Seymour Hersh - classic or dud

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.

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