Seymour Hersh - classic or dud

I should've put "chickenshit" in quotes (Hersh's word, not mine).

I like it, but then I would. ...Where did I read recently that when Hersh first met Lieutenant Calley at Fort Benning, Calley vomited blood at the mention of My Lai, which was how Hersh knew he was talking to the right person? Is that fake?

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would"

hmmmm, I have to dock him IQ points for this surprise.

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/131080-40-years-later-hersh-on-my-lai/transcript/

New:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

Between this and the Bin Laden thing, I'm starting to wonder if Hersh has gone off the deep end. Is there any consensus emerging on how credible Hersh is anymore? Has someone done a really tough, critical interview with him lately?

here's the FP rebuttal piece
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/12/09/sy_hershs_chemical_misfire#sthash.Tr2j2WTW.HEFsZH7A.dpbs

Washington Post & New Yorker passed on Hersh's Syria story, as someone noted abouve the NYer does seem to be quietly edging him out
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/08/seymour-hersh-syria-report_n_4409674.html

In looking up reactions to the new article, I stumbled onto this from 2006:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/sy-hersh-nsa-listened-to-u-s-calls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2G39yJtyl0

The idea that the government wants to control the conversation about wars and foreign policy and it attempts to distort our opinions through lies and concealment is not a shock, but it certainly is a legitimate news story when they are discovered doing it. Presumably, Hersh has enough experience around disinformation campaigns that he would be difficult to use to 'plant' disinformation in the media. But it is not inconceivable he could be fooled into reporting well-crafted untruths.

Lots of backlash, but another Hersh piece on Syria.

Yowsa. Turkey looks pretty bad there, Al Nusra more evil than before, and Denis McDonough willfully ignorant in the Feith/Perle/Wolfowitz mold.

This is from back in December, but a good interview:

http://thepolitic.org/syria-snowden-and-obama/

Bio:

http://scoopartistthebook.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/cover.jpg

New interview:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/seymour-hersh-nsa-surveillance-useless

Come on, Sy. Publish the book.

Return to My Lai:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/the-scene-of-the-crime

Here's what he's been hinting about in speeches for the past few years:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

So--what happened to the body, according to Hersh's sources? I'll have to try wading though all that again later.

Small portion of the story, but:

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slighest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.

Oh yeah, I saw that, didn't know if I'd missed any more in skimming, thanks.

"Did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours": but what were they gonna do if if they had more time? Some of this just seems pretty squirrely, also for inst like Pakistan vs/ Saudis re each one being competitive/complicit/responsible for bin Laden's maintainance, and paranoid/threatening. Hope some other investigators can verify some of this.

ya amazing read but seems to be primarily based on one anon source

the idea that bin laden was being held captive by isi does make a lot of sense tho, some of the other details maybe not as much

If a feeling counts this feels more right than wrong!

narrative primarily based on one source but validation from others...typical for Hersh.

But who cares anyway, right?

new yorker clearly wldnt touch it

I care, but want verification, like with My Lai. A lot (maybe most) people thought that at least some Pakistan govt. elements had to know bin Laden had settled into that city, so why not say, Oh yeah, we were gonna use him as a bargaining chip, 'til that guy betrayed the secret, as Hersh put it. Yeah, whatta party-pooper/ And maybe that's true, but the whole thing w Saudis, like I mentioned also needs much more parsing---Hersh's paraphrasing of sassy insiders raises as many questions as it answers, at least.

My Lai was way past verified, even if the perps got off light.

I don't doubt that ISi played a role in Bin Laden's confinement to Abbottabad, that Pak air defense withheld response to the SEAL insertion, or that Saud intelligence maintain ties to Al Qaeda (their support of affiliate Al-Nusra in Syria is overt).

I do have doubts that the SEAL team members who've disclosed elements of the raid that they were privy to were pushing an administration fabrication; as a group they take these things very seriously, and arguably none would risk ostracism by peers. While I've no idea whether Bin Laden's remains are at the bottom of the Arabian Sea, the requirement that there be no locus for a martyr's cult adequately explains why his remains or even post-mortem photos weren't released.

It may have been an utter mess, with a totally desecrated body torn into a dog's breakfast, but the resolution of the mess through the 'burial at sea' was about as good a resolution as could have been planned, even if they'd thought it through a hundred times and decided on it months beforehand. Kind of an 'all's well that ends well' story.

Can't imagine Kathryn Bigelow being very happy, if there's a chance her movie told all of the potentially false parts of this story.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2012/images/04/26/t1larg.sitroomtomason.jpg

gosh that movie was such ponderous security porn garbage may it be repeatedly owned by irl forever

Recent interview in which Hersh praises Gawker and Buzzfeed.

