The head scratcher is why you would use any surface ships at all for such a clandestine operation.
can you deploy divers from subs?
Easily. It's one of their most used functions.
Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
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Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#112The head scratcher is why you would use any surface ships at all for such a clandestine operation.
can you deploy divers from subs?
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.
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#113Author:
> It is often stated that people who lie have a tendency to add too much superfluous detail to their accounts.
Goes on to provide too much superfluous detail to his own account. /s
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 se…
When you qualify Hersh as one of journalism's least trustworthy figures, it's impossible to take the rest of your comment at face value.
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.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/whose-sarin
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-hersh/military-to-military
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/06/25/will-get-fooled-seymour-hersh-welt-khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack/
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/whatever-happened-to-seymour-hersh
Tell that to soldiers in WWI.
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Abu Ghraib was broken by multiple people prior to Hersh, as best as I can tell.
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...
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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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.
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
For that matter, it certainly doesn't exclude the possibility that the person posting as molopolo24 was personally responsible for the attack! 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 mean, I personally think its reasonable that the USA blew up the pipeline. Personally I'm at about 75% USA, 20% Russia, 5% someone else. I just also believe that Hersh's article was really, really, incredibly bad.
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.
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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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.
Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
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