If you fact check and you're right, you've wasted your time.
If you fact check and you're wrong, you either can't publish (wasting the time you took for the story) or you publish anyway knowing it's wrong, in which case, it's still a waste of time.
Or you publish and report the claims made by the source and call out specifically where those claims couldn't be verified. It's like science publishing, too often negative results go unpublished. Knowing what didn't work can be as useful as knowing what did work.
> If you fact check and you're right, you've wasted your time.
That is not how it works. First of all there is no “you’re right”. The journalist doesn’t have first hand observations. They cannot be “right” or “wrong” only their source can be.
The journalist goes and checks what can be verified independently. No matter what the outcome of these checks nobody wasted their time. The result is a stronger article, and continued respect for the journalist in his profession.
"The American explosive devices needed to be camouflaged in a way that would make them appear to the Russian system as part of the natural background—something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water"
This was the most ridiculous part. I can't think of a reason they would prefer to use an explosive charge in a position visible to inspection.
"Salinity matched" does not make any sense, and the article said nothing of the sort.
It said "make them appear ... as part of the natural background — something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water". Making something invisible to sonar could depend on the acoustic impedance (which varies with salinity) of the surrounding water and might involve adapting the object accordingly.
He's in "I want corroboration" territory for me. The big scoops - My Lai, Abu Gharaib - were backed up with hard evidence and other organizations confirming the allegations. Stuff like "the US faked Bin Laden's burial and chucked chunks of him into the mountains" have, thus far, not been.
Abu Ghraib happened, and My Lai happened, and Hersh was first who brought these two stories to light.
Neither were some giant secrets, and were previously dismissed as unsubstantiated rumour. Hersh collected enough factoids together to substantiate them enough to become a news story, rather than a military legend.
Similarly, we'll learn more about this operation over the next years, unless of course we get the species-ending nuclear holocaust that some appear to desire.
Hersh was emphatically not the first to bring My Lai to light. Hugh Thompson reported the incident, and although it was initially swept under the rug by lower-level commanders, it wasn't until after Calley was charged (Sept 1969) that Hersh reported on it (Nov 1969).
He deserves credit for his excellent, Pulitzer Prize-winning work covering My Lai. But to my knowledge he has never once been the first to report on a scandal and been right about it.
His contention involved the manner in which UBL's location was discovered. The popular narrative is that a courier was tracked with the aid of intelligence gathered during "enhanced interrogation" sessions. Whereas his claim is that an ISI officer walked in and received cash for the information.
If this is an accurate summary of what he's claiming, this seems a bit more ridiculous than that:
> The truth, Hersh says, is that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and kept him locked up with support from Saudi Arabia, using him as leverage against al-Qaeda. In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin Laden to the US for increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." Rather than kill him or hand him over discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging an elaborate American "raid" with Pakistani support.
I'm not sure it is more ridiculous. ISI holding him in quasi-house arrest in Abbottabad (home of the Pakistani Military Academy) seems more plausible to me vs. them having no idea he was there and the US finding him as depicted in the propaganda film "Zero Dark Thirty."
Either way, Hersh's story is more than simply 'an ISI officer walked in and received cash for the information', and veers directly into the definition of conspiracy theory territory. Which isn't to say it isn't possible, but many parts just don't make sense:
> And there are more contradictions. Why, for example, would the Pakistanis insist on a fake raid that would humiliate their country and the very military and intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it?
> A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?
> Why not just kill bin Laden, drive his body across the border into Afghanistan, and drop him off with the Americans? Or why not put him in a hut somewhere in Waziristan, blow it up with an F-16, pretend it was a US drone strike, and tell the Americans to go collect the body?
> 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.
> There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.
Granted...he is in his mid 80's. Say what you will about other national leaders in the 80's (some of whom have organizational apparatuses around them to support them, vs. being a lone wolf professional)...but cognition may play a factor vs. Seymour Hersh in the prime of his life...
Yup. Hersh also published bogus claims about the Syrian nerve agent attacks on civilians, claiming they were not done by the Syrian government, but by "outside agents".
Among his claims was that the Sarin was made by "mixing two inert chemicals", which is utter bullsh*t; the synthesis pathways for those deadly chemicals are notoriously difficult and hazardous, including things like hydrofluoric acid, which is extremely corrosive, and a itself a contact poison affecting the nervous system.
But he happily spouts his bullcrap stories, the primary beneficiaries of which are the autocracies of the world.
Why would one assume that the administration made any decisions at all about this? Besides, both the balloon funtime and the destruction of valuable energy infrastructure are stupid and dangerous. Doing one stupid dangerous thing doesn't preclude doing another.
> Seymour Hersh’s recent Substack post claims to provide a highly detailed account of a covert US operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in order to ensure that Russia would be unable to supply Germany with natural gas through them. All the information in Hersh’s post reportedly comes from a single unnamed source, who appears to have had direct access to every step of the planning and execution of this highly secretive operation.
Not sure why anybody took seriously a story an octogenarian wrote on his blog from interviewing a single anonymous source where he got numerous basic facts wrong anyway.
If someone was feeding Hersh false information why would they reference the Alta class? Assuming it was some Intel op or some insider, did they just google some Norwegian navy ships that could plausibly fit the picture? Or did Hersh draw that connection himself?
Hersh has been criticized for listening to cranks. Maybe some Intel officer (or adjacent gov/military worker) heard some rumours internally but there was comparmentalization or operational security protecting the details, and then tried to piece it together themselves, before leaking it to Hersh.
If it is false it's worth asking why and who would care to push these angles.
Presumably it's for the same reasons that people gave him faulty technical information about Sarin gas in his debunked Syria story, or whatever weird details he was fed about the notion that the Osama bin Laden raid never happened, or the idea that USSOCOM is secretly controlled by a sect within the Vatican. Because he'll run with it, and people pay attention to him.
People troll all the time on the Internet; why would we assume they wouldn't troll everywhere else too?
As bin Laden was holed up 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, it seems more likely that he was captured by ISI and/or the Pakistani army, as opposed to trying to hide from them there.
ISI dealt with bin Laden in the 1980s, and has good intelligence in the region bin Laden had been rumored to be holed up in.
It takes more of a leap of faith to believe bin Laden was hiding from the Pakistan military/industrial apparatus 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, than that some high officials knew he was there.
I'd still give Hersh the benefit of the doubt he's not just listening to some internet troll type person. There has to be some reputation at play here for him to take it seriously. The odds are high it's someone connected to the US or NATO govs. At least you'd assume so. As another commenter mentioned, he claimed he used to the same fact checkers used by The New Yorker.
I would not give him the benefit of the doubt, and I have a hard time understanding why anybody would; there is more than ample reason to doubt any story he runs. I can't imagine a credible source working with him, so far has the presumption of accuracy been shifted on his work over the last 10 years. That's why a famous journalist is reduced to running stories from unnamed (and implausible) sources in the first place.
"Since I posted my original article, I had a short email correspondence with Seymour Hersh, unfortunately he stopped replying once I asked him about several of the above mentioned inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies."
Maybe it was an aging Intel guy relying on old reputation for credibility who later declined into pushing conspiracy tier thing, so basically two levels of Hersh like people cruising off past glory.
You must know about becoming a first time voter after being on the sidelines? Same here after seeing Seymour Hersch being denigrated and attacked just because some don't agree with his point of view, especially after he has done so much for our country, its ideals and founding principles. I'll take your comment at face value and assume you don't hate on first timers. Otherwise you would fall into the same category of an ad hominem.:)
> the notion that the Osama bin Laden raid never happened
The first sentence of Hersh's article reads:
"It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan."
His entire article then goes on to lay out a set of details for both the lead up and the execution of that raid, including the execution of bin Laden.
Those details conflict with the details officially given by the Obama administration-- both the details given in the days after the event (which Hersh cites) and the clarifications from the administration in the weeks after the event.
In any case, Obama's administration and Hersh both clearly agreed that there was a raid on the exact same location on the exact same evening, involving the exact same helicopters and Navy Seals, in which the exact same bin Laden was killed.
In short, what you wrote here is factually inaccurate.
> the idea that USSOCOM is secretly controlled by a sect within the Vatican
Never heard about that one. Where did he write about that idea?
Edit: decided to not use the word "tenuous" to describe the Obama admin's account in the days after the raid. What I remember Hersh discussing was the admin's initial claim that the Seals had shot him in self defense, which was later clarified/retracted by the administration.
There are all sorts of interested parties in creating doubt about the attack, and the most likely is of course the master of this, Russia. It also fits very well with past bad reporting from Hersh.
The detail makes the story more plausible, later debunking matters far less than the initial report and the uncertainty that this sows in people's minds.
Taking attention away from the true culprit definitely helps. And any ammunition that can be used to make democracies in the West have more doubt and internal wasted debate definitely helps whoever actually destroyed the pipeline.
Trying to work backwards from the (likely true) notion that Hersh's story is fiction is just as intellectually flawed. We don't anything about Hersh's source or their motives. You could write an HN comment about how the CIA planted this whole story to cast doubt on the actual US-led operation to blow up (some) of the Nord Stream pipeline. Or you could write the opposite comment. There's just nothing to go on.
The only thing we can really discuss here is whether the Hersh story is credible. It seems clearly not to be. If we establish that, that's all we get: the fact that one story about what happened is false. We'll be no closer to knowing what actually happened. That's life!
Hersh wrote an article that broke through on Abu Gharib after several other outlets and the Red Cross had already been raising the alarm. His article was important and impactful but "breaking" is really overstating his impact there..
Edited to add a timeline rather than the wall of text;
* June 2023, Amnesty International calls out Abu Gharib as the site where US troops are holding Iraqis without charge in questionable conditions and reports on a riot there that resulted in the death of at least 1 prisoner.
