Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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According to the same analysis: it doesn't even make sense that they'd require an Alta-class ship from Norway's Navy in the first place; the ship was essentially just a diving platform, and civilian ships operate in those waters with far less need for cover. Moreover, the whole structure of the operation Hersh claims: EC-UBA divers planting C4 charges detonated by a sonobuoy dropped by a Norwegian P8, doesn't make sense either: remote underwater detonation is a routine operation performed in the civilian oil and gas industry. Not to mention: the P8 implicated Norway's Air Force, contradiction a big chunk of Hersh's story.

None of this checks out. You can make any number of unfalsifiable arguments about them not checking out deliberately as part of psy-ops or whatever, but at that point you've taken the whole story back to square one: we just don't know what happened, and Hersh's story has essentially nothing to tell us about it, other than that one random, implausibly-well-informed anonymous person told Hersh, one of journalism's least trustworthy figures, that that's what happened.

Look, I'm just a dude on a message board reading a set of competing claims about a subject I know literally nothing at all about. But I trust these claims more than I trust Hersh's claims, by a factor of infinity.

When you qualify Hersh as one of journalism's least trustworthy figures, it's impossible to take the rest of your comment at face value.

I think you have to separate Hersh pre-2010 and Hersh after-2010. He was once one of the greatest journalists in the world, but the last decade he has been putting out poorly-sourced, falsifiable garbage.

Watch the interview he gave the other day (mentioned in this article) and tell me you walk away from it with more confidence that he's fully "there" as a journalist. He goes on a tangent about how Ukraine is doomed and Zelenskiy is killing his own people by resisting, even though 90% of the country is in favor of fighting to regain the occupied territory.

He also doubles down on the ship being, specifically, the ALTA (and not any other ship), but the ALTA has been sitting in a scrap yard for 6 months.

I completely agree. He has a Pulitzer Prize, five Polk awards, two national magazine awards. Broke My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and exposed the Israeli nuclear program.

He is easily the most accomplished journalist for several generations.

That doesn’t automatically mean this story is right but to dismiss him in emotional and inaccurate terms doesn’t speak to a rational, evidence-based interpretation of the facts.

Seymour Hersh has also gone off the deep end lately. Some current examples[1]:

* the Osama bin Laden raid was faked in a conspiracy with Pakistan and he was actually captured in 2006

* much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei

* that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training

* the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey

Being right decades ago doesn't somehow absolve you of having to have verifiable sources and evidence when you go on to make numerous other claims that don't happen and no one can verify.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...

We live in a world where the CIA has a heart attack gun [1], a presidential administration faked evidence of WMD to go to war in Iraq, the CDC conducted secret medical torture on black men with syphilis, and the Pentagon sent JFK proposals to justify a war on Cuba by conducting false flag terrorist attacks against American civilians [2]. (JFK rejected them, apparently.)

So I read a list like yours, and read you scoffing at the implausibility of any of those things, and I remember just how different we all can be.

[1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

Yes and you know what all those things have in common? Actual evidence which corresponds to real events, and multiple sources confirming that they happened.

What Hersh's suppositions have is a stunning lack of verifiable evidence and observably factually incorrect assertions (as in the case of his articles on Nordstream).

Saying someone's claims don't (yet) have the kind of evidence you demand is pretty different from calling someone crazy (and in so doing implying that those claims are not worth the consideration of the sane).

The only thing your bullet points were doing is suggesting "look at the delusions of this maniac! He can't be trusted because of them". But because the completely insane shit in my list turned out to be true, Hersh's sorts of claims are at least as plausible as the insane shit I listed in my reply. (And in the case of the first two, they were labeled by bienpensants of all kinds as proof that the claimant was certifiably nuts or at least unworthy of Serious Attention ... until the day they were shown to be true.)

All I'm saying is that, given the factual record of conspiracy and sociopathy on the part of the world's powerful, something like "2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey" can't easily be used to dismiss someone as nuts. Not enough evidence? Sure, whatever (but let's wait a decade or two). Crazy though? Nope.

Over 10 years. It's one thing to have a story out there no one can prove, it's quite another to have been continuously publishing things you can't prove and which no one else can find any evidence of despite looking.

There are multiple factual claims about verifiable vessels, planes and movements being made and none of them are true.

All your saying is, despite obvious factual inconsistencies in the parts of the story which should be publicly verifiable, you've already got a conclusion you like. Which is what everyone's doing because the real big secret is "it was Russia" is a boring conclusion that doesn't move clicks.

> you've already got a conclusion you like

> the real big secret is "it was Russia"

Yes. The previous comment is also problematic. It does not follow from Hersh being one Smiths song short of a mixtape that the opposite of his conclusions are true. It's indicative of how all these discussions happen: points made to impeach Hersh's conclusions are analyzed as if they are arguments for the purity of US foreign policy. Hersh might be "right" that the US is behind the pipeline attack! But that doesn't matter if he got there by guessing. The real question is: can we learn anything from the story he told, and the answer to that seems, pretty convincingly, to be "only that his sources are fabulists".

It would be handy if you could conclude things like "whatever Hersh said, the opposite is true" from his stories! His journalism would be super valuable if that was the case. You'd just read it and draw the opposite conclusions. But you can't do that, because his stories (at least since 2006) are unmoored from reality.

Well, in the last decade he's kinda blown it with multiple claims in Syria. Statements that are either unbelievable, undocumented and easily could be (like building locations), or basically falsified have really brought down his trust. Even if he's just getting bad information rather than coming from a particular angle, his readers deserve better vetting of the material. At some point it feels like he's being driven by narrative more than facts that's a problem, and hanging out with Bashir Al Assad doesn't help to get the "real" story. Also note that Assad does have a particularly aligned geo-political supporter these days, who's directly involved.

   https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/whose-sarin
   https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-hersh/military-to-military
   https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/06/25/will-get-fooled-seymour-hersh-welt-khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack/
   https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/whatever-happened-to-seymour-hersh

There's no such thing as a chlorine bomb- "Chlorine is just a gas. It's not a chemical warfare weapon. You smell it, you run away." - Seymore Hersh

Tell that to soldiers in WWI.

