Seymour Hersh - classic or dud

God, i hope this doesn't mean Kathryn Bigelow is going to remake that piece of crap.

see now she's going to get it right

i've only been following hersh loosely since ~2004 (and as he started publishing less in the NYer) so i didn't realize he'd gone full-blown conspiracy theorist but when i first read the above bin ladin story i def thought that if it had been by anyone else it would be unbelievable. i guess even by hersh it's pretty unbelievable. challop up ahead: hersh sorta mirroring the left in general - the steady march from legitimate opposition to power to sputtering alienated ramblings. can't wait for his chemtrials/monsanto expose :/

conspiracy always been popular at the fringes and in the middle, just more visible now cause of online

i mean harpers been publishing equally dubious pieces since time imortal

why i haven't read harpers in about 10 years

expected more from hersh tbh - you'd think the guy who broke mai lai and abu ghraib would be very meticulous about his sourcing

or maybe he just got to a place where he was like "obv these evil fucks will do anything so who does skepticism serve"

feel like theres some sort of aging/impatience thing going on w him, obvs baseless speculation

shd be noted too that chemtrails is a rightwing cause, the lefts conspiracies are much closer to reality, like monstanto which is actually generally bad if not quite the deathstar its made out to be

oh lol i thought chemtrails were leftwing bc it tracked onto environmental / agricultural concerns. ok, vaccination/monsanto

first time i notice hersh being somewhat suss was that piece abt how bush wanted to invade iran that just seemed odd and vague and full of insinuations

vaccination is a cool one cause it cuts across political lines, equally popular on the left and right

i'm holding out hope that this piece is ~40% or more accurate

not that i'd put money on it, but the emotional chips are there

the pakistanis knew, (some) saudis were still paying OBL, obama is not entirely a straight shooter

yeah, man, chemtrails!!

A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out.

It's not totally insane I mean there is a country called Saudi Arabia

I'm not so certain what it is that is so shocking about this report anyway; the end result is the same, bin laden is still dead, not sure people really care about the details? I kind of don't.

who are "the saudis" in this story wld be a good question

its not so much that tons of stuff is totally unbelievable its just vague and gossipy

dude living in the pakistani equivalent of arlington for years is p strange; w/o interviewing all these people's sources myself, who knows? hersh's and the official story are about as equally plausible fwiw as a civilian

saudis did 9/11 btw

a lot of tenuous leaps of logic

"The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture" < this kinda gives the game away imo. They didn't want his presence revealed because he was a Saudi. what the fuck does that even mean.

like it either needs to be: "the saudis didn't want bin laden's presence revealed because THEY WERE BANKROLLING HIM" or "the saudis didn't give a fuck about the americans finding and killing bin laden."

The fact he was found in Abbottabad remains the main reason the Pakistanis i know all seem convinced it didn't go down like the original story. It's like choosing to hide from the US military in a secret compound just outside of Fort Myers. It's entirely plausible from their perspective that it's somewhere the ISI might have a safehouse. That said, it's tough to know how they managed to keep it secret.

The theory i've heard a number of times is that the ISI and the US had known where he was for a while and had been keeping him on ice for the most politically opportune time to announce his death - or that they had been detaining him for interrogation, he'd died of natural causes and they wanted to make a splash about a heroic takedown when he was no longer of any use.

I don't think there's much public appetite for going over the details though and it's all impossible to prove.

yeah agree w that everyone knows he likes to hide in caves in the tribal regions

I like how ppl are all "wow crazy conspiracist!" at Hersh but garbage like the Bergen thing - which is basically founded on "US gov't/military officials and two SEALs on a PR tour said things", are all good.

ppl were widely suspicions of the official story at the time iirc

That Pakistan was in on it is the most believable part of Hersh's story however iirc the day after OBL was buried ppl were already speculating about that, so he's got about as much to say as every internet commentator.

like it either needs to be: "the saudis didn't want bin laden's presence revealed because THEY WERE BANKROLLING HIM" or "the saudis didn't give a fuck about the americans finding and killing bin laden."

it's almost as if Saudi (and Pakistani, and American) politic and/or military class' actions could plausibly stem from there being different factions with different interests and goals and produce different - even contradictory, strategies.

*political

oh good so the explanation is that it's all very complicated so why can expect hersh to get it right

like say which saudis u r talking abt, that part was left completely unfleshed out while the internal pakistanti politics were delineated

maybe he hit a wall in his research and hes trying to provoke more ppl into talking to him

the saudis were bankrolling obl and didn't want him to get caught. which saudis? well you know, obl was a saudi...

also u kno i expect a lot a lot a lot more out of seymour hersh than i do the gvt propaganda line

That has always been the great unanswered question, though. It's assumed that people not that far away from the House of Saud are trying to overthrow them and are funding terrorism to advance that goal but nobody seems clear as to who they are. It's the kind of thing that both sides would want kept quiet - so either set would have a potential incentive to pay for him to be warehoused. Why that would necessarily end up with the US storming in to kill him is mostly unclear though.

It's easier to generalize about a country and its people when our government didn't almost conspire with Saudi Arabia to keep the latter so isolated from media coverage

if u had to speculate as to one saudi locus of power who wld most sympathize with bin laden it wld be hardline clerics, except that one of the keys to the house of sauds longevity has been their dedication to keeping those guys close so idk

that's the fulcrum of the conspiracy theory tho as i see it - hersh has to leave who the "saudis" are unclear bc the insinuation is that our "allies" in saudi arabia are funding al-q and hiding it from us ("The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida.") - or does he just mean that the rogue elements of Saudi society were afraid that obl was itching for the opportunity to spill all of al-q's funding sources from SA? the whole thing just breaks down under any scrutiny.

regardless who it was if it did really happen seems by far most likely it wld be a fairly minor faction that u wldnt just call "the saudis" like the heavy hitters dont want to fuck w someone who wants to overthrow them!

tho im not sure "the saudis" are central to this story really seems like he cldve left it out

idk maybe they were doing it to control him its vague i think we can all agree

so what are the other major points of the story? pakistan was more involved in the operation than the US led the world to believe? okay, i think everyone already assumed as much. that obl was never actually buried in the ocean but dropped out over the alps? the saudi bit is the only legitimate bombshell afaict?

xps Another line of thought is that he was being used as a means to an end to create chaos and a power vacuum. It doesn't necessarily have to be ideological.

If you wanted to be charitable to Hersh, it's entirely plausible that whoever gave him the information didn't know where it came from other than the country. The Sauds would also have an incentive to keep him "out of the picture" if they thought he could reveal in public where the divisions they're trying to paper over are.

Either way it seems pretty clear that the information Hersh has access to isn't enough to stand up to scrutiny even if it's true.

the #1 revelation as i see it is that bin laden was a pakistani captive and they handed him over to the usa, which seems v believable imho

super believable imo, and would be a bombshell if similar stuff hadn't been reported by other journalists:

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’