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Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

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Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#31

Post by mannerheim »

krisoft wrote: post #28
mannerheim wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 con…

[flagged]

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#32

Post by tptacek »

scythe wrote: post #20

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).

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#33

Post by tptacek »

rjsw wrote: post #26
tptacek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

I didn't think he claimed that the OBL raid never happened, just that the backstory about how he was found was wrong.

It's above the fold on his LRB story: he claims that Pakistani ISI captured bin Laden, not the US.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#35

Post by dmix »

tptacek wrote: post #18
dmix wrote: post #17

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 com…

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 wou…

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.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#36

Post by mannerheim »

TheBlight wrote: post #22
mannerheim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#37

Post by tptacek »

dmix wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

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."

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#39

Post by kornhole »

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.

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