Seymour Hersh - classic or dud

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.’

if he could've gotten someone on the record to confirm that pakistan a. knew about the operation and b. knew obl was in abbottabad (either holding him there, or just monitoring him) it would've been good

yeah he hit it a lil harder but not ness w any better sourcing

That Peter Bergen post only contradicts hersh but doesn't really disprove anything

um lol? he said: "I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it. The compound was trashed, littered almost everywhere with broken glass and several areas of it were sprayed with bullet holes where the SEALS had fired at members of bin Laden's entourage and family, or in one case exchanged fire with one of his bodyguards. The evidence at the compound showed that many bullets were fired the night of bin Laden's death." so maybe you think he's lying?

military cldve fired a bunch of bullets to back their story up but the alternative seems more likely

idg why even insufferable feebs like deej care about whether this story is true or not except for lingering respect + awe for the amazing journalism hersh has produced earlier in his career. let's say everything in it is true - pakistan and the US worked together to kill obl, scatter his mutilated body over the alps, lie about other fatalities in the compound, etc. what exactly does that change? does it make obama seem less... manly? for having to rely on pakistan? what exactly are the consequences of this vast conspiracy theory that makes it so attractive?

yeah I don't give a shit tbh

even if it is all true it's all p inconsequential

if true its a p fascinating behind the scenes look at diplomacy / stagecraft/ true lies and so forth imho

well, the narrative is this is less a military maneuver executed with prowess and more like a mob hit with helicopters, plus OBAMA PERFIDY right?

man, if the motivations are as hersh describes, aren't there a ton of waaaaaaaay less risky ways to deliver that body with similar deniability and also what outis said

obama shdve worn UBLs skin as a mask when he made the announcement imho

Oh no an mra sympathizer called me a "feeb"

Even if individual parts of this aren't exactly correct the overall narrative requires a lot less suspension of disbelief than the official story. If it's even 51% correct it certainly upends the official story ... I'm hardly morbs about Obama either, not trying to prove anything about his manliness don't even know wtf you're trying to suggest there

please tell me, as you see it, what the overall narrative is.

what if its 18% correct

like what is the 51% that you think is correct and how does it "upend the official story"?

i don't even think there's anything in this story for morbz types. what is obama's perfidy? that the assassination wasn't as awesome as portrayed? pretty sure 100% of americans were just happy obl was dead and the details were inconsequential. like if he had announced: 'today, with intelligence from our partners in pakistan, our soldiers were able to apprehend and execute obl' there would've been no difference in how the story was received. the only particularly boldfaced lie would've been that the body was buried at sea and not mutilated and dropped out of a plane -- but most Americans would've preferred the second story! the lie about the burial at sea was specifically to make ppl sympathetic to obl less angry.

"we only killed obl. we didn't kill anyone else in the compound." american public: "WHAT THE FUCK ONLY OBL???"

well the whole deification of the seals hit squad is p gross imo tho obvs completely standard

do you remember that whole right-wing meme about how obama took too much credit for the assassination and didn't give enough due to the seals? that was pretty lol.

they were really burnt that he got him

lol obv i'm now waiting for deej to read the original article and figure out what he thinks about it. don't worry about it, bro. go back to yr forte which is apparently explaining how tabloid media operates.

well the whole deification of the seals hit squad is p gross imo tho obvs completely standard

^^^

also completely irrelevant to what actually happened, ie no "facts" are going to undermine it

"hate is useless we shd all love each other" --mordy

lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEuxkTWW8AA33UM.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEuxleDXIAAV-eV.png

https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/597766639434788865

COMMUNITY-SOURCED CONTENT PRODUCTION IN ACTION (and pettiness given the source of the screenshot)

man, u dont want to see how the sausage gets man

sadly i am v familiar with the process i work in #content marketing

but yeah point being it's definitely exhibit 93,728 in vox being dumb as hell