoning of urban communities as a side effect" is a pretty blurry line at a certain point

I once went to the doctor and he told me bush did 9/11

http://i.imgur.com/mc3qgQC.jpg

It was a v embarrassing doc visit so I kind of went along with it because I wanted to get out of there intact

Ronnie still gets called a great president by idiots or villains who worship "optics." (Optics that don't include being prompted on camera by your Lady Macbeth as you drool into the sunset.)

the CIA funded the iowa writer's project and supported abstract expressionism in the 50s & 60s.

And hardcore modernist classical music in w Germany!

Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters is essential reading.

People laughed at Kevin Shields a few years ago when he said Britpop was backed by MI5 in the 90s.

Who's laughing now?

They are...

http://www.leifnorman.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_4995-2-120817.jpg

Communism, Hypnotism, Davey, Beaky, Dozey and Stitch

i'm learning about all kinds of hersh fuck-ups now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_document_hoax

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/magazine/the-detail-in-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-that-rings-true.html

another conspiracist!

its all connected man

man, nobody wrote a book about communism, hypnotism, and the monkees... :(

that intelligence has been suppressed

lol it "rings true" what kind of bullshit nonsense is that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwSZvHqf9qM

^your first good post in years

Mordy you should start looking up her record for truthfulness imo

question

if the main part of the hersh story is true...

then why would pakistani military

a) spend years hiding bin laden and supporting him as an asset/informant
b) then allow a US raid that they knew would end in his death

is it simply that there are different elements w/in the pakistani military and some were pro- and others anti-bin laden (or put another way, different elements felt they had different things to gain/lose from cooperation w/ americans)?

all that said, the idea that folks in pakistani military fed hersh elements of this story-- b/c it's less embarrassing for them than the official story--is compelling.

who knows! maybe we'll all find out in the end, maybe not.

I cannot confirm Hersh’s bolder claims — for example, that two of Pakistan’s top generals, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the former army chief, and Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the director of the ISI, had advance knowledge of the raid.

to me suggests there was a split in the pakistani military, including a contingent led by generals Kavani and Pasha that was willing to work with the u.s. military, or at least not stand in their way.

then why would pakistani military

a) spend years hiding bin laden and supporting him as an asset/informant
b) then allow a US raid that they knew would end in his death

He gives reasons in the piece!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQLJy9IIqrY

^^Reporter skimmed the article at best

"The last time the White House actually quoted a reporter in the way they did would have been Dick Cheney quoting a story by Judy Miller and Mike Gordon at the height of the WMD crisis."

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/5/12/seymour_hersh_details_explosive_story_on?autostart=true

what if hersh's "retired senior intelligence official" source is actually...

HILLARY CLINTON?!?!

[Hersh picks up other phone]: Yeah. Yeah. Oh no, fuck no … I don’t want to do it there! Go fuck—

Hersh: You there?

Chotiner: Yes.

Hersh: Fucking TV interview sets up in the hall of my office building. It’s a lawyer’s building.

Chotiner: I was just asking—
Hersh: You want to write about this totally tedious shit? Yes, I am a huge pain in the ass. I am the one that decided to publish it wherever the hell I please. That’s the story. You want to listen to hall gossip about me? Go ahead. [Sarcastic voice] It is so immensely important to so many people to know where I published. I can’t believe it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/05/seymour_hersh_interview_on_his_bin_laden_story_the_new_yorker_journalism.single.html

loool

Hersh: Would you care to hear the truth? Would you care to hear something that didn’t come from Vox, whoever Vox is?

:)

My favorite:

Chotiner: OK well it seems like the upshot of what you are saying, and correct me if this is wrong—

Hersh: I just said what I said. I don’t want to hear what the upshot is.