* July 2023, Amnesty reports further after interviewing several prisoners of Abu Gharib that coalition forces are torturing prisoners using prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged restraint in painful positions -- sometimes
combined with exposure to loud music, prolonged hooding and exposure to bright lights.
Amnesty would go on to write dozens more reports about the conditions in the prisons there.
* November 2003, AP writes an article about the terrible conditions faced by prisoners in the largest camps including reports of uprising and shootings at Abu Gharib.
* January 2004, Darby blows the whistle and provides a CD full of images of torture to US Army criminal investigators.
* January 2004, based on Red Cross reports from their inspectors in Iraq, Army commissions Taguba Report to investigate the rampant reports of torture and inhumane conditions in Iraqi prisons. Report was completed in February and found tons of torture.
* February 2004, Amnesty reports on further torture within Iraqi prisons naming specific victims, techniques, and prisons.
* Late April, 2004 First pictures of torture start being released among hints of a secret Army Report.
* April 27, 2004, 60 Minutes publishes report detailing the abuse and publishes several pictures from Darby's disc. Dan Rather names several soldiers who the Army had been quietly court martialing. They had received the report / pictures ~3/4 weeks earlier.
* April 30, 2004, Hersh's New Yorker piece comes out with more details.
If the point is just to muddy the waters, you don't need a story that's airtight, it just needs to be convincing enough to spark peoples' biases.
If it's a crank, well, it's a crank. When I was in the Air Force, and still had a TS clearance, there was a friend+coworker of mine that was deep into conspiracy theories. Flat Earth, Moon Hoax, 9/11 truther, and a few others I don't remember. Everything we talked about he had loads of details. I knew it was all nonsense of course, because you're talking about flat earth and all that; if I didn't know he was a full blown conspiracy theorist? If I just knew he was a system administrator with a top secret security clearance attached to an intelligence squadron? And he was telling me a story about something the intelligence community did? He'd be very believable.
The satellite imagery of the Alta shows the dates June 5, 7, 20, and later (until the Alta is scrapped on the 30th). The BALTOPS 2022 exercises took place June 5–17. So the imagery generally does not provide evidence of the Alta's location during most of BALTOPS 2022.
It's helpful to consider that BALTOPS itself is a batshit cover for one of the highest profile military operations of the last 20 years (it's sort of like the military equivalent of altering the schedule at the San Diego Comic Con to cover a heist), and that it might be hard to even come up with a reason that you'd need an Alta-class ship to pull this off, or really even a military ship at all; a lot of what Hersh is talking about here appears to be stuff that civilian extractive industry professionals already do (remote detonation in particular).
Would a "professional" agree to do this work without extensive obvious evidence that it was sanctioned on high? Wouldn't you risk becoming fall guys if you agree to do all this with a minimal crew on a wooden fishing boat? You'd risk being arrested by the local police. I think there is some holistic view on how to get the whole thing to work that might not lead to an obvious minimal solution. Various interests get in the way and add quite a degree of complication.
You don't need to go find the world's best miners like in the movie Armageddon; you can use military divers. You just don't use a carefully tracked warship, one of a single-digit number in its class, as a diving platform.
You get the same weird thing with this "camouflage" thing with the C4. Camouflaging from what? They need to make the explosive charges undetectable... for what? Like, the US blows up the Nord Stream pipeline and Russia is like, "oh, shit, we never detected a mine, I guess we'll never know if NATO was behind this, and they're innocent until proven guilty!"
Forget for a second about the "salinity matching" thing being gibberish; what exactly was this part of the operation that Hersh decided to document trying to accomplish? There is zero uncertainty that somebody blew up the pipeline.
>Like, the US blows up the Nord Stream pipeline and Russia is like, "oh, shit, we never detected a mine, I guess we'll never know if NATO was behind this, and they're innocent until proven guilty!"
If the US did blow up the pipeline, they would be most interested in keeping it a secret from Germany, not Russia. It would also be important to keep it secret from the voting public, other neutral countries (India, e.g.), pretty much anyone except Russia.
Is there any evidence that Alta was operational? Last time she moved under own power was 2012. She was towed to the scrapper. If could have moved herself, then they could have saved the cost of the tow.
It doesn’t make any sense that would use ship was bound for the scrapper. They would have to fix the engines and half the other stuff wouldn’t work. People would have noticed ship that never moved moving. There are working ships that could have done the job.
I haven't followed any of this really at all, but is there a compelling reason why Ukraine isn't at the top of everyone's list? Seems like they would have the motive to prevent Germany from giving-in to Russian demands to keep gas flowing and at the same time hurt Russia. It doesn't seem like it was a highly technical or expensive operation that would have prevented a smaller player from accomplishing it, and in fact there are signs that it wasn't a highly coordinated job. My completely uninformed analysis starts the odds at 75% Ukraine, 10% U.S., 10% some Russian faction, 5% other.
Maybe! I feel everything Ukraine does is under a microscope and they’d be hesitant to upset the USA or risk losing intl support by going rogue on something like this.
That doesn't seem like going rogue. The pipeline was already off. Sanctions are in effect. This just seems like ensuring the status quo is kept in place.
The pipeline was voluntarily disused by the Germans, not under sanction. Whoever blew up the pipeline (come-on, it was obviously the US) attacked critical infrastructure co-owned by Germany, Russia, and some minority interests. That would seem a little ungrateful, wouldn't it, directly attacking your sponsors? The US, on the other hand, has a long list of incentives for doing so.
I think the 2 reasons people don't suspect Ukraine is that:
a) it seems kinda implausible they have ability to blow up the pipe-line, nevermind to do so without being detected in what has to be the most cloesly monitored body of water on the planet.
b) Germany was already backing them. Blowing up the pipeline might make Germany marginally less likely to backslide, but if Ukraine were caught blowing up the pipeline, Germany would almost certainly turn against them. The risk/reward doesn't really make sense.
(FWIW, I think the most likely suspect is the one that doesn't usually get mentioned, that Germany blew it up to demonstrate their resolve regarding Russian sanctions).
(FWIW, I think the most likely suspect is the one that doesn't usually get mentioned, that Germany blew it up to demonstrate their resolve regarding Russian sanctions)
This is very unlikely, the german government simply never would have the balls to do anything remotely drastic.
But they likely would close their eyes, if someone else would do it.
Funny, as a Pole my 1st reaction was "damn our spooks finally did a good job". I was (and still am) very surprised nobody was even considering Poland as a perpetrator.
I know, right. Historical beefs with both Germany and Russia, a history of competent intelligence organizations, a quality military, and obvious current motivations. Yet, every time I bring up Poland as an option, usually I just get ignored.
The time I do get a response, it is usually some story about how only the US has the capability, which is total BS.
That was intended to come under current motivations, but I should have been more explicit. What else are the other Poles around you annoyed about in this situation? Do most think Polish agencies were responsible?
Most folks I know believe it was the US. They think that our leadership lacks the cojones and our military lacks the capability. I believe neither to be true, though I’d imagine there must have been an implicit approval from major NATO partners. Take France for example - Germany getting cheap fossil fuels isn’t exactly great for the French economy.
>a) it seems kinda implausible they have ability to blow up the pipe-line, nevermind to do so without being detected in what has to be the most closely monitored body of water on the planet.
Is there a reason it couldn't have been a couple of zodiac boats? I can't imagine the entire Baltic sea is so well monitored that every craft of any size is tracked, even under the cover of darkness. Seems like a large moving van sized vehicle could hold a couple of deflated rafts, and a 10 man outfit in a trek across Poland.
The reading comprehension has fallen to an abysmal level. Who said it is true?
It's just a possibility and in my opinion a very reasonable one. Does it advance the economic war against Russia? Check. Does it galvanize European support for US and not Russia? Check
Only if you're very lucky do you actually know any of these things. There's generally a very wide space of things that could have happened, and knowing that exactly one of them is wrong narrows things down very little. The space of motives for people to muddy the water is similarly wide, so you probably don't know anything new about the source.
You mean you know the outlet is unreliable, if they do it enough times. By "source" I assumed you meant the source of the story, about whom we still know nothing.
"You can't draw conclusions of any kind from false information; that's the problem with false information."
My point simply being, that you get information from false information, regarding the source of the false information. Philosophical and apparently out of place.
The glowies faked the transponders! They faked the satellite imagery too! And they even faked the witnesses and photographers who saw the ship! Case closed.
I don't think it really matters if Hersh's story is correct in all the details, or if it was done in a completely different way. So I don't really understand the zeal which people have to poke holes in it. What matters is motive, means and opportunity and only a few nations, all in NATO, have all three. And no one in NATO is going to do anything like this without making sure they get approval from the US first. That's pretty much all you need to know.
This is a non-statement. NATO is 29 other countries besides the US, all with their own motives, and you can contrive of motives for every other global power with the means to blow up a pipeline; the "opportunity" part of it doesn't even make sense.
You find it plausible that a global power outside of NATO would commit an act of international terrorism like this, blowing up the critical industrial infrastructure of a NATO member and everyone would just let it slide?
Or that any one of 29 NATO member countries would do this acting all on their own?
I think we have zero information and zero clues about who did this and trying to reason axiomatically about it, as HN is wont to do, isn't going to get us any closer to the truth.
That's exactly what reasoning axiomatically does, it gets you closer to the truth. It gets you from "I don't know anything" to "these are the plausible theories". I wonder why you think that allowing people to speculate based on these "axioms" is so dangerous? If they're wrong, they're just wrong aren't they?
As to clues, there are plenty. Biden proclaiming that he would put an end to Nord Stream 2 is a clue. That no one seems to be in a big rush to find out who did it given the scale of this and that it destroyed important infrastructure of a NATO member is a clue. That "there is no evidence that Russia did it" as the Swedish investigators said, is a clue.
