[HN Gopher] Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
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Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
Author : r721
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-02-16 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oalexanderdk.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oalexanderdk.substack.com)
| alienicecream wrote:
| Intelligence agencies have never heard of "open source" intel and
| would never anticipate that people on the internet would
| immediately check to see which ships would have been in the area
| at the time, and therefore would not have accounted for that.
|
| Case closed.
| mannerheim wrote:
| The glowies faked the transponders! They faked the satellite
| imagery too! And they even faked the witnesses and
| photographers who saw the ship! Case closed.
| alienicecream wrote:
| I don't think it really matters if Hersh's story is correct
| in all the details, or if it was done in a completely
| different way. So I don't really understand the zeal which
| people have to poke holes in it. What matters is motive,
| means and opportunity and only a few nations, all in NATO,
| have all three. And no one in NATO is going to do anything
| like this without making sure they get approval from the US
| first. That's pretty much all you need to know.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is a non-statement. NATO is 29 other countries besides
| the US, all with their own motives, and you can contrive of
| motives for every other global power with the means to blow
| up a pipeline; the "opportunity" part of it doesn't even
| make sense.
| alienicecream wrote:
| You find it plausible that a global power outside of NATO
| would commit an act of international terrorism like this,
| blowing up the critical industrial infrastructure of a
| NATO member and everyone would just let it slide?
|
| Or that any one of 29 NATO member countries would do this
| acting all on their own?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > critical industrial infrastructure of a NATO member
|
| That's a very odd description of a never-functional,
| decertified piece of infrastructure owned and constructed
| by a sanctioned geopolitical foe.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think we have zero information and zero clues about who
| did this and trying to reason axiomatically about it, as
| HN is wont to do, isn't going to get us any closer to the
| truth.
| alienicecream wrote:
| That's exactly what reasoning axiomatically does, it gets
| you closer to the truth. It gets you from "I don't know
| anything" to "these are the plausible theories". I wonder
| why you think that allowing people to speculate based on
| these "axioms" is so dangerous? If they're wrong, they're
| just wrong aren't they?
|
| As to clues, there are plenty. Biden proclaiming that he
| would put an end to Nord Stream 2 is a clue. That no one
| seems to be in a big rush to find out who did it given
| the scale of this and that it destroyed important
| infrastructure of a NATO member is a clue. That "there is
| no evidence that Russia did it" as the Swedish
| investigators said, is a clue.
| pvg wrote:
| _It gets you from "I don't know anything" to "these are
| the plausible theories"._
|
| It doesn't, it just lets you wrap your biases and
| motivated reasoning in a veneer of rigour that isn't
| really there. After all, you're the one picking the
| 'axioms' out of an infinite set and they aren't used for
| anything else.
|
| There isn't anything wrong with idle speculation but
| there also isn't anything wrong with people pointing some
| idle speculation is largely baseless.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Biden proclaiming that he would put an end to Nord
| Stream 2 is a clue.
|
| "We are going to put an end to poverty!"
|
| Normal people: "OK, social programs."
|
| Galaxy-brain people: "He's gonna genocide poor people!
| There's no other explanation!"
|
| NordStream 2 was decertified shortly after the Russians
| invaded Ukraine, and NordStream 2 AG filed for bankruptcy
| about a week later. I'm very comfortable fitting that
| within "put an end to".
| mannerheim wrote:
| Which axiom gets you that it must have been a state actor
| who did it?
| alienicecream wrote:
| For me it's the one where governments with the most
| capable intelligence agencies in the world are quiet
| about who committed an act of international terrorism
| against an important piece of industrial infrastructure
| at the bottom of the ocean. One largely owned by Germany,
| a key NATO member. If this was some eco terrorism
| (imagining for a moment that they would have the means to
| procure the explosives and expertise to blow up a
| concrete encased pipeline at the bottom of the sea), it
| would present a serious risk for oil and gas
| infrastructure everywhere. It would not be taken lightly.
| mannerheim wrote:
| And Germany somehow knows who does this in your story and
| keeps quiet because...
| mcguire wrote:
| Yeah, well. Some of us are kind of fond of evidence and not
| just vibes.
| mannerheim wrote:
| I haven't seen any convincing evidence only a state actor
| could be responsible.
| dmix wrote:
| If someone was feeding Hersh false information why would they
| reference the Alta class? Assuming it was some Intel op or some
| insider, did they just google some Norwegian navy ships that
| could plausibly fit the picture? Or did Hersh draw that
| connection himself?
|
| Hersh has been criticized for listening to cranks. Maybe some
| Intel officer (or adjacent gov/military worker) heard some
| rumours internally but there was comparmentalization or
| operational security protecting the details, and then tried to
| piece it together themselves, before leaking it to Hersh.