Trying to keep an open mind about this, but looking for verifiable evidence over plausibility. The most concerning aspect is allegad Saudi contributions to bin Laden's upkeep. A recent Times piece contrasted the new king's support of extremists (in Saudi Arabia and Syria) with the old king's relatively reformist tendencies, but tho old king was already old and increasingly bad health while bin Laden was in Pakistan, and seems *plausible* that some Saudis could have been working around him. Anyway, here's the piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/11/world/middleeast/king-salman-upends-status-quo-in-region-and-the-royal-family.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

sorry for typos, tiny screen right now

Gen. Walk-In from a different angle...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/ISI-man-who-sold-Osama-a-Kashmir-hardliner/articleshow/47277000.cms

Abu Ghraib had photos, and the weirdness this week of making Seymour Hersh a character stems from the lack of visuals to tell this story. He needs a bin Laden arm, or something.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121771/loneliness-sy-hersh

http://wp.newrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen-Shot-2015-05-12-at-8.49.13-AM1-500x484.png

http://wp.newrepublic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen-Shot-2015-05-12-at-8.37.19-AM1-500x488.png

Those diagrams are dopey.

John Kerry?

In the top diagram, Obama has eaten both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Anyway, the main insight is that HERSH ALWAYZ HATES DUH PREZEZ AND DUH SOLJERZ

they really should have come up with someone or something to fill the "pro-bush, anti-military" square

the papacy? idk

They could have drawn a bush.

http://pando.com/2015/05/14/lapdogs-redux-how-the-press-tried-to-discredit-seymour-hershs-bombshell-expose-of-the-cias-domestic-spying/

He needs a bin Laden arm, or something.

― ... (Eazy), Thursday, May 14, 2015 4:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wld be cool if he had one tbh

wld be cool if he could unscrew his bin laden arm and replace it with a chainsaw arm or a flamethrower arm according to his mood

like one of COBRA's battle android troopers

or Baron Karza

gonna find bin laden's head on this mountain of hindu kush if you know what I'm saying

looking at the world
through the sunset in your eyes
unless the vultures picked them out or
unless the seals shot them out,
the ducks and pigs and chickens peck
hey where's your neck?
would you know we're riding on the hindu kush express
we're really quite a mess

Hersh vs. Boden:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/magazine/what-do-we-really-know-about-osama-bin-ladens-death.html?_r=0

*Bowden

Last spring, Bowden got another unexpected call on his cellphone. He was on his way home to Pennsylvania from a meeting in New York with his publisher about his next book, the story of the Battle of Hue in the Vietnam War. On the other end of the line was Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter.

Hersh was calling to ask about the photographs of bin Laden’s burial at sea — carried out, the U.S. government said, in accordance with Islamic custom — that Bowden had described in detail at the end of ‘‘The Finish,’’ as well as in an adaptation from the book that appeared in Vanity Fair. ‘‘One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud,’’ Bowden had written. ‘‘The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame, the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.’’

Hersh wanted to know: Had Bowden actually seen those photos?

Bowden told Hersh that he had not. He explained that they were described to him by someone who had.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Hersh said the photographs didn’t exist. Indeed, he went on, the entire narrative of how the United States hunted down and killed bin Laden was a fabrication. He told Bowden that he was getting ready to publish the real story of what happened in Abbottabad.

He said versus he said

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military

i was with it for the first three paragraphs.

Guess Vox et al marginalized him well in that last round.

Once the flow of US intelligence began, Germany, Israel and Russia started passing on information about the whereabouts and intent of radical jihadist groups to the Syrian army; in return, Syria provided information about its own capabilities and intentions.

this is shocking to me if true

i've been thinking abt this piece all day - so much in here is really surprising/interesting to me

His old JCS sources are really just having a good old time making shit up at the country club, aren't they?

"We didn't purposefully commit insubordination, but we chose to break with the National Security Council and the President and the State Department and do our own thing basically all the time - systemically lying by omission in our daily briefings, of course, just like we have always done to all the presidents"

i agree - there's some truth in there but the majority of it is totally unbelievable

The next day, shortly before he died, he met a representative from Al-Marfa Shipping and Maritime Services, a Tripoli-based company which, the JCS adviser said, was known by the Joint Staff to be handling the weapons shipments.