For me it's the one where governments with the most capable intelligence agencies in the world are quiet about who committed an act of international terrorism against an important piece of industrial infrastructure at the bottom of the ocean. One largely owned by Germany, a key NATO member. If this was some eco terrorism (imagining for a moment that they would have the means to procure the explosives and expertise to blow up a concrete encased pipeline at the bottom of the sea), it would present a serious risk for oil and gas infrastructure everywhere. It would not be taken lightly.
In 2014 there was a sabotage operation against a munitions depot in Vrbětice in the Czech republic, a NATO member. There was no official attribution for half a decade. Lack of immediate attribution as a basis for assigning responsibility seems mostly cherrypicking and vibes.
Maybe but that's the essence of cherry-picking. It suggests that you aren't actually 'working from nothing towards plausible theories' as you think (and I'm not saying this is intentional or some sort of intellectual or moral failing, we all do this) but working backwards from a conclusion to select supporting points and counterpoints can be dismissed for not being sufficiently countery.
Is not cherry picking to apply relevant heuristics. I'm an average news consumer and I had never heard of your example. I doubt many people have, and probably even fewer care. It's just not as noteworthy as what happened here and that in itself is a factor in analyzing the response to it.
The fact that you hadn't heard of his example is a reason _not_ to trust your own first-principles logic, not a reason to rely on it.
I'm still stuck on the idea that we're having this discussion at all, though. It's really hard for people to get past the idea that Hersh can be an absolute kook and whatever their prior beliefs about the Nord Stream incidents can still be valid.
It goes in both directions. There's a comment elsewhere on this thread suggesting that, since Hersh's story is obviously fictitious (I tend to agree), it's probably the case that the US had nothing to do with the detonation. But that doesn't follow either!
Yes, I said it was a valid point but you're overestimating it's value. The magnitude of the event matters too in judging it's response, and the Czech story is nothing by comparison.
It's getting kind of tiring seeing you all over every thread in here smearing Hersh as a discredited wacko. I personally don't buy it, much less from someone who seems so invested in spreading it. I don't know what your motivation is, but please refrain from doing that in this comment chain, it's just irrelevant, thanks.
* He reported that the Vatican influences USSOCOM.
* He reported that the US faked the Syrian Sarin attack.
* He reported that Jewish money was behind an effort to start WW3 in Iran.
* He reported that Pakistan staged the bin Laden raid.
* And now he's reported an elaborate conspiracy between the US and (checks notes) Norway to blow up a pipeline, none of the details of which hold up or even make sense.
It gets you from "I don't know anything" to "these are the plausible theories".
It doesn't, it just lets you wrap your biases and motivated reasoning in a veneer of rigour that isn't really there. After all, you're the one picking the 'axioms' out of an infinite set and they aren't used for anything else.
There isn't anything wrong with idle speculation but there also isn't anything wrong with people pointing some idle speculation is largely baseless.
> Biden proclaiming that he would put an end to Nord Stream 2 is a clue.
"We are going to put an end to poverty!"
Normal people: "OK, social programs."
Galaxy-brain people: "He's gonna genocide poor people! There's no other explanation!"
NordStream 2 was decertified shortly after the Russians invaded Ukraine, and NordStream 2 AG filed for bankruptcy about a week later. I'm very comfortable fitting that within "put an end to".
"decertified" and "rusting hunk of twisted metal at the bottom of the ocean" are two different things. Apparently the US government agrees, people like Victoria Nuland made a point to express their satisfaction that it's the latter now.
Depends what you mean by "ended", one of those is permanent.
I'm not saying being happy about it is proof they did it, I'm saying that it indicates that they are aware of a difference, and that it indirectly bolsters the argument for a motive.
I really doubt any of these points would be in dispute if all this circumstantial evidence was pointing at Russia.
Rationalist reasoning about things you don't actually know about in the real world not only leads you to guaranteed wrong conclusions, it makes you think you're right because you made up a bunch of math about it.
This is why people think computers are going to develop AGI and enslave them.
> You find it plausible that a global power outside of NATO would commit an act of international terrorism like this, blowing up the critical industrial infrastructure of a NATO member and everyone would just let it slide?
Plausible? It has happened many times. In 2014, Russian military intelligence operatives blew up ammo depots in Czech Republic and nothing happened. Ammo stored there was to be sold to Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
I spent a few days with the chief of special operations of the joint chiefs of staff, and he told me many stories of things they would do to cover their tracks in special ops. For example, they would dismantle an airplane and file off every serial number of every part and then put it back together again.
Anyone planning an operation of this scale and significance would have thought to ensure the ship had an alibi. Moving the AIS transponder to another ship and send it on a tour seems trivially easy.
According to the same analysis: it doesn't even make sense that they'd require an Alta-class ship from Norway's Navy in the first place; the ship was essentially just a diving platform, and civilian ships operate in those waters with far less need for cover. Moreover, the whole structure of the operation Hersh claims: EC-UBA divers planting C4 charges detonated by a sonobuoy dropped by a Norwegian P8, doesn't make sense either: remote underwater detonation is a routine operation performed in the civilian oil and gas industry. Not to mention: the P8 implicated Norway's Air Force, contradiction a big chunk of Hersh's story.
None of this checks out. You can make any number of unfalsifiable arguments about them not checking out deliberately as part of psy-ops or whatever, but at that point you've taken the whole story back to square one: we just don't know what happened, and Hersh's story has essentially nothing to tell us about it, other than that one random, implausibly-well-informed anonymous person told Hersh, one of journalism's least trustworthy figures, that that's what happened.
Look, I'm just a dude on a message board reading a set of competing claims about a subject I know literally nothing at all about. But I trust these claims more than I trust Hersh's claims, by a factor of infinity.
I think you have to separate Hersh pre-2010 and Hersh after-2010. He was once one of the greatest journalists in the world, but the last decade he has been putting out poorly-sourced, falsifiable garbage.
Watch the interview he gave the other day (mentioned in this article) and tell me you walk away from it with more confidence that he's fully "there" as a journalist. He goes on a tangent about how Ukraine is doomed and Zelenskiy is killing his own people by resisting, even though 90% of the country is in favor of fighting to regain the occupied territory.
He also doubles down on the ship being, specifically, the ALTA (and not any other ship), but the ALTA has been sitting in a scrap yard for 6 months.
Hersh stopped working within journalistic organizations, with their editors, fact-checkers, second-sourcing, etc - the organizations in which all his previous and more credible and verifiable work was done. That's a concrete fact, not 'tribalistic bias'. There's no basis whatsoever for you to attribute skepticism of recent Hersh to it, it's just namecalling.
That's just not true. A handful of bloggers have nitpicked at it using publicly available information. All of Hersh's big stories received the same initial response of derision, going back to My Lai half a century ago [1].
Hersh, believe him or not, is not relying on publicly available information, but confidential sources.
1. Convincing an editor to run your ideas under their masthead
2. Paying someone to edit your work, and running your ideas under your own masthead
A newspaper is more than a brand. They put their reputation on the line when they publish.
(You can make a good argument that many newspapers have trashed their own reputations, but that doesn’t negate the argument. When you self publish, you have no one vouching for you. Furthermore if you don’t like an editor or fact checker you can fire them)
Even if he wanted to work within those journalistic organizations and everything he said was true, they wouldn’t publish it. There’s really no other option for him at this point.
The fact they didn't want to work with him, after many years of him dropping huge bombshells they published, the literal foundation of his reputation, says more about his later work than than theirs, no? It's strange to claim his inability to find publishers for his non-verifiable work somehow confirms its credibility.
You're jumping to a conclusion here -- sometimes the journalist does change.
Plenty of political journalists go off the deep end at some point in their career. (Prof.) Mark Crispin Miller used to write well-researched essays on the culture of TV, now he believes that Sandy Hook was likely staged and that the standard explanation for 9/11 isn't true. Christopher Hitchens made a significant swerve to the right later in his career.
Many colleagues and former friends of Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald feel the same way about what they have done.
Those last two examples indicate you have a tribalistic bias though:
Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald changed their politics which you’re implying impacts their credibility because their friends (fellow members of your tribe) said mean things about that.
Further, why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility — and even mixed into a paragraph about hoaxes?
> why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility...?
Because, unfortunately to those who admired him, Christopher Hitchens allowed his disgust for Islamic fundamentalism to lead him to credulously advocate for a war that turned out to be based on a series of lies? Lies that he partly saw through, but that he decided to ignore in service of what for him was the larger good?
I completely agree. He has a Pulitzer Prize, five Polk awards, two national magazine awards. Broke My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and exposed the Israeli nuclear program.
He is easily the most accomplished journalist for several generations.
That doesn’t automatically mean this story is right but to dismiss him in emotional and inaccurate terms doesn’t speak to a rational, evidence-based interpretation of the facts.
Seymour Hersh has also gone off the deep end lately. Some current examples[1]:
* the Osama bin Laden raid was faked in a conspiracy with Pakistan and he was actually captured in 2006
* much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei
* that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training
* the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey
Being right decades ago doesn't somehow absolve you of having to have verifiable sources and evidence when you go on to make numerous other claims that don't happen and no one can verify.
We live in a world where the CIA has a heart attack gun [1], a presidential administration faked evidence of WMD to go to war in Iraq, the CDC conducted secret medical torture on black men with syphilis, and the Pentagon sent JFK proposals to justify a war on Cuba by conducting false flag terrorist attacks against American civilians [2]. (JFK rejected them, apparently.)
So I read a list like yours, and read you scoffing at the implausibility of any of those things, and I remember just how different we all can be.
Yes and you know what all those things have in common? Actual evidence which corresponds to real events, and multiple sources confirming that they happened.
What Hersh's suppositions have is a stunning lack of verifiable evidence and observably factually incorrect assertions (as in the case of his articles on Nordstream).
Saying someone's claims don't (yet) have the kind of evidence you demand is pretty different from calling someone crazy (and in so doing implying that those claims are not worth the consideration of the sane).