|
| If it is false it's worth asking why and who would care to push
| these angles.
| epistasis wrote:
| There are all sorts of interested parties in creating doubt
| about the attack, and the most likely is of course the master
| of this, Russia. It also fits very well with past bad reporting
| from Hersh.
|
| The detail makes the story more plausible, later debunking
| matters far less than the initial report and the uncertainty
| that this sows in people's minds.
|
| Taking attention away from the true culprit definitely helps.
| And any ammunition that can be used to make democracies in the
| West have more doubt and internal wasted debate definitely
| helps whoever actually destroyed the pipeline.
| tptacek wrote:
| Trying to work backwards from the (likely true) notion that
| Hersh's story is fiction is just as intellectually flawed. We
| don't anything about Hersh's source or their motives. You
| could write an HN comment about how the CIA planted this
| whole story to cast doubt on the actual US-led operation to
| blow up (some) of the Nord Stream pipeline. Or you could
| write the opposite comment. There's just nothing to go on.
|
| The only thing we can really discuss here is whether the
| Hersh story is credible. It seems clearly not to be. If we
| establish that, that's all we get: the fact that one story
| about what happened is false. We'll be no closer to knowing
| what actually happened. That's life!
| tptacek wrote:
| Presumably it's for the same reasons that people gave him
| faulty technical information about Sarin gas in his debunked
| Syria story, or whatever weird details he was fed about the
| notion that the Osama bin Laden raid never happened, or the
| idea that USSOCOM is secretly controlled by a sect within the
| Vatican. Because he'll run with it, and people pay attention to
| him.
|
| People troll all the time on the Internet; why would we assume
| they wouldn't troll everywhere else too?
| dmix wrote:
| I'd still give Hersh the benefit of the doubt he's not just
| listening to some internet troll type person. There has to be
| some reputation at play here for him to take it seriously.
| The odds are high it's someone connected to the US or NATO
| govs. At least you'd assume so. As another commenter
| mentioned, he claimed he used to the same fact checkers used
| by The New Yorker.
| tptacek wrote:
| I would not give him the benefit of the doubt, and I have a
| hard time understanding why anybody would; there is more
| than ample reason to doubt any story he runs. I can't
| imagine a credible source working with him, so far has the
| presumption of accuracy been shifted on his work over the
| last 10 years. That's why a famous journalist is reduced to
| running stories from unnamed (and implausible) sources in
| the first place.
|
| "Since I posted my original article, I had a short email
| correspondence with Seymour Hersh, unfortunately he stopped
| replying once I asked him about several of the above
| mentioned inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies."
| dmix wrote:
| Maybe it was an aging Intel guy relying on old reputation
| for credibility who later declined into pushing
| conspiracy tier thing, so basically two levels of Hersh
| like people cruising off past glory.
| rjsw wrote:
| I didn't think he claimed that the OBL raid never happened,
| just that the backstory about how he was found was wrong.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's above the fold on his LRB story: he claims that
| Pakistani ISI captured bin Laden, not the US.
| rjsw wrote:
| ... and then the US staged a raid to pick him up from the
| ISI.
| mannerheim wrote:
| And it was directed by Stanley Kubrick.
| rainworld wrote:
| [flagged]
| mannerheim wrote:
| Not sure why anybody took seriously a story an octogenarian wrote
| on his blog from interviewing a single anonymous source where he
| got numerous basic facts wrong anyway.
| fundad wrote:
| because he talks shit about HRC
| scythe wrote:
| The satellite imagery of the Alta shows the dates June 5, 7, 20,
| and later (until the Alta is scrapped on the 30th). The BALTOPS
| 2022 exercises took place June 5-17. So the imagery generally
| does not provide evidence of the Alta's location during most of
| BALTOPS 2022.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's helpful to consider that BALTOPS itself is a batshit cover
| for one of the highest profile military operations of the last
| 20 years (it's sort of like the military equivalent of altering
| the schedule at the San Diego Comic Con to cover a heist), and
| that it might be hard to even come up with a reason that you'd
| need an Alta-class ship to pull this off, or really even a
| military ship at all; a lot of what Hersh is talking about here
| appears to be stuff that civilian extractive industry
| professionals already do (remote detonation in particular).
| snapcaster wrote:
| How easy would it be for a military or intelligence service to
| fake this data? I don't really have any experience or idea on how
| reliable these signals are for something like this
| tptacek wrote:
| Countervailing OSINT data isn't the only problem with the story
| Hersh is telling; a deeper problem is that the whole scheme
| doesn't make much sense. The author links to a more expansive
| debunking at the top of his story (it's a better link than the
| one we're reading now, because it incorporates all this
| Norwegian minesweeper OSINT), and the bulk of it is just
| observations about how dumb this mission structure is.
