Seymour Hersh - classic or dud

I finished Ambrose's Eisenhower biography last week. My god, are we lucky that he was less trigger-happy than the Joint Chiefs.

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/01/18/seymour_hersh_unleashed

"Just when we needed an angry black man," he began, his arm perched jauntily on the podium, "we didn't get one."

"He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, "are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta." "

er some bad quote marks there sorry

Can't wait to read what he writes next, as always. His speeches and Q-and-A's are always interesting because he tosses in nuggets that couldn't quite be substantiated enough to make it into his articles.

"They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins"

Apparently that is true:

http://twitter.com/#!/jeremyscahill/status/27465884440199170

Which is really creepy.

his arm perched jauntily on the podium,

yeah the writing there is slightly prejudicial

Scahill was my Facebook friend until I saw him pose unironically with Fidel, and his friends swooned. I still love his book on Blackwater.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media

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" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an "independent" Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. "The Pakistanis put out a report, don't get me going on it. Let's put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It's a bullshit report," he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.

the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever

If the death of bin Laden was all a hoax, then either OBL died a while earlier of some other cause, or else the USA cut a deal with him, bcz nothing would suit OBL more than to pop up in a video after loudly being proclaimed dead, making the USA look very bad indeed and would add to his legend - something he is quite vain about.

i don't think he's claiming it was a hoax, just that it didn't happen at all like the new yorker and kathryn bigelow said it did.

was just looking at my copy of Chain of Command this morning and wondering what Hersh was up to

If I were near NYC, I would go to Bethlehem and see him speak next week:

http://lehighcalendar.activedatax.com/LehighU/EventList.aspx?view=EventDetails&eventidn=25353&information_id=34070&type=&syndicate=syndicate

Seems like the necktie would draw attention when meeting a source in a parking garage.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2013/9/27/1380263187095/Seymour-Hersh-008.jpg

"The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple." And he implores journalists to do something about it.

This story gets printed because it is not a story about government lies and lying, but a story about Seymour Hersh complaining about goevernment lies and lying. Then the reporter and editor can say to themselves, maybe we didn't break a real story, but at least we sort of almost courageously hinted at one.

i wouldn't exactly accuse the guardian, of all papers, of being afraid to print stories 'about government lies and lying.'

point taken

Hey Sy if things have been so bad for the past five years, where have you been?

Is he saying he can't find an editor to print all these vast truths that everyone's ignoring?

I'm not one to defend the water carrying ability of the NYT, but guys like Hersh can get published anywhere they want.

^ this

first thought was yeah yeah yeah, wake me up when there's a story to go read somewhere

I'm not one to defend the water carrying ability of the NYT, but guys like Hersh can get published anywhere they want.

Hersh, re:Snowden:

Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game,"

Maybe Hersh is sitting on a trove of stories, but chicken-shit editors - and one might presume an implicitly chicken-shit Hersh - are afraid to publish them due to all the anonymous sources, lack of hard documentation, etc. Which is, you know, good journalism, but indeed perhaps counterproductive to breaking stories of secrets and lies.

Unclear, since Hersh is quick to qualify, but the whole Osama story is a lie line: does that include the New Yorker's take on it, or is he just ripping on the Times?

Hersh may still be under contract and in-house at the New Yorker, and so can't publish elsewhere other than in book form.

His recent pieces for the New Yorker have been surprisingly online-only, off in a corner:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/seymour_m_hersh/search?contributorName=seymour%20m%20hersh

...or he just means that chickenshit editors have less faith in putting journalists on the road for months and months in search of documents that may or may not turn up.

By chickenshit I assume you actually mean "broke." The major paper I often write for was just asked to shave $100 million off its budget.

dud, for inspiring anyone to work "within the system to change it"
― You've Got to Pick Up Every Stitch (tracerhand), Monday, September 6, 2004 7:01 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

geez....tough crowd...

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.

an interesting aspect of the kinds of cultural journalism i do know a lot about is that the antagonism of one era will be adapted to and absorbed into the marketing of a subsequent era…

the cia for example also know a lot about their particular field, and about using people (more than me certainly). i would expect them to adapt and am assuming they have. has hersh also adapted? it's quite hard for a solitary actor to adapt, but maybe he has. i think it much more likely that the unending recent spat between him and e.g. bellingcat is basically a "well poisoned at both ends"* with conflicting tidbits that distract from elements they genuinely don't want know or discussed…

*(sorry this is a rubbish mixed metaphor lol)

the cia for example also know a lot about their particular field, and about using people (more than me certainly). i would expect them to adapt and am assuming they have. has hersh also adapted? it's quite hard for a solitary actor to adapt, but maybe he has.