Bellingcat is a way for UK/US spies to launder intelligence, a bootleg Wikileaks that won't challenge domestic power structures. I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously.

> I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously.

Bellingcat have a significant proven track record [1] and have won significant awards for their reporting, including the Investigative Reporting Award from the European Press Prize [2]. Do you have evidence for your counter-claim that they should not be taken seriously?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Notable_cases [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Awards

Haha, Bellingcat is your source vs a Pulitzer Prize journalist who may have fallen out of favor with a particular crowd, and you want the comment to be taken seriously? Not all us drink Koolaid. Here's a link to your link - about Brown Moses, an unemployed man from Leicester, England (https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/bellingcat_brown_moses....)

Good idea, judge based only on the name of the source, completely captured by narrative and unable to make decisions based any measurable facts they present. Pick a football team and cheer them to victory for surely that's the right way to understand the world, the economy, and geopolitics!

Don't read anything from the London Review of Books either since you might not agree with them. It's scary to hear new things.

I'll note that you didn't dispute that chlorine gas was used (eg in Yepres and many other times) and killed thousands in the great war nor that Seymour said it couldn't (there's video). Do you like it when your team slaughters innocents? Tryout Kiwi Farms.

>>>>Good idea, judge based only on the name of the source, completely captured by narrative and unable to make decisions based any measurable facts they present. Pick a football team and cheer them to victory for surely that's the right way to understand the world, the economy, and geopolitics! Lots of words, but nothing that adds to the discussion that the source of your "new things" is a bunch of Tik-Tokers doing armchair analysis. Here's another description of your trusted sources - "Brown Moses aka Eliot Higgins, is the founder of an online collective called Bellingcat that picks apart conspiracy theories and investigates war crimes and hate crimes using clues from the Internet." Wow, how amazing that we can now understand the world, the economy, and geopolitics from sitting in our gaming chair using clues from the internet. Yah, let's dispute about chlorine gas in the "great war" since you and I are experts at chemical warfare and we both have access to proven, evidence-based reliable data aka Bellingcat and London Review of Books!

When you're JAQing off the use of chlorine gas in WWI and comparing LRoB to TikTok, ZyclonB and the holocaust are nearby. Since you use the internet I guess you can't know anything, LOL!

If you're stuck in a time tube and perceive the world as it was in 2005, Hersh is one of the more important journalists in the world. I don't deny that. I only deny that the Jews are attempting to start WW3 in Iran, that Opus Dei runs USSOCOM, that the US faked the UBL raid in Pakistan (and in fact the ISI had UBL for years prior), and that Syria's Sarin attacks on their own people were faked by the US. Oh, also that the US got the Norwegian Navy to put a minesweeper in the Baltic Sea as a diving platform for US divers to blow up a pipeline that wasn't shipping any gas to Germany.

If you're still in 2005, I have great news for you: you've got one more amazing season of the Wire ahead of you, and 5 whole seasons of a show called Breaking Bad --- take my word on this, it's going to be amazing. You can skip The Wire S5 though.

>other than that one random, implausibly-well-informed anonymous person told Hersh

There is no reason to believe that Hersh is working off a single source. If he were, it would be extremely stupid, and certainly unbefitting a journalist with his level of experience, to admit it, since it would make it far easier to determine who the leaker was — it narrows the list of candidates dramatically. It seems like the whole justification for the "single source" smear is coming from a few times when Hersh said "my source" in the essay, which may simply be good practice in ensuring he doesn't accidentally reveal which claims came from one source and which came from multiple, since that could also (unlikely, but not impossible) help the intelligence services find one of the leakers.

>remote underwater detonation is a routine operation performed in the civilian oil and gas industry.

Remote underwater detonation with an unidentifiable signal is not. Using a normal sonar detonator would probably increase the chance of detection.

Detection of what? It's not a secret that somebody blew up the pipeline. Do we have a clear theory of what exactly the conspirators were attempting to conceal?

Obviously, detection of who blew up the pipeline. If you can detect the means, then you have a lead for the culprit.

What kind of question is this? All it does is make me think you're being intentionally obtuse. Anyone who blew up the pipeline — or committed any other crime —would try to cover their tracks, unless they were planning to take credit (which they weren't). That's how you always commit crimes!

How exactly does detecting a remote detonation give you attribution? Google this: a lot of different entities do underwater remote detonation. The one thing you wouldn't want to do is to park a big, beaconing Alta-class minesweeper precisely over the thing you later blow up!

It doesn't immediately give you attribution, but like any other clue, it could contribute to an evidence base that eventually leads to a suspect. Again, this is basic criminology, and you're a security researcher. Why are you suddenly unable to make these connections?

What is your explanation for why the White House, State Department, and CIA immediately responded with public statements about that "blog post" from a "discredited former journalist"?

What is your explanation as to why Washington hasn't put forward an alternative explanation for what happened to the critical infrastructure of their treaty ally, given they have the most powerful intelligence service on the planet?

This was clearly a covert operation and as such is unlikely to have any smoking gun. But As Hersh said, he's merely "deconstructing the obvious".

There are multiple possible reasons for why Washington hasn't put forward an alternative explanation. Maybe they really don't know. Or maybe they do know but can't publicly reveal it in order to protect intelligence sources and methods. Or maybe they did do it, but using a different technique than Hersh alleged. Or maybe they intentionally leaked a false story to Hersh to muddy the waters.

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