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Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

oalexanderdk.substack.com

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Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#241

Post by ggm »

Hersh is in the difficult position of needing to neither confirm nor deny his sources, because if he doesn't then no future internal leaker will talk to him: we're not going to find out "how he knows" because it kills his business.

He's also like John Pilger and Glenn Greenwald very definitely bringing a specific world view to the table. Like the other two, that means his editorial has a direction. I don't personally mind that, I take it on board and think about what I think is factual and what I think is supposition.

The problem however, is that authors like this become aware people are skeptical of their supposition and editorial and they always wind up shifting voice from "I think" to "I know" and .. then you're in a bad place.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#242

Post by tptacek »

peteradio wrote: post #147
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#243

Post by kornhole »

lispm wrote: post #233
kornhole wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot missing from this account such as: The US promising not to expand NATO beyond Germany. The Maidan coup in 2014. The Minsk agreement where Kiev agreed to stop bombing the Donbas but has still killed over 14K people doing so. The Ruble is strong and Russia's GDP will grow more than the UK this year.

> The Ruble is strong and Russia's GDP will grow more than the UK this year. Not. The economic numbers of Russia are now manipulated by Russia and the West. The value of the ruble in many markets is nearing zero, since Russia can't buy much for it, because it has lost access to those markets. It lacks supplies and needs to invest a lot of money into a war economy. Russia now has a war economy - the big and rising eco…

What do you mean the Ruble is near zero? All charts I see show it higher against the dollar compared to a year ago. https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/fx/RUBUSD/historical-...

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#244

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #203
ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#245

Post by mushbino »

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…

If it were false, it would be Hersh's first false story. He broke My Lai and Abu Ghraib. He's one of the most accomplished journalists in history.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#246

Post by tptacek »

astro19238_ wrote: post #230
stephc_int13 wrote: post #154

I've read both this paper and the original Seymour Hersh article. I found the abundance of details a bit weird, to be honest, but not enough to discount the credibility of the thesis. On the other hand, this paper is poorly constructed, mostly using straw man techniques and sleight of hands to discredit the original paper. I think it's doing the opposite of what it is trying to achieve, adding free publicity on top.

Even if the Hersh thesis is completely made up, he still makes more sense than what this guy does. For one thing. The most plausible reason he can't find the plane dropping the buoy he privides himself. -It's a small device. -Better to use a boat. -Better to use a non military boat. Yeah? Maybe that is what they did? It's not impossible the source filled in a few gaps in his story? Or was mistaken? Or Hersh himself m…

It's not what they did, according to Hersh! It's not a minor gap in the story! Hersh claims the Norwegian Navy allocated an Alta-class minesweeper to the task of operating as a diving platform for American divers. You can't say "well, maybe that's not what happened then!" and act like the story is intact. If major details in the story are false, that's a big deal!

You can absolutely still believe the US blew up the pipelines, the same way you could have before Hersh's goofy story ran. But you can't claim to believe Hersh's story while systematically dismantling all of his claims. The story itself is either true or it isn't.

I feel like a lot of people are defending this story because they've independently and axiomatically derived US culpability for the pipeline sabotage. I don't have anything to say about whether the US sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline. But Seymour M. Hersh has, ever since 2006, been a nutbag, and this story he's telling makes no sense. That's a much more interesting thing to discuss than our rooting interests in geopolitics!

If you think he's right about the particulars, and this analysis is wrong about those particulars, say why! That's an interesting discussion to have!

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#247

Post by mushbino »

groby_b wrote: post #211

It is probably worth keeping in mind that since at least 2006 or so, Seymour and the truth aren't really much on speaking terms any more. If he then posts a whole bunch of extraordinary unverifiable claims by an unnamable source, I don't really think there's much need for rebuttals.

Which stories did he get wrong?

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#248

Post by jrsj »

pvg wrote: post #116
honkler wrote: post #104

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.

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.

Re: Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream

#249

Post by jessaustin »

ninjagoo wrote: post #174

> Updated to include information given my Seymour Hersh in interviews in the days following his original post. This was in bold font underneath the picture under the headline. Presumably it should be "Updated to include information given by Seymour Hersh in interviews in the days following his original post." If Oliver is relying on details to blow holes in the Hersh story, the prognosis isn't that great for Oliver's…

Don't sell him short! At this rate he'll get enough traffic from crackpot-realist dead-enders that NED will make him into a new Bellingcat.
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