|
| Implausibly informed anonymous single source? Check.
|
| Midlist Tom Clancy-grade technical details, like salinity
| camouflaged C4 charges? Check.
|
| Basic factual errors, like the Norwegian Navy not operating
| P8s? Check.
|
| Irrational strategic details, like using Navy minesweepers as
| platforms for human divers during a huge, widely monitored,
| extensively planned military exercise? Check.
|
| That's just this analysis. But you can work back through
| Hersh's credibility with similar debunkings of his previous
| stories. Look at the enmity Hersh's cheering section has for
| Bellingcat, for instance, for taking his Syria Sarin story to
| pieces.
| runnerup wrote:
| It feels rather damning that Hersh didn't verify some of the
| easily verifiable claims that his source made.
|
| Why would you not have researchers do some fact checking on the
| story before publishing it so loudly?
| mach5 wrote:
| he did do fact checking, with people he had previously worked
| with at New Yorker
|
| https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/seymour...
| runnerup wrote:
| They fact-checked "salinity-matched C4"? My god they're
| terrible.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Hersh, fact checking:
|
| https://twitter.com/grodira/status/1626150758017015809
| tptacek wrote:
| Then they're apparently not very good, are they?
| mannerheim wrote:
| If you fact check and you're right, you've wasted your time.
|
| If you fact check and you're wrong, you either can't publish
| (wasting the time you took for the story) or you publish anyway
| knowing it's wrong, in which case, it's still a waste of time.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Or you publish and report the _claims_ made by the source and
| call out specifically where those claims couldn 't be
| verified. It's like science publishing, too often negative
| results go unpublished. Knowing what _didn 't_ work can be as
| useful as knowing what did work.
| krisoft wrote:
| > If you fact check and you're right, you've wasted your
| time.
|
| That is not how it works. First of all there is no "you're
| right". The journalist doesn't have first hand observations.
| They cannot be "right" or "wrong" only their source can be.
|
| The journalist goes and checks what can be verified
| independently. No matter what the outcome of these checks
| nobody wasted their time. The result is a stronger article,
| and continued respect for the journalist in his profession.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > continued respect for the journalist in his profession.
|
| A very funny joke!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> If you fact check and you 're right, you've wasted your
| time._
|
| I see it differently. I used to be a test engineer.
|
| My tests made it onto documentation accompanying a $50,000 RF
| snooper (in 1985), and were verifications that the item
| passed the test.
|
| I like it when tests don't fail.
| [deleted]
| epistasis wrote:
| Really sad to see Hersh's downfall into complete nonsense. It
| really makes me begin to doubt his prior work!
|
| I've lost a lot of respect for the people who are pushing his
| nonsense these days. It doesn't even pass a sniff test, it's just
| bait for those prone to believe conspiracy theories.
|
| Such a shame for a reputation to dissolve like this.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| He's in "I want corroboration" territory for me. The big scoops
| - My Lai, Abu Gharaib - were backed up with hard evidence and
| other organizations confirming the allegations. Stuff like "the
| US faked Bin Laden's burial and chucked chunks of him into the
| mountains" have, thus far, not been.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Abu Ghraib happened, and My Lai happened, and Hersh was first
| who brought these two stories to light.
|
| Neither were some giant secrets, and were previously
| dismissed as unsubstantiated rumour. Hersh collected enough
| factoids together to substantiate them enough to become a
| news story, rather than a military legend.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Hersh was first who brought these two stories to light.
|
| Yes, but critically, also _not the last_. Other journalists
| corroborated, more sources came forward, evidence,
| hearings, photographs, convictions.
| TheBlight wrote:
| His contention involved the manner in which UBL's location
| was discovered. The popular narrative is that a courier was
| tracked with the aid of intelligence gathered during
| "enhanced interrogation" sessions. Whereas his claim is that
| an ISI officer walked in and received cash for the
| information.
| mannerheim wrote:
| If this is an accurate summary of what he's claiming, this
| seems a bit more ridiculous than that:
|
| > The truth, Hersh says, is that Pakistani intelligence
| services captured bin Laden in 2006 and kept him locked up
| with support from Saudi Arabia, using him as leverage
| against al-Qaeda. In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin
| Laden to the US for increased military aid and a "freer
| hand in Afghanistan." Rather than kill him or hand him over
| discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging
| an elaborate American "raid" with Pakistani support.
|
| https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-
| bi...