The only thing your bullet points were doing is suggesting "look at the delusions of this maniac! He can't be trusted because of them". But because the completely insane shit in my list turned out to be true, Hersh's sorts of claims are at least as plausible as the insane shit I listed in my reply. (And in the case of the first two, they were labeled by bienpensants of all kinds as proof that the claimant was certifiably nuts or at least unworthy of Serious Attention ... until the day they were shown to be true.)
All I'm saying is that, given the factual record of conspiracy and sociopathy on the part of the world's powerful, something like "2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey" can't easily be used to dismiss someone as nuts. Not enough evidence? Sure, whatever (but let's wait a decade or two). Crazy though? Nope.
Over 10 years. It's one thing to have a story out there no one can prove, it's quite another to have been continuously publishing things you can't prove and which no one else can find any evidence of despite looking.
There are multiple factual claims about verifiable vessels, planes and movements being made and none of them are true.
All your saying is, despite obvious factual inconsistencies in the parts of the story which should be publicly verifiable, you've already got a conclusion you like. Which is what everyone's doing because the real big secret is "it was Russia" is a boring conclusion that doesn't move clicks.
Yes. The previous comment is also problematic. It does not follow from Hersh being one Smiths song short of a mixtape that the opposite of his conclusions are true. It's indicative of how all these discussions happen: points made to impeach Hersh's conclusions are analyzed as if they are arguments for the purity of US foreign policy. Hersh might be "right" that the US is behind the pipeline attack! But that doesn't matter if he got there by guessing. The real question is: can we learn anything from the story he told, and the answer to that seems, pretty convincingly, to be "only that his sources are fabulists".
It would be handy if you could conclude things like "whatever Hersh said, the opposite is true" from his stories! His journalism would be super valuable if that was the case. You'd just read it and draw the opposite conclusions. But you can't do that, because his stories (at least since 2006) are unmoored from reality.
Well, in the last decade he's kinda blown it with multiple claims in Syria. Statements that are either unbelievable, undocumented and easily could be (like building locations), or basically falsified have really brought down his trust. Even if he's just getting bad information rather than coming from a particular angle, his readers deserve better vetting of the material. At some point it feels like he's being driven by narrative more than facts that's a problem, and hanging out with Bashir Al Assad doesn't help to get the "real" story. Also note that Assad does have a particularly aligned geo-political supporter these days, who's directly involved.
Bellingcat is a way for UK/US spies to launder intelligence, a bootleg Wikileaks that won't challenge domestic power structures. I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously.
> I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously.
Bellingcat have a significant proven track record [1] and have won significant awards for their reporting, including the Investigative Reporting Award from the European Press Prize [2]. Do you have evidence for your counter-claim that they should not be taken seriously?
Haha, Bellingcat is your source vs a Pulitzer Prize journalist who may have fallen out of favor with a particular crowd, and you want the comment to be taken seriously? Not all us drink Koolaid. Here's a link to your link - about Brown Moses, an unemployed man from Leicester, England (https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/bellingcat_brown_moses....)
Good idea, judge based only on the name of the source, completely captured by narrative and unable to make decisions based any measurable facts they present. Pick a football team and cheer them to victory for surely that's the right way to understand the world, the economy, and geopolitics!
Don't read anything from the London Review of Books either since you might not agree with them. It's scary to hear new things.
I'll note that you didn't dispute that chlorine gas was used (eg in Yepres and many other times) and killed thousands in the great war nor that Seymour said it couldn't (there's video). Do you like it when your team slaughters innocents? Tryout Kiwi Farms.
>>>>Good idea, judge based only on the name of the source, completely captured by narrative and unable to make decisions based any measurable facts they present. Pick a football team and cheer them to victory for surely that's the right way to understand the world, the economy, and geopolitics!
Lots of words, but nothing that adds to the discussion that the source of your "new things" is a bunch of Tik-Tokers doing armchair analysis. Here's another description of your trusted sources -
"Brown Moses aka Eliot Higgins, is the founder of an online collective called Bellingcat that picks apart conspiracy theories and investigates war crimes and hate crimes using clues from the Internet."
Wow, how amazing that we can now understand the world, the economy, and geopolitics from sitting in our gaming chair using clues from the internet.
Yah, let's dispute about chlorine gas in the "great war" since you and I are experts at chemical warfare and we both have access to proven, evidence-based reliable data aka Bellingcat and London Review of Books!
When you're JAQing off the use of chlorine gas in WWI and comparing LRoB to TikTok, ZyclonB and the holocaust are nearby. Since you use the internet I guess you can't know anything, LOL!
Nice! Love how you threw in the age factor there Buster. Yep, Seymour sure got his basic facts wrong during the Vietnam War, Watergate scandal, Abu Ghraib and more. I'd rather have him report on our state of the world than Brown Moses's team of Tik Tok experts or for that matter Team Jorge, unless you are one of them?
I threw in the age factor because it's a fact that people's mental faculties diminish as they age.
And the Pakistani staged Bin Laden raid, Opus Dei in the USMC, and the Turks using chemical weapons in Syria? How convenient that everything that doesn't corroborate his fairy tales is just more proof of the cover up.
Got it. That's not the intent, but have to call out the comment preceding mine which is ad hominem and insulting individuals without providing any substance for discussion.
I didn't see that comment. I've responded now. We don't always read the threads sequentially.
But in any case, other commenters breaking the rules doesn't make it ok for you to break them. (I don't mean you personally there, I mean any of us.) That's just a recipe for a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Also, you broke them in several places, not just that one.
Personal attacks and name-calling are not allowed here. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
Yes. For starters, if you had kept "senility" out of it, and just made your case based on what he'd actually reported, you wouldn't have made it so easy for the thread to devolve into a referendum on "ad hominem" arguments. His age and "soundness of mind" --- which you don't know anything about --- has nothing to do with this situation.
It's even worse than that, because really the whole ballgame on a thread like this is dodging what this blogger actually wrote, and instead pivoting to a credibility duel --- Hersh broke Abu Ghraib, and this guy... wrote a blog post? You've lost from the moment you accept that framing. Just read the post and consider what it says! The blogger did the work for you!
On the off chance that getting this feedback from someone on "the same side" as your argument is helpful, that is.
Well, I don't know if you noticed, but the part of the thread I responded to was already about discussing Mr Hersh's trustworthiness. And on the contrary, his soundness of mind has everything to do with this.
I would love to discuss the merits of the evidence presented by Mr Hersh. Too bad he hasn't given any! We just have to take him at his word because apparently he's credible and we have to pretend that octogenarians are just as mentally present as the rest of us. Anyone calling this an ad hominem doesn't know what the fallacy even means - it's not attacking the person instead of the argument if the person is the argument in the first place.
You could start by editing out swipes, as the site guidelines request. By what logic did you think it was ok to post nastiness like "He's clearly cuckoo for cocoa puffs" and, worse, "time to send him to the nursing home"? That's an outright slur. Please don't do such things on HN.
As tptacek correctly pointed out, it also discredits your argument, so it would also be in your interest to edit out. Either way, though, we need you to stop posting flamebait and/or snark to this site.
Well, I can't really edit that anymore as it's been too long. And I simply used a bit of colourful language to describe relevant points to a discussion of Mr Hersh's trustworthiness: he is senile and old.
Now, if you think 'The man is 85, he gets basic facts wrong in his articles, he takes a single anonymous source's word as gospel, and either won't do fact checking or fails to do so competently. He is senile and old.' is acceptable, I will stick to such less colourful language in the future.
As I've said elsewhere, the question of whether or not Mr Hersh possesses a sound mind is relevant to the matter as the discussion was already revolving around whether or not he's a trustworthy figure in journalism. And again, this story is based entirely around his credibility in the first place, so there's really no other place for this discussion to end up.
the question of whether or not Mr Hersh possesses a sound mind is relevant
It's not. It's just a rationalization for the name calling. No attempt to elevate it into some reasoned point about the article is going to make it not-name calling.
there's really no other place for this discussion to end up.
Whatever the place is, it's just not here because you just can't go 'story I don't believe' -> 'mentally deficient person'. It's a completely straightforward thing to not do.
I haven't said it's not name calling, but only that it is not an ad hominem, as the very thing in question is Mr Hersh's credibility.
Is it wrong to suggest someone who has made a number of outlandish claims in recent years and is quite elderly is suffering from a degraded mental state, as we all know is wont to happen to the elderly?
If, say, Linus Pauling published in the 90s something along the lines of 'I've discovered the secret to immortality, and no, I won't provide any verifiable evidence for it, you just have to trust me' after decades of passing off Vitamin C as a cure for cancer, and everybody was saying 'well Linus Pauling is one of the greatest biochemists of our time, he's won the Nobel Prize', is it out of bounds to say, well, maybe at one point, but the man is 90 now and clearly lost his marbles some years ago?
Is it wrong to suggest someone who has made a number of outlandish claims in recent years and is quite elderly is suffering from a degraded mental state, as we all know is wont to happen to the elderly?
That's not actually the thing you are getting all this flak for - we don't have to decide or agree if it's 'wrong' on some broad scale or whether or not it constitutes a logical fallacy. It's corrosive to the notion of a (however imperfect and irritating) internet forum that aims for interestingness and curious conversation. Which is why it's in the written guidelines, the reams of mod comments, the mod-scolding you got earlier. Globally wrong or not, you can't do it on HN because it would kill HN.
Well, perhaps an Internet forum that aims for interestingness and curious conversation should also aim for the intellectual honesty of admitting that the mental faculties of individuals diminish as they age.
I didn't do it because I disagreed, I did it because the 'trustworthiness' of Mr Hersh is the very thing in question, and a discussion about a story based entirely off of his word and credibility alone had no other way of ending up. Again, I would love to argue on the merits of the evidence Mr Hersh has presented - but too bad he hasn't given any! Where else could this discussion end up other than whether or not Mr Hersh is credible?