This some Bourne Assessment shit right here! I'm surprised the next paragraph doesn't go into how the DIA was spying on the CIA to help the DoD potentially disrupt the stated policy of their boss - oh wait, it does

Like this whole thing is basically some kind of "Obama? He doesn't know what he's doing, but us Joint Chiefs staffers, we knew what was up - and we're working hard to change the game, so don't blame the DoD when it all goes to shit" Hersh is getting fed

Disappointing that LRB did not use this as an illustration for the piece

http://www.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/2014731/rs_560x415-140831193539-1024.Syriana-jmd-083114.jpg

it seems like he doesn't really understand why obama would believe assad needs to step down before there can be peace. it isn't possible that he doesn't know the history of the war right? like how does he propose assad get control of the country again - have the west just kill sunnis until the revolution gives up? and that's what he wants obama to do for peace?

Here's his interview yesterday with Democracy Now, on the same episode looking into the FBI's files on Pete Seeger.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/22/seymour_hershs_latest_bombshell_us_military

And part two of the interview:
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/22/sy_hersh_backing_assads_ouster_has

the main claim of the article does seem fantastic to me but im interested in his claims abt turkey, how true those are, and his general policy prescription w/r/t to assad

maybe he thinks that if we publicly backed assad the rebels would get dispirited and lay down their arms. i suspect some version of this is true but it involves a lot more bodies first. otherwise it seems fanciful

Does it seem like a didactic piece of reporting? Or is it just saying that there were those who saw the seeds of ISIS in the Syrian rebels of 2013 and found it more important to stop them than to stop Assad?

it felt strongly-argued to me and certainly in that democracy now interview he is very openly advocating for certain foreign policies. i dont know enough about the situation to evaluate either his claims or the effectiveness of his line but i found it somewhat persuasive

The longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could not hide his contempt when I asked him for his view of the US’s Syria policy. ‘The solution in Syria is right before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis and all of us – the United States, Russia and China – need to work together. Bashar will remain in office and, after the country is stabilised there will be an election. There is no other option.’

i think this is the pov he is supporting. it seems to me like there are a number of problems w/ this idea. a) how will you force assad to hold elections once the revolution is put down? b) how do you plan to put down the revolution? c) how do you get turkey to stop funding rebels? d) how do you stop sunni marginalization from erupting into further violence?

longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command retired O-5 who worked for a major defense contractor for a little while before hanging his own shingle after a couple of chats with his accountant, i.e. a real master of MENA statecraft

glad we have real expertise here on this thread that knows sy's sources so well

i appreciate tombot's impressions + experience on these sorts of threads tbh

anyway this stuff sounds unsurprising and believable to me, and sort of how i understand things work in terms of diplomatic jockeying internationally and disputes between top military brass, etc.

absolutely in keeping with what we know about how the u.s. military has functioned historically, in terms of different wings advocating different policies, etc.

also the stuff about weapons in benghazi was well known and reported at the time but got lost in the shuffle over the hillary nonstory

i appreciate tombot's impressions but idk why he finds it unbelievable when one compares it to what we now know about the history of disputes within factions of the military and between the military and the president etc under basically every administration in the past hundred years, and not only in the u.s.

I don't find it completely unbelievable but the motivations of the source(s) are more than a little transparent.

Certainly the top echelon DoD has a record of insubordinate behavior under the last two presidents at the very least - frankly, some of their own post-Vietnam textbooks and readings ENCOURAGE the officer class to seek ways to subvert top-down policy if they think they have a better understanding of the problem - but nice of Hersh to not bother to seek out any CIA or State Department sources to see if anybody on that side of the argument sees things differently. Nah, that would take time - and everybody knows THOSE branches are inherently untrustworthy, not like Pentagon insiders with "Special" and "Joint" in the names of the offices they used to work in

i mean tho hersh may support what they say but mainly i consider his reporting to be A) they're saying it and B) they did things about it, both of which seem plausible. so sure people see things differently, like obama and his current circle. but we sorta know what they think and what they've done about it because that was already reported on.

Nah, that would take time

Sy "Hot Take" rushing stuff to print.

Exactly. Did I commit blasphemy?

