191–200 of 223 posts
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> started to make Russian industry more competitive in export markets Outside of oil, gas, timber and weaponry what products are they known for exporting?
Heavy machinery, aerospace & automotive.
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Normally I would be more skeptical. But the assertions Hersh is making about this is so far beyond the "official" narrative, you can't seriously think someone with Hersh's reputation would just make that up? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
Also worth weighing is that another reporter, R J Hillhouse, reported many of the same facts about the bin Laden raid shortly after it happened, to almost no attention[0]. However, she does not believe Hersh plagiarized her[1] (as Politico dubiously claimed, and she refuted), nor does she think that Hersh even had the same sources as her. She even noted that one of the more lurid details (dumping parts of Bin Laden's…
(a) confirm no sources
(b) never have been fact-checked
(c) received no editorial scrutiny
Its author is offended that Hersh didn't give credit for the following claims, which the blogger claims to have broken herself:
* The US cover story of how they found bin Laden was fiction
* OBL was turned in by a walk-in informant, a mid-level ISI officer seeking to claim $25 million under the "Rewards for Justice" program.
* The Pakistani Intelligence Service -- ISI -- was sheltering bin Laden
* Saudi cash was financing the ISI operation keeping bin Laden captive
* The US presented an ultimatum to Pakistan that they would lose US funding if they did not cooperate with a US operation against bin Laden
* Pakistani generals Kiyani and Pasha were involved in the US operation that killed OBL
* Pakistan pulled out its troops from the area of Abottabad to facilitate the American raid
* The Obama administration betrayed the cooperating Pakistani officials
* The Obama administration scrambled to explain the crashed helicopter when their original drone strike cover story collapsed
But if you look carefully at these claims, you'll see that they're not particularly specific (the closest they get to "specific" is "knowing the names of two Pakistani generals who are so well-known they have Wikipedia pages"), have been corroborated nowhere, and, most importantly, are all predictable points in any narrative about Pakistan deliberately sheltering Bin Laden.
I think there's a reason nobody reported on Hillhouse originally.
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To say that Hersh's story about the OBL Killing is controversial, especially among journalists, would be understating it quite a bit. The London Review Of Books is not a conventional outlet for Hersh's investigative journalism (he's a regular at The New Yorker, which has one of the more notoriously elaborate fact checking apparatuses in the industry) and not Hersh's first choice for publishing that story.
Why is Hersh having to publish some stories at LRB not more of an indictment of the New Yorker (et al) than Hersh? Hasn't the Obama administration been subject to curiously little investigative journalism?
Second: because the implication is that the New Yorker was unwilling to publish a piece that didn't fact-check out, and the London Review of Books was.
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> It is my experience that the Saudi's pray with one hand and dole out cash to terrorist groups with the other. That makes zero sense. Why would they fund the people calling for their destruction? What exactly is your "experience?" It's just more unfounded conjecture.
Good questions. First, Saudi Arabia's government is in favor of the United States, but their wealthy citizens often fund non-state actors to attack Western targets. Second, my experience comes from studying International Relations at Princeton. For sources, there are too many sources to count for the assertion that Saudi citizens continue to give money to Salafist (for lack of a better word) non-state actors that tar…
If you want to hold forth as an expert, it's fair to ask: Did you take a couple online classes? Get a Ph.D. in international relations?
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I really have no idea what it means to be a Salafist, but there's something unsettling about an HN debate about whether a particular religion is or isn't fundamentally terroristic. That's especially true if you are yourself somehow affiliated with the religion, in which case: I'm sorry you find yourself litigating this here. Whether or not you are, and whether or not these are good faith comments, I think this is a p…
Why is that weird? You don't think different religions can be more or less supportive of violence in their foundational texts? What would be weird is if that weren't possible for some reason.