| TheBlight wrote:
| I'm not sure it is more ridiculous. ISI holding him in
| quasi-house arrest in Abbottabad (home of the Pakistani
| Military Academy) seems more plausible to me vs. them
| having no idea he was there and the US finding him as
| depicted in the propaganda film "Zero Dark Thirty."
| mannerheim wrote:
| Either way, Hersh's story is more than simply 'an ISI
| officer walked in and received cash for the information',
| and veers directly into the definition of conspiracy
| theory territory. Which isn't to say it isn't possible,
| but many parts just don't make sense:
|
| > And there are more contradictions. Why, for example,
| would the Pakistanis insist on a fake raid that would
| humiliate their country and the very military and
| intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it?
|
| > A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the
| ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a
| dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?
|
| > Why not just kill bin Laden, drive his body across the
| border into Afghanistan, and drop him off with the
| Americans? Or why not put him in a hut somewhere in
| Waziristan, blow it up with an F-16, pretend it was a US
| drone strike, and tell the Americans to go collect the
| body?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, these specific claims are definitely made by Hersh.
|
| https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-
| paper/v37/n10/seymour-m.-hersh/the...
|
| > 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.
|
| > There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to
| sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.
| TheBlight wrote:
| This is the least interesting aspect of the story IMO.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup. Hersh also published bogus claims about the Syrian nerve
| agent attacks on civilians, claiming they were not done by the
| Syrian government, but by "outside agents".
|
| Among his claims was that the Sarin was made by "mixing two
| inert chemicals", which is utter bullsh*t; the synthesis
| pathways for those deadly chemicals are notoriously difficult
| and hazardous, including things like hydrofluoric acid, which
| is extremely corrosive, and a itself a contact poison affecting
| the nervous system.
|
| But he happily spouts his bullcrap stories, the primary
| beneficiaries of which are the autocracies of the world.
| tptacek wrote:
| In that story, his expert sources also confused the chemicals
| used in pesticides with those used in fertilizers.
| alrs wrote:
| If you doubt that Abu Ghraib happened, I dunno what to tell
| you.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No one doubts Abu Ghraib happened.
|
| Hersh's reporting in the twenty years _since_ is somewhat in
| question.
| caycep wrote:
| Granted...he is in his mid 80's. Say what you will about other
| national leaders in the 80's (some of whom have organizational
| apparatuses around them to support them, vs. being a lone wolf
| professional)...but cognition may play a factor vs. Seymour
| Hersh in the prime of his life...
| molopolo24 wrote:
| Let us consider that, even if he was fed false-information and
| his story discredited we can do limited conclusions from it.
|
| It might not affirm "the West blew up Nordstream" but it
| certainly does not affirm "the West NOT blow up Nordstream".
| mcguire wrote:
| "We cannot disprove it. Therefore, it must be true." :-)
| epistasis wrote:
| For that matter, it certainly doesn't exclude the possibility
| that the person posting as molopolo24 was personally
| responsible for the attack!
|
| And now that the possibility has been raised, we must all very
| seriously consider it along with all the other possibilities.
| This is only fair.
| runnerup wrote:
| I mean, I personally think its reasonable that the USA blew
| up the pipeline. Personally I'm at about 75% USA, 20% Russia,
| 5% someone else.
|
| I just _also_ believe that Hersh 's article was really,
| really, incredibly bad.
| kornhole wrote:
| I spent a few days with the chief of special operations of the
| joint chiefs of staff, and he told me many stories of things they
| would do to cover their tracks in special ops. For example, they
| would dismantle an airplane and file off every serial number of
| every part and then put it back together again.
|
| Anyone planning an operation of this scale and significance would
| have thought to ensure the ship had an alibi. Moving the AIS
| transponder to another ship and send it on a tour seems trivially
| easy.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nerdponx wrote:
| The same argument makes it easy to spin tales. "Of course
| there's no evidence, they thought of that."
| mannerheim wrote:
| There's satellite photography and a picture by a photographer
| of the ship in question too.
| tptacek wrote:
| Well, but, how hard could it be for the world's best
| resourced intelligence agencies to fake that data? Come on,
| man.
| linksnapzz wrote:
| So, does Oliver cash the CIA/NED checks himself, or are they
| slipping him cash?
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| [flagged]
| nerdponx wrote:
| For those lacking context, like me:
|
| > Seymour Hersh's recent Substack post claims to provide a highly
| detailed account of a covert US operation to destroy the Nord
| Stream pipelines in order to ensure that Russia would be unable
| to supply Germany with natural gas through them. All the
| information in Hersh's post reportedly comes from a single
| unnamed source, who appears to have had direct access to every
| step of the planning and execution of this highly secretive
| operation.
|
| https://oalexanderdk.substack.com/p/blowing-holes-in-seymour...
|
| This is an impressively thorough debunking.
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