So on the less transparent motivations for this article and its UBL Funeral Truther precedent, how about Sy realizes on his second/third-to-last pet that he needs a few more bucks, and decides to just wring the last dribbles of dirty water out of a few more anonymous sources so he can sell several thousand words to the LRB (or whomever's paying) before he has to close up shop for good?

i'm confused. you're saying that the article is less credible because it is possible that he... wanted to make money?

like i don't even understand what your beef with the story is -- it doesn't even seem damaging to the U.S. unlike the last one except insofar as I guess it reveals A) fracture in the ranks (but that was externally observable well before this article) or B) that there was intelligence given to other countries that are U.S. allies and it often shares intelligence with? (with the exception in this case being that some of the intelligence was intended to make its way to syria, which is unsurprising given the stated aims of some of those other u.s. allies).

if anything, the complete mixed attitude of the U.S. on syria in the whole past year plus has been super murky and this seems to help clear up why the policy has been so two-faced

I'm pretty sure my main point is that the source is a self-serving traitor who is probably already on the radar of the CIA and his own former DIA colleagues, who just don't give enough of a shit to pursue (for the reasons you mention), that Sy has turned into a lazy TP/PR repeater for his insider sources, and that on the whole, this piece tells me absolutely nothing worthwhile about what we should be doing in the region to improve things - just that if we trust the JCS, well, they seem to have the best ideas, because that's who the reporter talked to last.

I get more from one of Atrios' "HERP MORE BOMBS AND GUNS DERP" posts where he just assumes that any policy involving armaments comes with absolutely no other activities, like our foreign policy is all just gun stamps and free training to randoms. At least he saves me 7500+ words when he emits.

late reply, but

"this piece tells me absolutely nothing worthwhile about what we should be doing in the region to improve things"

it tells me something that _has_ been done in the region about which i was not aware. this is definitionally what reporting is for.

dud

Sorry, nothing to do with this thread, but is everyone getting error messages to almost every thread on this site?

yes

Ok then, it's not just me. I remember back in 2011 this site went down for many weeks. Hopefully whatever is happening isn't on that scale.

Though it's weird I can post on this thread...

thank god for seymour hersh and basketball

New book already out - who knew? http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-Osama-Bin-Laden/dp/1784784362

New interview: http://www.salon.com/2016/04/22/seymour_hersh_spills_the_secrets_of_bin_ladens_execution_he_was_a_prisoner_of_war_it_was_a_hit_partner

Drawing from accounts of a number of high-level military officials, Hersh challenges a number of commonly accepted narratives: that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the Sarin gas attack in Ghouta; that the Pakistani government didn’t know Bin Laden was in the country; that the late ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in a solely diplomatic capacity; and that Assad did not want to give up his chemical weapons until the U.S. called on him to do so.

jesus effing christ

it must be fun to be a double-retired flag officer slash worn out Pentagon technocrat making up un-fact-checkable stories on the golf course to tell your old pal Sy

I think Sy puts a bit more leg work into his stories than that, Tom. afaics, he doesn't ever rely on single-sourcing.

hence coming up with shit on the golf course so you and your pals can get all the "facts straight" before phoning up Hersh with the crimes of that durned Obammer administration

the usual sign of a conspiracy theorizing is that the rationale for the cover-up doesn't exist or doesn't make any sense. literally every single one of the "commonly accepted narratives" being "challenged" in that list fits the bill.

You realize that you are hypothesizing a conspiracy, too, don't you?

Sure, but senior military and intelligence officials have a demonstrated history of talking smack about Obama and leaking things to the press to embarrass the administration.
The administration itself does not have a history of blatantly lying to the public for the lulz, which is what Sy has spent the last couple of years telling people.

Hersh embarrassed the G.W. Bush and W. Clinton administrations, too. Its less Hersh vs. Obama, than Hersh and his Pentagon sources vs. ideologues that would further ensnare us, the Doug Feiths and Samantha Powers of the world.