Worth considering also that the CIA is an institution which refreshes itself through the hiring of new, young employees versed in new techniques and information strategies, while Hersh is one very old man with the cognitive biases of an old man (think and move slower, suspicious of/resistant to new information or perspectives, more likely to trust people he's had "relationships" with for decades, never considering seriously the idea that he and/or his source may be past it). It's not just possible, it's likely that Hersh has long since transitioned, in the CIA's/government's eyes, from antagonist to clearinghouse. "Pass this off to the old man — it's exactly the kind of thing he goes for, and there are some people out there who still think he's a brave truthtelling genius."

iii: as noted, shapes both ends of the debate (is doing that right now)…

according to this metric, whatever hersh reports serves the interests and desires of the intelligence community? it seems to me that by assuming that any reporting using sources inside the intelligence community, however accurate or truthful, is to be shunned as harmful, that you've constructed a double bind. you've imagined that community as being so cunning and powerful that they control everything they touch.

i think hersch tries to tell it straight but he is deeply biased against the american intelligence community and with good reason. haven't read his nord stream article but it never made sense to me that russia would do it.

I don't have a strong opinion on who did it, and Hersh's theory is plausible as far as I can tell, but "an actor would do a certain act" and "an actor did that act" aren't the same thing. I don't think he's established the second of those

The intelligence stuff of the last few posts is an interesting direction, have to ruminate on that a bit

FWIW I agree with poster Aimless.

The posts by Mark S and Unperson are good reminders to be sceptical about what we're told and to look for hidden motives and causes, eg: some of which may be unknown to Hersh.

But they don't, themselves, disprove any claim that Hersh has made. Only factual evidence can do that.

And I think Aimless is correct to say that dismissing Hersh whatever he says becomes incoherent. There must be certain things that he could say that would be true or worth knowing.

Thought these were interesting factual details in his reporting:

The C4 attached to the pipelines would be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a plane on short notice, but the procedure involved the most advanced signal processing technology. Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives. (“You want a signal that is robust enough so that no other signal could accidentally send a pulse that detonated the explosives,” I was told by Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy at MIT. Postol, who has served as the science adviser to the Pentagon’s Chief of Naval Operations, said the issue facing the group in Norway because of Biden’s delay was one of chance: “The longer the explosives are in the water the greater risk there would be of a random signal that would launch the bombs.”)

May as well dismiss Biden as a malleable old man if Hersh's age makes him a rube.

May as well dismiss Biden as a malleable old man if Hersh's age makes him a rube.

Do you think that's a zing? Biden is clearly malleable. Make a list of the positions he advocated in the 70s, 80s and 90s and compare them to the positions he's advocated (and things he's actually achieved, legislatively) as Obama's VP and now as president. He has undergone a steady and obvious leftward shift as he has aged, indicating that he is aware of broader social and political changes and is adjusting his thinking accordingly.

By 'malleable' I think Eazy was thinking more in terms of being shaped and directed by someone else's will. iow, being their dupe.

Genuine question. If say in two weeks Hersh’s story becomes undeniably ‘the truth’ ? Like Biden admits to it. Would it change your perception of the intelligence community or US foreign policy? Or even the current invasion of Ukraine?

If say in two weeks Hersh’s story becomes undeniably ‘the truth’ ?

the key piece of the whole operation was its deniability. its a lock that whoever did it will continue to deny responsibility. hersh's story is an attempt to cut through that fog to expose who did what to whom and how. how the world uses those facts is not his concern as a journalist. getting the story right is his job, which isn't easy in the world of spying and covert operations.

My question is more about the different possible impacts of such an act.

The most important impacts aren't likely to be public knowledge. But I think it's safe to speculate there are more Germans pissed off at the USA today than there were before this story was posted.

This piece goes after Hersh's credibility as a journalist; I was not aware of just how often he has fallen victim to forged documents, made factual errors, etc.

This piece digs into the details of Hersh's reporting on the Nordstream story and finds numerous factual errors and timeline fuckups.

Hersh interviews Thomas Frank:

TF: I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too. A near miss on that one.

He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on.

fuckin preach! it simply cannot be emphasized enough.

gotta love that neoliberalism baby

Lots of laughter about Hersh's latest:

At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the [American] official said, “Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan—a poor waif in his underwear—and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking. Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”

What's making people...skeptical, to put it mildly...is that "poor waif in his underwear" line, which is a Russian idiom that no American would ever use. The sidelong shot at Nigeria is also pissing some people off.

its ridiculous, zelensky is quite robust, hes a stocky boi