Woman Allegedly Put Dead Foot Skin Shavings in Family's Milk

Seymour Hersh

new yorker clearly wldnt touch it

― lag∞n, Sunday, May 10, 2015 10:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they have all their credibility propping up the official story, which ran in their pages, and whose author (iirc) hasn't written for them again, right?

iffy sourcing seems the more likely culprit, not like theyve never published a story that contradicted a previous one

dont think it wld "ruin their credibility" or anything

lmao never mind

http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nicholas-schmidle

i mean unless u think they just stick to their original story always even when new info becomes available, doesnt seem quite right

The New YOrker is never wrong, they employ fact checkers and shit

hersh seems more and more willing to publish thinly sourced pieces which is certainly interesting from a readers perspective but i cld see how it wld make the nyer et al nervous, just from journalists reactions on twitter hes obvs someone who is widly admired but his rep has def taken a hit because of this pattern

the vibe of score settling from the sources in that piece too was pretty out there

Perhaps the most concerning problem with Hersh's story is not the sourcing but rather the internal contradictions in the narrative he constructs.

Most blatant, Hersh's entire narrative turns on a secret deal, in which the US promised Pakistan increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." In fact, the exact opposite of this occurred, with US military aid dropping and US-Pakistan cooperation in Afghanistan plummeting as both sides feuded bitterly for years after the raid.

Hersh explains this seemingly fatal contradiction by suggesting the deal fell apart due to miscommunication between the Americans and Pakistanis. But it's strange to argue that the dozens of officials on both sides would be competent enough to secretly plan and execute a massive international ruse, and then to uphold their conspiracy for years after the fact, but would not be competent enough to get on the same page about aid delivery.---Max Fischer, here:
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden

oh, speaking of credibility

Also, Peter Bergen, interviewer of bin Laden etc:

The evidence

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.

Let's start with the claim that the only shots fired at the Abbottabad compound were the ones that killed bin Laden. That ignores the fact that two SEALs on the mission, Matt Bissonnette, author of "No Easy Day," and Robert O'Neill have publicly said that there were a number of other people killed that night, including bin Laden's two bodyguards, one of his sons and one of the bodyguard's wives. Their account is supplemented by many other U.S. officials who have spoken on the record to myself or to other journalists.

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.

Common sense would tell you that the idea that Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden's expenses while he was living in Abbottabad is simply risible. Bin Laden's principal goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family as a result of which his Saudi citizenship was revoked as far back as 1994.

Why would the Saudis pay for the upkeep of their most mortal enemy? Indeed, why wouldn't they get their close allies, the Pakistanis, to look the other way as they sent their assassins into Pakistan to finish him off?

Common sense would also tell you that if the Pakistanis were holding bin Laden and the U.S. government had found out this fact, the easiest path for both countries would not be to launch a U.S. military raid into Pakistan but would have been to hand bin Laden over quietly to the Americans.

Indeed, the Pakistanis have done this on several occasions with a number of other al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9/11, who was handed over to U.S. custody after a raid in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 2003. So too was Abu Faraj al-Libi, another key al Qaeda leader who was similarly handed over by the Pakistanis to U.S. custody two years later.

Why cover it up?

Common sense would also tell you that if U.S. officials had found out that the Pakistani officials were hiding bin Laden there is no reason the Americans would have covered this up. After all, around the time of the bin Laden raid, relations between the United States and Pakistan were at an all-time low because the Pakistanis had recently imprisoned Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who had killed two Pakistanis. What did U.S. officials have to lose by saying that bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis, if it were true?

The fact is that the senior Pakistani officials Hersh alleges were harboring bin Laden were as surprised as the rest of the world that al Qaeda's leader was living in Abbottabad. The night of the bin Laden raid, U.S. officials were monitoring the communications of Pakistan's top military officials such as Kayani and Pasha and their bewildered reactions confirmed that the Pakistanis had not had a clue about bin Laden's presence there, according to a number of U.S. officials I spoke to in the course of reporting "Manhunt," a book about the hunt for bin Laden.

In his article, Hersh correctly points out that in the immediate aftermath of the bin Laden raid, White House officials initially made some false statements about the raid -- for instance, that bin Laden was using his wives as human shields during the raid -- but these were quickly corrected.

The only source Hersh refers to by name in his 10,000-word piece is Assad Durrani, who was the head of ISI during the early 1990s, around two decades before the bin Laden raid occurred. Hersh portrays Durrani as generally supportive of Hersh's various conclusions.

When I emailed Durrani after the Hersh piece appeared, Durrani said there was "no evidence of any kind" that the ISI knew that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad but he still could "make an assessment that this could be plausible." This is hardly a strong endorsement of one of the principal claims of Hersh's piece.

Durrani added that he believed that the bin Laden "operation could not have been carried out without our cooperation." This glosses over the fact that the SEALs were flying in stealth helicopters through blind spots in Pakistan's radar defense and the Pakistani air force had virtually no capacity to fly at night when the raid took place, so in fact the bin Laden raid was relatively easily accomplished without Pakistani cooperation, according to multiple U.S. officials with knowledge of the bin Laden operation.

All sorts of things are, of course, plausible, but in both journalism and in the writing of history one looks for evidence, not plausibility.

Hersh has had a storied career. One hopes that he won't end it with a story about the Obama administration and the bin Laden raid that reads like Frank Underwood from "House of Cards" has made an unholy alliance with Carrie Mathison from "Homeland" to produce a Pakistani version of Watergate.

did anyone ever figure out who that woman was (pictured above)?

These guys might be wrong, but they're raising the right questions.

akm: just some white house bod iirc

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