Nothing in this interview is new, really. Hersh's reporting already implicated Turkish intelligence in the Ghouta attack more than a year ago, and ties of the Saudis and gulf states to jihadis and Pakistan are open secrets. Anyone who still believes our "friends" in the region are morally superior to our state-enemies has had blinders on for decades.

That's why I didn't say anything to implicate Hersh's own motives? He obviously believes he is doing his job the same way he always has (which comes with its own problems but those are pretty well understood at this point). I retain my position that his sources are wagging the dog because they resent this administration's relatively dovish foreign policy and they apparently *really* hate the idea of Obama getting any kind of credit for Neptune Spear.

oh and btw who the hell came up with that name for the op, Neptune has a TRIDENT, not a damn spear, you jocks

otm

"Trident" is already taken by the U.S. nuclear SLBMs.

Great audio interview, about smoking Mary Jane at the University of Chicago and more:

http://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-192-seymour-hersh

"Mary Jane"

guy's an obvious nutter btw

"Mary Jane" because it helps paint the picture of Hersh there around the same time as Nichols & May and Sontag and these other misfit prodigies.

I hope he's active enough to be working his ass off these days.

new Scahill podcast for the Intercept includes SH interview

“The way (the media) behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.”...

“It’s high camp stuff,” Hersh told The Intercept. “What does an assessment mean? It’s not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate, you would have five or six dissents. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force — they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story. An assessment is simply an opinion. If they had a fact, they’d give it to you. An assessment is just that. It’s a belief. And they’ve done it many times.”...

Although critical of the Russia coverage, Hersh condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media and its threats to limit the ability of journalists to cover the White House. “The attack on the press is straight out of national socialism,” he said. “You have to go back into the 1930s. The first thing you do is destroy the media. And what’s he going to do? He’s going to intimidate them. The truth is, the First Amendment is an amazing thing and if you start trampling it the way they — I hope they don’t do it that way — this would be really counterproductive. He’ll be in trouble.”

Hersh also said he is concerned about Trump and his administration assuming power over the vast surveillance resources of the U.S. government. “I can tell you, my friends on the inside have already told me there’s going to be a major increase in surveillance, a dramatic increase in domestic surveillance,” he said. He recommended that anyone concerned about privacy use encrypted apps and other protective means. “If you don’t have Signal, you better get Signal.”

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/25/seymour-hersh-blasts-media-for-uncritically-promoting-russian-hacking-story/

https://theintercept.com/podcasts/

“They were just so willing to believe stuff..."

lol irony

Hersh also said he is concerned about Trump and his administration assuming power over the vast surveillance resources of the U.S. government.

Damn straight, Seymour.

“They were just so willing to believe stuff..."

lol irony

Given his history I would love to hear a self-reflective take on this from him but sadly I doubt we'll ever get one.

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article165905578/Trump-s-Red-Line.html

Believable, but using a single source is still disappointing.

there's copies of recordings he used. it wasn't just a person's say-so.

Also, longer interview about this new piece.

Amazed at how absolutely persona non grata he's become in such a short time.

link to recordings?

Audio: Seymour Hersh States Seth Rich Was WikiLeaks Source and the Russia hack was "a Brennan Operation" https://t.co/LkssOVoLdw

— Peter Duke 📷 🇺🇸 (@peterdukephoto) August 2, 2017

Uff da

it's awesome he stockpiled a career of credibility to save up for fueling the seth rich story

He showed up in that NPR article about the Trump and the Rich story but only said he heard rumors that he couldn't confirm.

it's not like this is first misstep into conspiracy land, even this year. The man has been on InfoWars.

was this a private conversation, not intended to be published? disappointing either way.

WaPo quoted him as saying his comments were blown out of proportion by Fox etc., still was sad/disappointing to see him involved in this farrago at all

Leaked, though.

Has anyone read his memoir yet?

https://newrepublic.com/article/148646/seymour-hersh-weekly

see also: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/seymour-hersh-monday-interview.php

^^Always love reading/hearing interviews with him.