It is not an ad hominem when the entire basis of an argument is 'so-and-so says so'. Well, I think so-and-so is full of shit; why isn't that a valid point of inquiry?
If you're stuck in a time tube and perceive the world as it was in 2005, Hersh is one of the more important journalists in the world. I don't deny that. I only deny that the Jews are attempting to start WW3 in Iran, that Opus Dei runs USSOCOM, that the US faked the UBL raid in Pakistan (and in fact the ISI had UBL for years prior), and that Syria's Sarin attacks on their own people were faked by the US. Oh, also that the US got the Norwegian Navy to put a minesweeper in the Baltic Sea as a diving platform for US divers to blow up a pipeline that wasn't shipping any gas to Germany.
If you're still in 2005, I have great news for you: you've got one more amazing season of the Wire ahead of you, and 5 whole seasons of a show called Breaking Bad --- take my word on this, it's going to be amazing. You can skip The Wire S5 though.
What is your explanation for why the White House, State Department, and CIA immediately responded with public statements about that "blog post" from a "discredited former journalist"?
What is your explanation as to why Washington hasn't put forward an alternative explanation for what happened to the critical infrastructure of their treaty ally, given they have the most powerful intelligence service on the planet?
This was clearly a covert operation and as such is unlikely to have any smoking gun. But As Hersh said, he's merely "deconstructing the obvious".
There are multiple possible reasons for why Washington hasn't put forward an alternative explanation. Maybe they really don't know. Or maybe they do know but can't publicly reveal it in order to protect intelligence sources and methods. Or maybe they did do it, but using a different technique than Hersh alleged. Or maybe they intentionally leaked a false story to Hersh to muddy the waters.
>other than that one random, implausibly-well-informed anonymous person told Hersh
There is no reason to believe that Hersh is working off a single source. If he were, it would be extremely stupid, and certainly unbefitting a journalist with his level of experience, to admit it, since it would make it far easier to determine who the leaker was — it narrows the list of candidates dramatically. It seems like the whole justification for the "single source" smear is coming from a few times when Hersh said "my source" in the essay, which may simply be good practice in ensuring he doesn't accidentally reveal which claims came from one source and which came from multiple, since that could also (unlikely, but not impossible) help the intelligence services find one of the leakers.
>remote underwater detonation is a routine operation performed in the civilian oil and gas industry.
Remote underwater detonation with an unidentifiable signal is not. Using a normal sonar detonator would probably increase the chance of detection.
Detection of what? It's not a secret that somebody blew up the pipeline. Do we have a clear theory of what exactly the conspirators were attempting to conceal?
Obviously, detection of who blew up the pipeline. If you can detect the means, then you have a lead for the culprit.
What kind of question is this? All it does is make me think you're being intentionally obtuse. Anyone who blew up the pipeline — or committed any other crime —would try to cover their tracks, unless they were planning to take credit (which they weren't). That's how you always commit crimes!
How exactly does detecting a remote detonation give you attribution? Google this: a lot of different entities do underwater remote detonation. The one thing you wouldn't want to do is to park a big, beaconing Alta-class minesweeper precisely over the thing you later blow up!
It doesn't immediately give you attribution, but like any other clue, it could contribute to an evidence base that eventually leads to a suspect. Again, this is basic criminology, and you're a security researcher. Why are you suddenly unable to make these connections?
How easy would it be for a military or intelligence service to fake this data? I don't really have any experience or idea on how reliable these signals are for something like this
Countervailing OSINT data isn't the only problem with the story Hersh is telling; a deeper problem is that the whole scheme doesn't make much sense. The author links to a more expansive debunking at the top of his story (it's a better link than the one we're reading now, because it incorporates all this Norwegian minesweeper OSINT), and the bulk of it is just observations about how dumb this mission structure is.
Implausibly informed anonymous single source? Check.
Midlist Tom Clancy-grade technical details, like salinity camouflaged C4 charges? Check.
Basic factual errors, like the Norwegian Navy not operating P8s? Check.
Irrational strategic details, like using Navy minesweepers as platforms for human divers during a huge, widely monitored, extensively planned military exercise? Check.
That's just this analysis. But you can work back through Hersh's credibility with similar debunkings of his previous stories. Look at the enmity Hersh's cheering section has for Bellingcat, for instance, for taking his Syria Sarin story to pieces.
The same Bellingcat started by an unemployed man from Leicester, England - "perhaps the foremost expert on ammunitions used in Syria"? I've been reading most of your comments and they all lack details and real evidence, but a lot of character assassination thrown in. I love your writing style, though. Check.
Did you see me call Bellingcat "perhaps the foremost expert on ammunitions used in Syria"? Because I didn't see me calling them that. But you might have a better vantage point than I do.
The CIA narrative on the "Syria gas attacks" have been roundly debunked by the meticulous reporting of Aaron Mate (and others). The even more absurd "Skripal poisoning" incident has completely fallen apart upon only the barest scrutiny. It is sad and disturbing these these completely debunked narratives are still being touted by people as credible. Anyone (rightfully) calling for skepticism and scrutiny into Hersch's account of the pipeline bombing should, at the very least, have the same skepticism towards CIA/US government claims that are even flimsier.
Aaron Maté is a ridiculous tankie who's currently claiming the US is trying to coup Hungary.
(Why as a leftist he's supporting the current Hungary government is unclear, but being a tankie requires you to start with the US being bad and work the rest out from there.)
"Ridiculous" and "Tankie" are non-specific characterizations which mostly indicate whether or not you like a person or their opinions. But in the same vein, let us recall Mate has been awarded the Ithaca College Journalism School's Izzy award (which is considered prestigious).
Mate, specifically, has a record of reliable fact-based investigative and integrational reporting on subjects such as "Russia-gate" (i.e. the various claims regarding Russian involvement in 2016 US elections and the candidates' campaigns), as well as the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in 2018 and the coverup within the OPCW of the investigation of that attack.
I don't know about the Hungary situation and have not read Mate's work on that; but links would be appreciated.
> But in the same vein, let us recall Mate has been awarded the Ithaca College Journalism School's Izzy award (which is considered prestigious).
Noam Chomsky is also quite decorated but that doesn't stop them both from denying war crimes like Cambodia and Syria.
If you're claiming Russia-Trump coordination and Skripal didn't happen, that's because you're a tankie who can never say Russia has done anything bad, because you think they're secretly the USSR and are going to bring back communism. Bit sad since they're a fascist state. ("Anti-imperialists" are also rather bad at opposing Chinese imperialism.)
> I don't know about the Hungary situation and have not read Mate's work on that; but links would be appreciated.
That is a tweet about a suspicion, not a news article with a concrete claim. Also, USAID is indeed widely perceived as an arm of the US government, or the CIA more specifically, for political intervention in foreign countries. And I would be pretty worried if Samantha Power were to land in my country and start driving some "locally-driven" initiatives.
> that's because you're a tankie
This "tankie" thinks the Russian regime has done and does many bad things, like killing civilians, suppressing speech and organization, forcing a military draft, maintaining a social order of massive exploitation of workers by private proprietors, etc. It's just that most of those bad things don't happen to be the bad things which the US is accusing Russia of - and the latter are often just fanciful tales or more elaborate fabrication.
What's the word that requires someone to start with the US being good and working out the rest from there? Samantha Powers' recent trip to Hungary and her statements about USAID’s "newly launched work to help support democracy in Central Europe, including by bolstering civil society and helping independent media thrive and build new audiences" exactly mirrors the rhetoric from what we pulled in Ukraine in 2014 and the rest of the "color revolutions".
>Why as a leftist he's supporting the current Hungary government is unclear
Why is it so difficult for some people to understand that even if you don't like a foreign government, that you still don't have the right to replace it (whether through invasion or subversion) with a government you favor? It is possible to be both critical of the Hungarian government and also to take the position that the US should not be in the game of choosing who leads Hungary. Believing that we should stay out of the internal politics of foreign countries does not equate to apologizing or making excuses for those countries. It is especially ironic that those who insist that we act as policeman of the world and decide who is fit to run foreign countries also cry loudest about "foreign interference" in our own elections.
Skripal poisoning denial is so good man, I've never heard that one before. Especially after one of the guys accused turned out to be a Hero of Russian Federation under a fake name. Found a ria news article with almost exact same wording you used but in russian. Anyway I guess you would say Navalny, Litvinenko were fakes as well. 3% of russians believe in skripal thing, you are preaching to the choir, the real skeptics in russia are the ones saying it is real.
"same skepticism towards CIA/US government" Yeah americans do that all the time and definitely do it the most, but that is also because they live there. maybe its time to take a look in the mirror and start focusing on what your country is doing Stanislav Petrov.
Yeah. Kind of a stretch to believe it's a coincidence that the very first time that a duplicate post has been made on HN it's this story, isn't it? Hmmmm.... makes you think. Like, deep deep only people interested in the truth kind of thinking.
Because someobe has an idea that their theory is smart, doesn't make their argument very good nor does it guarantee that they know what they're talking about.
The levels of hubris present in discourse like this, as regards the confidence with which people claim arguments in one direction or another, is absurd. Yet it runs rampant among the "rationalists" of HN constantly in the comments sections.
that doesn't mean he necessarily "worked directly with US intelligence", but - he might have. He did go on to become a staunch NATO-supporter after all.
> mine clearing has long been a staple of the BALTOPS exercises. Implying that this is something that was added as cover for this operation is honestly laughable.
So, an extra R&D exercise in addition to everything that was already planned. Adding something that doesn't seem extraordinary is a good idea; adding an strange exercise would seem suspicious.
> Secondly, the people behind this highly secret operation that could not afford leaks had now somehow convinced the BALTOPS planners to change the parameters of their exercise
Add another exercise, supposedly similar to existing exercises.
> All of this either without informing them of why or by adding more people to the loop that could leak the plans.
