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Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

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131–140 of 439 posts

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#131

Hersh is clearly a douche. But what if the US did, indeed, destroy those pipelines? Great job, guys. Blow up the rest of them. The last I’ve heard, South Stream is still operational.

Yep, nothing like blowing up your allies' infrastructure to make them like you.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Gross

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#133
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

According to Hersh, he still does due diligence with editors and fact checking. He just doesn't have the brand sponsorships anymore.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#134
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#135
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/industria…

I can believe Pakistani intelligence knew where he was the whole time.

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.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#136
post #43

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. Mo…

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…

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".

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#137

Let us consider that, even if he was fed false-information and his story discredited we can do limited conclusions from it. It might not affirm "the West blew up Nordstream" but it certainly does not affirm "the West NOT blow up Nordstream".

You can't draw conclusions of any kind from false information; that's the problem with false information.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#138
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to Hersh, he still does due diligence with editors and fact checking. He just doesn't have the brand sponsorships anymore.

And yet, somehow his work ends up error-laden and full of holes. Funny how that works out.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#139

The head scratcher is why you would use any surface ships at all for such a clandestine operation.

Submarines can also be detected by sonar. Ships are common and do not raise as much suspicion as submarines. Either could have launched the divers.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Hersh, he still does due diligence with editors and fact checking. He just doesn't have the brand sponsorships anymore.

And yet, somehow his work ends up error-laden and full of holes. Funny how that works out.

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] - https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/16262796968...

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