There’s (a CIA) guy; I was screaming at him once about fucking up the FBI after 9/11. And he said to me, “Sy, you don’t get it. The FBI catches bank robbers and we rob banks.” I thought to myself, Fuck! That’s just exactly right. They’re criminals, what the CIA does. It’s all criminal activity.

great interview, thanks for posting that mookie

p excited to read his book

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

lol this is the kissinger photo used in the book

https://i.imgur.com/h0f1Bs8.jpg

ha! that's great. the bookforum review was very very positive.

In your memoir, you say, “I can write now what I could not [in 1990], which was that the CIA had impeccable intelligence, conversation on nuclear issues in real-time, from deep inside the Pakistan nuclear establishment.” Why couldn’t you report that?

Because the person who told me was still in. [Now] he’s long gone.

Did you run that by him while you were working on the book to make sure it was okay to disclose?

He’s gone completely crazy. It’s been 30 years.

Yo Seymour Hersh... April 22nd 1915 just called... they would like to know what the fuck you are talking about. https://t.co/wREi6K31on… https://t.co/86LNZ3TZoX

— (((Pat Hilsman))) (@PatrickHilsman) June 27, 2018

“When you could die a highly respected and admired journalist but you just gotta do genocide denial on your way out.“ Sean P. McCarthy

To my knowledge, I'm not sure if chlorine has ever been used in aerial bombs or rocket/artillery shells, except perhaps as a contaminant from production.

More lethal agents like mustard were discovered before gas agents were put in shells in WWI. When Germans used chlorine in the WWI, they'd just tap large tanks upwind of opposing trenches.

https://www.veteranstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/gas-hulton-getty3.jpg

More to the point, if one has chlorine, its a single synthesis step to phosgene (responsible for 85% of gas deaths in WWI, and the Bhopal disaster).

CO + Cl2 → COCl2 (ΔHrxn = −107.6 kJ/mol)

The LC50 for chlorine is around 300 ppm, that for phosgene around 3 ppm, ie its 100 times as effective.

What are we questioning here?

what are you questioning? and can you find any source for it beyond al-bab.com?

I'm more inclined to trust Hersh, insofar as he has long provided an outlet for US IC insiders seeking to avoid US military intervention, than groups that, whether well-intentioned expats, or Gulf state funded, which have sought it.

It’s a verbatim quote.

"You sound like an apologist for Assad?" @Jo_Coburn

"I just believe in facts" Seymour Hersh#bbcdp pic.twitter.com/wZkpioU0gh

— BBC Daily Politics and Sunday Politics (@daily_politics) June 26, 2018

OPCW concluded that chlorine was very likely used in the attack, no mention of a bomb? he may be caught up in the semantics, but i doubt that anyone involved has the standing to question his anti-war credentials, let alone accuse him of 'apologising' for assad or 'denying genocide'

he, or his sources in american intelligence, could totally be wrong! and if sean p. mccarthy has better sources or info that would be surprising, but cool

The UN has confirmed past attacks. I think we would have done the regime change by now if that was really on the horizon and the ultimate goal behind the false flags or whatever the counter narrative is this week.

Not denying gas attacks children doesn’t necesarily mean you want military intervention. Maybe the guy that goes on infowars now isn’t that reliable anymore?

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Chemical-Weapons-Activity

And a useful thread

Seymour Hersh's BBC interview where he denies the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons on civilian populations is disgusting and factually inaccurate.

I'm going to go through here and refute point by point his claims. https://t.co/mNSrgEXsb3

— Rao Komar (@RaoKomar747) June 28, 2018

Good interview here with Hersh about Chicago.

If you were a reporter working in Chicago in 2018, what do you think you'd focus on?

Getting out of there.

This is shocking. Sy Hersh, who broke the US military's Mai Lai massacre of women and infants, who reported Abu Ghraib, casually says on RT News that dead kids in Syria are just staged propaganda.https://t.co/3cmlsiQZlt

— Matt Bors (@MattBors) July 1, 2018

hm, that's not what he said

“we keep seeing that same kid covered in dust” that’s truther/“crisis actor” territory in the face of something well documented.