On the contrary. If this had been an isolated operation, it would have been far more likely to raise suspicions. This seems like a way to minimize the disturbances.
Don't know about the ship business, it requires close scrutiny if one is not an expert on these matters and I'm certainly not. What I can say is that reporting based on anonymous sources, no material evidence, and little or no ability to otherwise verify is problematic - even if the US is the most likely suspect for blowing up Nordstream.
Thorvald was defense minister. His son had interactions with the student peace movement as a teenager. If the son passed information to the father, and this was passed to the CIA - then the CIA would have known of him from his teenage years.
Norwegian papers were filled in recent years with the massive intelligence operations against Norwegian student anti-NATO groups. The US was terrified Norway would follow France and start pulling back from NATO.
Probably cause basic google search says that he thinks we are living in a post truth world (title of his book). By definition he shouldnt be listened to for gathering truth. Truth was so last year according to him.
Because Bellingcat is little more than a CIA information laundering mill that is staffed almost entirely by former intelligence officers and is funded by the US and British governments (among others).
Edit: For those who doubt Bellingcat is little more than a CIA mouthpiece, it is something they brag about.
>But, perhaps more importantly, it has also enabled U.S. officials and lawmakers to discuss Moscow’s skullduggery openly without revealing the sources and methods of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
Yes, it's common practice, and has been for decades. It is my (unfounded suspicion) that submarine-based divers were the ones to destroy the Nordstreams.
One interesting thing about the Jens Stoltenberg. It’s Thorvald Stoltenberg, his father who was defense minister and foreign minister after 1979 as well as was a high level official in the Norwegian state and defense department during the last years of the Vietnam conflict.
You would think that for releasing a major story like this that Hersh would be trying to get his details correct. Confusing father and son is not a negligible error.
438 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadWhy would you not have researchers do some fact checking on the story before publishing it so loudly?
If you fact check and you're wrong, you either can't publish (wasting the time you took for the story) or you publish anyway knowing it's wrong, in which case, it's still a waste of time.
That is not how it works. First of all there is no “you’re right”. The journalist doesn’t have first hand observations. They cannot be “right” or “wrong” only their source can be.
The journalist goes and checks what can be verified independently. No matter what the outcome of these checks nobody wasted their time. The result is a stronger article, and continued respect for the journalist in his profession.
I see it differently. I used to be a test engineer.
My tests made it onto documentation accompanying a $50,000 RF snooper (in 1985), and were verifications that the item passed the test.
I like it when tests don't fail.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/seymour...
https://twitter.com/grodira/status/1626150758017015809
This was the most ridiculous part. I can't think of a reason they would prefer to use an explosive charge in a position visible to inspection.
It said "make them appear ... as part of the natural background — something that required adapting to the specific salinity of the water". Making something invisible to sonar could depend on the acoustic impedance (which varies with salinity) of the surrounding water and might involve adapting the object accordingly.
Hersh's reporting in the twenty years since is somewhat in question.
Neither were some giant secrets, and were previously dismissed as unsubstantiated rumour. Hersh collected enough factoids together to substantiate them enough to become a news story, rather than a military legend.
Yes, but critically, also not the last. Other journalists corroborated, more sources came forward, evidence, hearings, photographs, convictions.
Most notably the AP in 2003, a year prior to Hersh's reporting. 60 minutes covered the Taguba report before Hersh's article was published online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
He deserves credit for his excellent, Pulitzer Prize-winning work covering My Lai. But to my knowledge he has never once been the first to report on a scandal and been right about it.
> The truth, Hersh says, is that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and kept him locked up with support from Saudi Arabia, using him as leverage against al-Qaeda. In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin Laden to the US for increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." Rather than kill him or hand him over discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging an elaborate American "raid" with Pakistani support.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...
> And there are more contradictions. Why, for example, would the Pakistanis insist on a fake raid that would humiliate their country and the very military and intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it?
> A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?
> Why not just kill bin Laden, drive his body across the border into Afghanistan, and drop him off with the Americans? Or why not put him in a hut somewhere in Waziristan, blow it up with an F-16, pretend it was a US drone strike, and tell the Americans to go collect the body?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n10/seymour-m.-hersh/the...
> 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.
> There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.
Among his claims was that the Sarin was made by "mixing two inert chemicals", which is utter bullsh*t; the synthesis pathways for those deadly chemicals are notoriously difficult and hazardous, including things like hydrofluoric acid, which is extremely corrosive, and a itself a contact poison affecting the nervous system.
But he happily spouts his bullcrap stories, the primary beneficiaries of which are the autocracies of the world.
> Seymour Hersh’s recent Substack post claims to provide a highly detailed account of a covert US operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines in order to ensure that Russia would be unable to supply Germany with natural gas through them. All the information in Hersh’s post reportedly comes from a single unnamed source, who appears to have had direct access to every step of the planning and execution of this highly secretive operation.
https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour...
This is an impressively thorough debunking.
Hersh has been criticized for listening to cranks. Maybe some Intel officer (or adjacent gov/military worker) heard some rumours internally but there was comparmentalization or operational security protecting the details, and then tried to piece it together themselves, before leaking it to Hersh.
If it is false it's worth asking why and who would care to push these angles.
People troll all the time on the Internet; why would we assume they wouldn't troll everywhere else too?
ISI dealt with bin Laden in the 1980s, and has good intelligence in the region bin Laden had been rumored to be holed up in.
It takes more of a leap of faith to believe bin Laden was hiding from the Pakistan military/industrial apparatus 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, than that some high officials knew he was there.
I don't believe they cut some deal to stage a raid where they came off looking like total morons for purported military aid that never came.
"Since I posted my original article, I had a short email correspondence with Seymour Hersh, unfortunately he stopped replying once I asked him about several of the above mentioned inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies."
The first sentence of Hersh's article reads:
"It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan."
His entire article then goes on to lay out a set of details for both the lead up and the execution of that raid, including the execution of bin Laden.
Those details conflict with the details officially given by the Obama administration-- both the details given in the days after the event (which Hersh cites) and the clarifications from the administration in the weeks after the event.
In any case, Obama's administration and Hersh both clearly agreed that there was a raid on the exact same location on the exact same evening, involving the exact same helicopters and Navy Seals, in which the exact same bin Laden was killed.
In short, what you wrote here is factually inaccurate.
> the idea that USSOCOM is secretly controlled by a sect within the Vatican
Never heard about that one. Where did he write about that idea?
Edit: decided to not use the word "tenuous" to describe the Obama admin's account in the days after the raid. What I remember Hersh discussing was the admin's initial claim that the Seals had shot him in self defense, which was later clarified/retracted by the administration.
The detail makes the story more plausible, later debunking matters far less than the initial report and the uncertainty that this sows in people's minds.
Taking attention away from the true culprit definitely helps. And any ammunition that can be used to make democracies in the West have more doubt and internal wasted debate definitely helps whoever actually destroyed the pipeline.
The only thing we can really discuss here is whether the Hersh story is credible. It seems clearly not to be. If we establish that, that's all we get: the fact that one story about what happened is false. We'll be no closer to knowing what actually happened. That's life!
Edited to add a timeline rather than the wall of text;
* June 2023, Amnesty International calls out Abu Gharib as the site where US troops are holding Iraqis without charge in questionable conditions and reports on a riot there that resulted in the death of at least 1 prisoner.
* July 2023, Amnesty reports further after interviewing several prisoners of Abu Gharib that coalition forces are torturing prisoners using prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged restraint in painful positions -- sometimes combined with exposure to loud music, prolonged hooding and exposure to bright lights.
Amnesty would go on to write dozens more reports about the conditions in the prisons there.
* November 2003, AP writes an article about the terrible conditions faced by prisoners in the largest camps including reports of uprising and shootings at Abu Gharib.
* January 2004, Darby blows the whistle and provides a CD full of images of torture to US Army criminal investigators.
* January 2004, based on Red Cross reports from their inspectors in Iraq, Army commissions Taguba Report to investigate the rampant reports of torture and inhumane conditions in Iraqi prisons. Report was completed in February and found tons of torture.
* February 2004, Amnesty reports on further torture within Iraqi prisons naming specific victims, techniques, and prisons.
* Late April, 2004 First pictures of torture start being released among hints of a secret Army Report.
* April 27, 2004, 60 Minutes publishes report detailing the abuse and publishes several pictures from Darby's disc. Dan Rather names several soldiers who the Army had been quietly court martialing. They had received the report / pictures ~3/4 weeks earlier.
* April 30, 2004, Hersh's New Yorker piece comes out with more details.
Though before Abu Ghraib he also claimed the Chicago mob fixed JFK's presidential election.
If it's a crank, well, it's a crank. When I was in the Air Force, and still had a TS clearance, there was a friend+coworker of mine that was deep into conspiracy theories. Flat Earth, Moon Hoax, 9/11 truther, and a few others I don't remember. Everything we talked about he had loads of details. I knew it was all nonsense of course, because you're talking about flat earth and all that; if I didn't know he was a full blown conspiracy theorist? If I just knew he was a system administrator with a top secret security clearance attached to an intelligence squadron? And he was telling me a story about something the intelligence community did? He'd be very believable.
You get the same weird thing with this "camouflage" thing with the C4. Camouflaging from what? They need to make the explosive charges undetectable... for what? Like, the US blows up the Nord Stream pipeline and Russia is like, "oh, shit, we never detected a mine, I guess we'll never know if NATO was behind this, and they're innocent until proven guilty!"
Forget for a second about the "salinity matching" thing being gibberish; what exactly was this part of the operation that Hersh decided to document trying to accomplish? There is zero uncertainty that somebody blew up the pipeline.
If the US did blow up the pipeline, they would be most interested in keeping it a secret from Germany, not Russia. It would also be important to keep it secret from the voting public, other neutral countries (India, e.g.), pretty much anyone except Russia.