I don't think that's relevant: 1) We can't read the texts except for translations; 2) Within every religion, among experts with great familiarity with the texts, there are a very wide variety of interpretations - so wide they sometimes fight wars over it (e.g., Protestants vs Catholics, Sunnis vs Shia, Jews vs. Christians vs. Muslims (all share the Old Testament; Muslims and Christians share the New Testament)), etc. 3) Adherents to religions are usually ignorant of and completely disregard the texts (lay Catholics didn't even read or hear them until the 20th century IIUC), except when convenient. For example, the Ten Commandments, the highest law, requires people to observe the Sabbath. I wonder if that includes posting on Hacker News?
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There are nine pages redacted from the 9/11 report, because they were deemed too incendiary against an ally, Saudi Arabia. I want those pages.
The CIA and/or NSA very likely knew that the 9/11 terrorists were in the US, learning to fly airliners. Not long after 9/11, there were reports that Mossad agents (the "art students", as I recall) had been tailing the 9/11 terrorists. Almost all of whom were Saudis. But I've seen no credible reports that any of them knew what was planned. And yes, those pages might be very interesting.
They definitely knew something: A month before the attacks they gave President Bush a briefing titled: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike...
Boko Haram, al-Qaida, ISIS, Ansar al-Shariah, Jund al-Khilafan, al-Nusra, ... You can backtrack basically all active jihadist groups that attack west back to to the Saudi funded ideology. Even ISIS is offshoot of Wahabbi/Salafism. The "traditional" Islamist like Brotherhood put their efforts in Arab countries. Saudis are not in control of these groups, but they are responsible for the ideology. Saudi Arabia's Curricu…
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people associate being a Salafi with the various terrorist groups. I have never heard a Salafi scholar promote any acts terrorism. In fact, every single high-ranking scholar in Saudi Arabia (those who call themselves Salafi), are all opposed to groups like ISIS, Al Qaida, and Al Nusra. There are dozens of audio clips on Youtube from such scholars who clearly warn the Muslim…
Bear might be better known as the author of "Hear No Evil", a memoir of his time in the CIA, which the movie Syriana was loosely based on.
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Why is Hersh having to publish some stories at LRB not more of an indictment of the New Yorker (et al) than Hersh? Hasn't the Obama administration been subject to curiously little investigative journalism?
Last question first: no. Second: because the implication is that the New Yorker was unwilling to publish a piece that didn't fact-check out, and the London Review of Books was.
Hersh claims to have sold the story to LRB for the "politics" of it, the meaning of which is uncertain. But as he hopes to have a book published on the "war on terror", it is not out of the question that he selected them to establish rapport. And that he chose them, instead of resorting to them out of some kind of desperation owing to defects in the work itself, seems pretty clear.
[*] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/sy-hersh-bin-la...
[.] http://fpif.org/seymour-hersh-draws-even-criticism-lrb-new-y...
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The Obama administration is widely claimed by non-partisan journalists and journalist groups as being openly hostile toward the press and has used espionage provisions to prosecute officials deemed to have "leaked" inside information via the types of conversations that would previously have been considered business-as-usual. (Despite opening his presidency with rhetoric about being the most "open" and "transparent" administration in history.) This has resulted in administration staffers & officials being paralyzed and fearful of speaking with the press at all, stymieing journalists' attempts at effectively covering the government and acting as the fourth estate. While it is unfortunate that we cannot quantify whether one administration has experienced more or less scrutiny than others, blithely asserting to the contrary is not a reasonable position in this context.
[:] https://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks...
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Last question first: no. Second: because the implication is that the New Yorker was unwilling to publish a piece that didn't fact-check out, and the London Review of Books was.
Yes, that is the conclusion pushed in the usual organs. But the New Yorker had already published a bin-Laden assassination piece that supported the official narrative. Hersh himself says they (i.e. David Remnick) simply weren't interested in revisiting the story. Hersh further claims that he warned Remnick soon after the bin-Laden raid that the official story was being disputed by his sources and suggested he write a…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701813
The most important takeaway is that the sample size on leak prosecutions is very, very low, so happenstance alone can make a President look unusually hostile. Here, it's a combination of happenstance, a shift in media norms, and cases begun under the previous President.