I'll admit it's not great

I hope I have the sense to stop posting before I hit 80

this interview is, uh, somethin' else

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/seymour-hersh-interview-novichok-russian-hacking-9-11-nerve-agent-attack-a8459596.html

That writer suuuuuuuucks

Hersh shows no signs of slowing down. He clearly has plenty of work in progress with the tantalising prospect of reporting on the alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the US election.

Holy shit, that's bad. Doesn't the Independent have editors?

it's on-line only with pretty much a skeleton staff as i understand it

New story:

Seymour Hersh on what George H.W. Bush got up to as Reagan's VP https://t.co/iFhAhq3gk0

— London Review of Books (@LRB) January 16, 2019

hersh: "i don't think that robert mueller is all there."

https://www.salon.com/2019/07/23/investigative-reporter-seymour-hersh-the-world-is-run-by-ignoramuses-wackos-and-psychotics/

I was with you on that all the way. I thought once Hillary called those people "deplorables" it was all over. She was dead from that moment. She lost millions of votes on that by criticizing people who were considering an alternative to her.

I didn't realize this was a commonly accepted belief (per a quick search, a bunch of Hillary staffers have agreed on it losing votes) - I find it difficult to believe was cruising toward even an Obama 2012 small popular vote majority before the deplorables line.

Thoughts on Hersh's NordStream take?

Not really sure what to think. I feel like its plausible, but alternatives are plausible too, which is where I was already on this. There doesn't seem much here to move it beyond that, doesn't feel a particularly solid case.

I had yanks and poles in the office sweepstake

Classic - It's all true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

^^^ hersh has been an unwitting US natsec asset for a fair time now, used basically to deliver controlled counter-details which churn up chatter (which is to say, controlling both ends of the debate) w/o in any sense actually damaging deeper US interests. SH has access to the one "retired" cia guy who tells the truth, and coincidentally knows everything relevant while remaining unidentified by his colleagues? yeah this guy definitely exists lol

why would it be in the US interest to supply hersh with (real? fake?) details of the US clandestinely blowing up Nord Stream? is this a way to brag about it to the russians, like “in your face!!” while still maintaining plausible deniability?

i: we do what we want and we also lie abt it is a power move
ii: also true if they didn't do it lol tbh
iii: as noted, shapes both ends of the debate (is doing that right now)…
ii: … while actual precise details of the how are handily distracting and misleading (technically it was done some other way)
v: could plausibly also be factional shunting within the deep state to force someone's hand somewhere (the system is what it does, the factions are not "rebel outsiders")
vi: the international other players (germany etc) all also have intelligence services and security structures, they aren't sitting round waiting for sy hersh's blog to determine who did what when

"(technically it was done some other way)"

^^^ i mean i don't know this but this is how a limited hangout would operate

yeah i can see how that would be useful

vii: a semi-discredited SH (via small technically incorrect details as opposed to the larger basically correct story) is p useful, bcz of who else gets tangled in the tar-baby

Mark S, I don't know why you think you know more about the intelligence world than SH, who has been involved in reporting on it for decades.

I wouldn't trust him to tell me the inside truth about your work at NME / The Wire / Sight & Sound etc.

By the same token, while your intelligent and stimulating ideas are always good to read, I think he knows more about this particular field than you do.

an interesting aspect of the kinds of cultural journalism i do know a lot about is that the antagonism of one era will be adapted to and absorbed into the marketing of a subsequent era…

the cia for example also know a lot about their particular field, and about using people (more than me certainly). i would expect them to adapt and am assuming they have. has hersh also adapted? it's quite hard for a solitary actor to adapt, but maybe he has. i think it much more likely that the unending recent spat between him and e.g. bellingcat is basically a "well poisoned at both ends"* with conflicting tidbits that distract from elements they genuinely don't want know or discussed…

*(sorry this is a rubbish mixed metaphor lol)

the cia for example also know a lot about their particular field, and about using people (more than me certainly). i would expect them to adapt and am assuming they have. has hersh also adapted? it's quite hard for a solitary actor to adapt, but maybe he has.