It doesn’t make any sense that would use ship was bound for the scrapper. They would have to fix the engines and half the other stuff wouldn’t work. People would have noticed ship that never moved moving. There are working ships that could have done the job.
It might not affirm "the West blew up Nordstream" but it certainly does not affirm "the West NOT blow up Nordstream".
And now that the possibility has been raised, we must all very seriously consider it along with all the other possibilities. This is only fair.
I just also believe that Hersh's article was really, really, incredibly bad.
a) it seems kinda implausible they have ability to blow up the pipe-line, nevermind to do so without being detected in what has to be the most cloesly monitored body of water on the planet.
b) Germany was already backing them. Blowing up the pipeline might make Germany marginally less likely to backslide, but if Ukraine were caught blowing up the pipeline, Germany would almost certainly turn against them. The risk/reward doesn't really make sense.
(FWIW, I think the most likely suspect is the one that doesn't usually get mentioned, that Germany blew it up to demonstrate their resolve regarding Russian sanctions).
This is very unlikely, the german government simply never would have the balls to do anything remotely drastic.
But they likely would close their eyes, if someone else would do it.
The time I do get a response, it is usually some story about how only the US has the capability, which is total BS.
"Gas starts flowing to Poland through new Baltic Pipe pipeline"
Is there a reason it couldn't have been a couple of zodiac boats? I can't imagine the entire Baltic sea is so well monitored that every craft of any size is tracked, even under the cover of darkness. Seems like a large moving van sized vehicle could hold a couple of deflated rafts, and a 10 man outfit in a trek across Poland.
It's just a possibility and in my opinion a very reasonable one. Does it advance the economic war against Russia? Check. Does it galvanize European support for US and not Russia? Check
No, if someone is spreading false information, then this gives the solid information, that this source is tainted.
And everything else is speculation, yes.
"You can't draw conclusions of any kind from false information; that's the problem with false information."
My point simply being, that you get information from false information, regarding the source of the false information. Philosophical and apparently out of place.
Well yeah, but only because that's included in the statement "we know nothing more than we did before he wrote the article."
Or that any one of 29 NATO member countries would do this acting all on their own?
As to clues, there are plenty. Biden proclaiming that he would put an end to Nord Stream 2 is a clue. That no one seems to be in a big rush to find out who did it given the scale of this and that it destroyed important infrastructure of a NATO member is a clue. That "there is no evidence that Russia did it" as the Swedish investigators said, is a clue.
I'm still stuck on the idea that we're having this discussion at all, though. It's really hard for people to get past the idea that Hersh can be an absolute kook and whatever their prior beliefs about the Nord Stream incidents can still be valid.
It goes in both directions. There's a comment elsewhere on this thread suggesting that, since Hersh's story is obviously fictitious (I tend to agree), it's probably the case that the US had nothing to do with the detonation. But that doesn't follow either!
It's getting kind of tiring seeing you all over every thread in here smearing Hersh as a discredited wacko. I personally don't buy it, much less from someone who seems so invested in spreading it. I don't know what your motivation is, but please refrain from doing that in this comment chain, it's just irrelevant, thanks.
* He reported that the US faked the Syrian Sarin attack.
* He reported that Jewish money was behind an effort to start WW3 in Iran.
* He reported that Pakistan staged the bin Laden raid.
* And now he's reported an elaborate conspiracy between the US and (checks notes) Norway to blow up a pipeline, none of the details of which hold up or even make sense.
It doesn't, it just lets you wrap your biases and motivated reasoning in a veneer of rigour that isn't really there. After all, you're the one picking the 'axioms' out of an infinite set and they aren't used for anything else.
There isn't anything wrong with idle speculation but there also isn't anything wrong with people pointing some idle speculation is largely baseless.
"We are going to put an end to poverty!"
Normal people: "OK, social programs."
Galaxy-brain people: "He's gonna genocide poor people! There's no other explanation!"
NordStream 2 was decertified shortly after the Russians invaded Ukraine, and NordStream 2 AG filed for bankruptcy about a week later. I'm very comfortable fitting that within "put an end to".
Being happy about something’s destruction doesn’t mean you did it. I was happy when OBL got offed, but that doesn’t make me a Navy SEAL.
I'm not saying being happy about it is proof they did it, I'm saying that it indicates that they are aware of a difference, and that it indirectly bolsters the argument for a motive.
I really doubt any of these points would be in dispute if all this circumstantial evidence was pointing at Russia.
This is why people think computers are going to develop AGI and enslave them.
That's a very odd description of a never-functional, decertified piece of infrastructure owned and constructed by a sanctioned geopolitical foe.
Plausible? It has happened many times. In 2014, Russian military intelligence operatives blew up ammo depots in Czech Republic and nothing happened. Ammo stored there was to be sold to Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
Anyone planning an operation of this scale and significance would have thought to ensure the ship had an alibi. Moving the AIS transponder to another ship and send it on a tour seems trivially easy.
None of this checks out. You can make any number of unfalsifiable arguments about them not checking out deliberately as part of psy-ops or whatever, but at that point you've taken the whole story back to square one: we just don't know what happened, and Hersh's story has essentially nothing to tell us about it, other than that one random, implausibly-well-informed anonymous person told Hersh, one of journalism's least trustworthy figures, that that's what happened.
Look, I'm just a dude on a message board reading a set of competing claims about a subject I know literally nothing at all about. But I trust these claims more than I trust Hersh's claims, by a factor of infinity.
Watch the interview he gave the other day (mentioned in this article) and tell me you walk away from it with more confidence that he's fully "there" as a journalist. He goes on a tangent about how Ukraine is doomed and Zelenskiy is killing his own people by resisting, even though 90% of the country is in favor of fighting to regain the occupied territory.
He also doubles down on the ship being, specifically, the ALTA (and not any other ship), but the ALTA has been sitting in a scrap yard for 6 months.
Hersh, believe him or not, is not relying on publicly available information, but confidential sources.
[1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/16262796968...
Sure sounds like the words of somebody who isn't going senile!
1. Convincing an editor to run your ideas under their masthead
2. Paying someone to edit your work, and running your ideas under your own masthead
A newspaper is more than a brand. They put their reputation on the line when they publish.
(You can make a good argument that many newspapers have trashed their own reputations, but that doesn’t negate the argument. When you self publish, you have no one vouching for you. Furthermore if you don’t like an editor or fact checker you can fire them)
Eg, CNN has a lower viewership in the “key demo” than large YouTube news channels.
Plenty of political journalists go off the deep end at some point in their career. (Prof.) Mark Crispin Miller used to write well-researched essays on the culture of TV, now he believes that Sandy Hook was likely staged and that the standard explanation for 9/11 isn't true. Christopher Hitchens made a significant swerve to the right later in his career.
Many colleagues and former friends of Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald feel the same way about what they have done.
Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald changed their politics which you’re implying impacts their credibility because their friends (fellow members of your tribe) said mean things about that.
Further, why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility — and even mixed into a paragraph about hoaxes?
Because, unfortunately to those who admired him, Christopher Hitchens allowed his disgust for Islamic fundamentalism to lead him to credulously advocate for a war that turned out to be based on a series of lies? Lies that he partly saw through, but that he decided to ignore in service of what for him was the larger good?
It's an instructive episode.
He is easily the most accomplished journalist for several generations.
That doesn’t automatically mean this story is right but to dismiss him in emotional and inaccurate terms doesn’t speak to a rational, evidence-based interpretation of the facts.
* the Osama bin Laden raid was faked in a conspiracy with Pakistan and he was actually captured in 2006
* much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei
* that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training
* the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey
Being right decades ago doesn't somehow absolve you of having to have verifiable sources and evidence when you go on to make numerous other claims that don't happen and no one can verify.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...
So I read a list like yours, and read you scoffing at the implausibility of any of those things, and I remember just how different we all can be.
[1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
What Hersh's suppositions have is a stunning lack of verifiable evidence and observably factually incorrect assertions (as in the case of his articles on Nordstream).
The only thing your bullet points were doing is suggesting "look at the delusions of this maniac! He can't be trusted because of them". But because the completely insane shit in my list turned out to be true, Hersh's sorts of claims are at least as plausible as the insane shit I listed in my reply. (And in the case of the first two, they were labeled by bienpensants of all kinds as proof that the claimant was certifiably nuts or at least unworthy of Serious Attention ... until the day they were shown to be true.)
All I'm saying is that, given the factual record of conspiracy and sociopathy on the part of the world's powerful, something like "2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey" can't easily be used to dismiss someone as nuts. Not enough evidence? Sure, whatever (but let's wait a decade or two). Crazy though? Nope.
There are multiple factual claims about verifiable vessels, planes and movements being made and none of them are true.
All your saying is, despite obvious factual inconsistencies in the parts of the story which should be publicly verifiable, you've already got a conclusion you like. Which is what everyone's doing because the real big secret is "it was Russia" is a boring conclusion that doesn't move clicks.
> the real big secret is "it was Russia"
It would be handy if you could conclude things like "whatever Hersh said, the opposite is true" from his stories! His journalism would be super valuable if that was the case. You'd just read it and draw the opposite conclusions. But you can't do that, because his stories (at least since 2006) are unmoored from reality.
Tell that to soldiers in WWI.
Bellingcat have a significant proven track record [1] and have won significant awards for their reporting, including the Investigative Reporting Award from the European Press Prize [2]. Do you have evidence for your counter-claim that they should not be taken seriously?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Notable_cases [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Awards
Don't read anything from the London Review of Books either since you might not agree with them. It's scary to hear new things.
I'll note that you didn't dispute that chlorine gas was used (eg in Yepres and many other times) and killed thousands in the great war nor that Seymour said it couldn't (there's video). Do you like it when your team slaughters innocents? Tryout Kiwi Farms.
And the Pakistani staged Bin Laden raid, Opus Dei in the USMC, and the Turks using chemical weapons in Syria? How convenient that everything that doesn't corroborate his fairy tales is just more proof of the cover up.
