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.
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.
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.
* 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...
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...
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).
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.
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.
> the real big secret is "it was Russia"
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.
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
Tell that to soldiers in WWI.
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
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.
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.