Worth considering also that the CIA is an institution which refreshes itself through the hiring of new, young employees versed in new techniques and information strategies, while Hersh is one very old man with the cognitive biases of an old man (think and move slower, suspicious of/resistant to new information or perspectives, more likely to trust people he's had "relationships" with for decades, never considering seriously the idea that he and/or his source may be past it). It's not just possible, it's likely that Hersh has long since transitioned, in the CIA's/government's eyes, from antagonist to clearinghouse. "Pass this off to the old man — it's exactly the kind of thing he goes for, and there are some people out there who still think he's a brave truthtelling genius."

iii: as noted, shapes both ends of the debate (is doing that right now)…

according to this metric, whatever hersh reports serves the interests and desires of the intelligence community? it seems to me that by assuming that any reporting using sources inside the intelligence community, however accurate or truthful, is to be shunned as harmful, that you've constructed a double bind. you've imagined that community as being so cunning and powerful that they control everything they touch.

i think hersch tries to tell it straight but he is deeply biased against the american intelligence community and with good reason. haven't read his nord stream article but it never made sense to me that russia would do it.

I don't have a strong opinion on who did it, and Hersh's theory is plausible as far as I can tell, but "an actor would do a certain act" and "an actor did that act" aren't the same thing. I don't think he's established the second of those

The intelligence stuff of the last few posts is an interesting direction, have to ruminate on that a bit

FWIW I agree with poster Aimless.

The posts by Mark S and Unperson are good reminders to be sceptical about what we're told and to look for hidden motives and causes, eg: some of which may be unknown to Hersh.

But they don't, themselves, disprove any claim that Hersh has made. Only factual evidence can do that.

And I think Aimless is correct to say that dismissing Hersh whatever he says becomes incoherent. There must be certain things that he could say that would be true or worth knowing.

Thought these were interesting factual details in his reporting:

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)

May as well dismiss Biden as a malleable old man if Hersh's age makes him a rube.

May as well dismiss Biden as a malleable old man if Hersh's age makes him a rube.

Do you think that's a zing? Biden is clearly malleable. Make a list of the positions he advocated in the 70s, 80s and 90s and compare them to the positions he's advocated (and things he's actually achieved, legislatively) as Obama's VP and now as president. He has undergone a steady and obvious leftward shift as he has aged, indicating that he is aware of broader social and political changes and is adjusting his thinking accordingly.

By 'malleable' I think Eazy was thinking more in terms of being shaped and directed by someone else's will. iow, being their dupe.

Genuine question. If say in two weeks Hersh’s story becomes undeniably ‘the truth’ ? Like Biden admits to it. Would it change your perception of the intelligence community or US foreign policy? Or even the current invasion of Ukraine?

If say in two weeks Hersh’s story becomes undeniably ‘the truth’ ?

the key piece of the whole operation was its deniability. its a lock that whoever did it will continue to deny responsibility. hersh's story is an attempt to cut through that fog to expose who did what to whom and how. how the world uses those facts is not his concern as a journalist. getting the story right is his job, which isn't easy in the world of spying and covert operations.

My question is more about the different possible impacts of such an act.

The most important impacts aren't likely to be public knowledge. But I think it's safe to speculate there are more Germans pissed off at the USA today than there were before this story was posted.

This piece goes after Hersh's credibility as a journalist; I was not aware of just how often he has fallen victim to forged documents, made factual errors, etc.

This piece digs into the details of Hersh's reporting on the Nordstream story and finds numerous factual errors and timeline fuckups.

Hersh interviews Thomas Frank:

TF: I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too. A near miss on that one.

He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on.

fuckin preach! it simply cannot be emphasized enough.

gotta love that neoliberalism baby

Lots of laughter about Hersh's latest:

At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the [American] official said, “Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan—a poor waif in his underwear—and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking. Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”

What's making people...skeptical, to put it mildly...is that "poor waif in his underwear" line, which is a Russian idiom that no American would ever use. The sidelong shot at Nigeria is also pissing some people off.

its ridiculous, zelensky is quite robust, hes a stocky boi