We don't need you to change your views but we do need you to present them thoughtfully and respectfully, if you want to participate here.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
But in any case, other commenters breaking the rules doesn't make it ok for you to break them. (I don't mean you personally there, I mean any of us.) That's just a recipe for a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Also, you broke them in several places, not just that one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe you don't owe disagreeable elderly journalists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's even worse than that, because really the whole ballgame on a thread like this is dodging what this blogger actually wrote, and instead pivoting to a credibility duel --- Hersh broke Abu Ghraib, and this guy... wrote a blog post? You've lost from the moment you accept that framing. Just read the post and consider what it says! The blogger did the work for you!
On the off chance that getting this feedback from someone on "the same side" as your argument is helpful, that is.
I would love to discuss the merits of the evidence presented by Mr Hersh. Too bad he hasn't given any! We just have to take him at his word because apparently he's credible and we have to pretend that octogenarians are just as mentally present as the rest of us. Anyone calling this an ad hominem doesn't know what the fallacy even means - it's not attacking the person instead of the argument if the person is the argument in the first place.
As tptacek correctly pointed out, it also discredits your argument, so it would also be in your interest to edit out. Either way, though, we need you to stop posting flamebait and/or snark to this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now, if you think 'The man is 85, he gets basic facts wrong in his articles, he takes a single anonymous source's word as gospel, and either won't do fact checking or fails to do so competently. He is senile and old.' is acceptable, I will stick to such less colourful language in the future.
It's not. It's just a rationalization for the name calling. No attempt to elevate it into some reasoned point about the article is going to make it not-name calling.
there's really no other place for this discussion to end up.
Whatever the place is, it's just not here because you just can't go 'story I don't believe' -> 'mentally deficient person'. It's a completely straightforward thing to not do.
Is it wrong to suggest someone who has made a number of outlandish claims in recent years and is quite elderly is suffering from a degraded mental state, as we all know is wont to happen to the elderly?
If, say, Linus Pauling published in the 90s something along the lines of 'I've discovered the secret to immortality, and no, I won't provide any verifiable evidence for it, you just have to trust me' after decades of passing off Vitamin C as a cure for cancer, and everybody was saying 'well Linus Pauling is one of the greatest biochemists of our time, he's won the Nobel Prize', is it out of bounds to say, well, maybe at one point, but the man is 90 now and clearly lost his marbles some years ago?
That's not actually the thing you are getting all this flak for - we don't have to decide or agree if it's 'wrong' on some broad scale or whether or not it constitutes a logical fallacy. It's corrosive to the notion of a (however imperfect and irritating) internet forum that aims for interestingness and curious conversation. Which is why it's in the written guidelines, the reams of mod comments, the mod-scolding you got earlier. Globally wrong or not, you can't do it on HN because it would kill HN.
Please don't do the putdown/name-calling/slur thing on HN at all. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
(Edit: I see pvg already made this point, and I don't mean to pile on, but maybe it's important for a moderator to make this clear.)
It is not an ad hominem when the entire basis of an argument is 'so-and-so says so'. Well, I think so-and-so is full of shit; why isn't that a valid point of inquiry?
If you're still in 2005, I have great news for you: you've got one more amazing season of the Wire ahead of you, and 5 whole seasons of a show called Breaking Bad --- take my word on this, it's going to be amazing. You can skip The Wire S5 though.
What is your explanation as to why Washington hasn't put forward an alternative explanation for what happened to the critical infrastructure of their treaty ally, given they have the most powerful intelligence service on the planet?
This was clearly a covert operation and as such is unlikely to have any smoking gun. But As Hersh said, he's merely "deconstructing the obvious".
There is no reason to believe that Hersh is working off a single source. If he were, it would be extremely stupid, and certainly unbefitting a journalist with his level of experience, to admit it, since it would make it far easier to determine who the leaker was — it narrows the list of candidates dramatically. It seems like the whole justification for the "single source" smear is coming from a few times when Hersh said "my source" in the essay, which may simply be good practice in ensuring he doesn't accidentally reveal which claims came from one source and which came from multiple, since that could also (unlikely, but not impossible) help the intelligence services find one of the leakers.
>remote underwater detonation is a routine operation performed in the civilian oil and gas industry.
Remote underwater detonation with an unidentifiable signal is not. Using a normal sonar detonator would probably increase the chance of detection.
What kind of question is this? All it does is make me think you're being intentionally obtuse. Anyone who blew up the pipeline — or committed any other crime —would try to cover their tracks, unless they were planning to take credit (which they weren't). That's how you always commit crimes!
Implausibly informed anonymous single source? Check.
Midlist Tom Clancy-grade technical details, like salinity camouflaged C4 charges? Check.
Basic factual errors, like the Norwegian Navy not operating P8s? Check.
Irrational strategic details, like using Navy minesweepers as platforms for human divers during a huge, widely monitored, extensively planned military exercise? Check.
That's just this analysis. But you can work back through Hersh's credibility with similar debunkings of his previous stories. Look at the enmity Hersh's cheering section has for Bellingcat, for instance, for taking his Syria Sarin story to pieces.
And the number of hit pieces against the journalist in question is telling. Using wholly dubious paid for misinformation from Bellingcat.
But if you still think the US are innocent there is really not much more that can be said.
I don't know of anything incorrect in Hersh's take on (one of) the Syria gas attacks:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/who...
and I haven't read what he wrote on the Skripal affair.
(Why as a leftist he's supporting the current Hungary government is unclear, but being a tankie requires you to start with the US being bad and work the rest out from there.)
Mate, specifically, has a record of reliable fact-based investigative and integrational reporting on subjects such as "Russia-gate" (i.e. the various claims regarding Russian involvement in 2016 US elections and the candidates' campaigns), as well as the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in 2018 and the coverup within the OPCW of the investigation of that attack.
I don't know about the Hungary situation and have not read Mate's work on that; but links would be appreciated.
Noam Chomsky is also quite decorated but that doesn't stop them both from denying war crimes like Cambodia and Syria.
If you're claiming Russia-Trump coordination and Skripal didn't happen, that's because you're a tankie who can never say Russia has done anything bad, because you think they're secretly the USSR and are going to bring back communism. Bit sad since they're a fascist state. ("Anti-imperialists" are also rather bad at opposing Chinese imperialism.)
> I don't know about the Hungary situation and have not read Mate's work on that; but links would be appreciated.
Doing it right now.
https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1625634526947835907
That is a tweet about a suspicion, not a news article with a concrete claim. Also, USAID is indeed widely perceived as an arm of the US government, or the CIA more specifically, for political intervention in foreign countries. And I would be pretty worried if Samantha Power were to land in my country and start driving some "locally-driven" initiatives.
> that's because you're a tankie
This "tankie" thinks the Russian regime has done and does many bad things, like killing civilians, suppressing speech and organization, forcing a military draft, maintaining a social order of massive exploitation of workers by private proprietors, etc. It's just that most of those bad things don't happen to be the bad things which the US is accusing Russia of - and the latter are often just fanciful tales or more elaborate fabrication.
>Why as a leftist he's supporting the current Hungary government is unclear
Why is it so difficult for some people to understand that even if you don't like a foreign government, that you still don't have the right to replace it (whether through invasion or subversion) with a government you favor? It is possible to be both critical of the Hungarian government and also to take the position that the US should not be in the game of choosing who leads Hungary. Believing that we should stay out of the internal politics of foreign countries does not equate to apologizing or making excuses for those countries. It is especially ironic that those who insist that we act as policeman of the world and decide who is fit to run foreign countries also cry loudest about "foreign interference" in our own elections.
"same skepticism towards CIA/US government" Yeah americans do that all the time and definitely do it the most, but that is also because they live there. maybe its time to take a look in the mirror and start focusing on what your country is doing Stanislav Petrov.
The levels of hubris present in discourse like this, as regards the confidence with which people claim arguments in one direction or another, is absurd. Yet it runs rampant among the "rationalists" of HN constantly in the comments sections.
Actually, it seems Stoltenberg was politically active during the late years of the Vietnam war, as a teenager:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/unlocked-young-78471711
that doesn't mean he necessarily "worked directly with US intelligence", but - he might have. He did go on to become a staunch NATO-supporter after all.
> mine clearing has long been a staple of the BALTOPS exercises. Implying that this is something that was added as cover for this operation is honestly laughable.
So, an extra R&D exercise in addition to everything that was already planned. Adding something that doesn't seem extraordinary is a good idea; adding an strange exercise would seem suspicious.
> Secondly, the people behind this highly secret operation that could not afford leaks had now somehow convinced the BALTOPS planners to change the parameters of their exercise
Add another exercise, supposedly similar to existing exercises.
> All of this either without informing them of why or by adding more people to the loop that could leak the plans.
On the contrary. If this had been an isolated operation, it would have been far more likely to raise suspicions. This seems like a way to minimize the disturbances.
Don't know about the ship business, it requires close scrutiny if one is not an expert on these matters and I'm certainly not. What I can say is that reporting based on anonymous sources, no material evidence, and little or no ability to otherwise verify is problematic - even if the US is the most likely suspect for blowing up Nordstream.
Norwegian papers were filled in recent years with the massive intelligence operations against Norwegian student anti-NATO groups. The US was terrified Norway would follow France and start pulling back from NATO.
https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/828554441485869056
Edit: For those who doubt Bellingcat is little more than a CIA mouthpiece, it is something they brag about.
>But, perhaps more importantly, it has also enabled U.S. officials and lawmakers to discuss Moscow’s skullduggery openly without revealing the sources and methods of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/17/bellingcat-can-say-what...
Confusion but basically father and son.
If I was going to do this I would drop off the teams in three zodiacs and then pick them up on the return this way my ship was never stationary.
Goes on to provide too much superfluous detail to his own account. /s