who could’ve seen this coming
Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the U.S. military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award.
Hersh has accused the Obama administration of lying about the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden and disputed the claim that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the Syrian Civil War. Both assertions have stirred controversy.
Damn so this shit ain’t new to him. Some are critical of him for citing anonymous sources which included me, which is why I searched him up in the first place
The points in favor of trusting the source here are:
- Tons of circumstantial evidence pointing in the same direction
- The significant history of the journalist breaking/reporting on similar stories
- It’s presumably someone inside the U.S. government being critical of it, meaning less incentive to make up this kind of story
Democrats will reject the story for obvious reasons. The Republicans, however, will reject the story because the source said of Biden “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”
I mean it really does take balls to point a proverbial shotgun at your foot and pull your finger
I still have a step 0 objection to the chemical weapon theory. Why bother with chemical weapons? They’re a pain in the ass and they’ll make everyone mad at you. Just use HE or incendiaries. It’s like deciding to insult someone by shooting their mother instead of just flipping them off. Same result but why give yourself the extra grief?
And then Assad immediately complies with demands to turn over any and all remaining gas in the country anyway, so it must not have even been militarily important if he was willing to use it once to kill some civvies then turn around and immediately dismantle it all.
“Seymour Hersh? Isn’t he that whack job who was [right about literally every word he has ever published]?”
Fantastic read, too detailed and too plausible to be fiction. Of course everyone here knows it was the US, but it’s good to have confirmation. I am sure this little piece of information will “die in darkness”
It’s not proof at all. It’s credible because it adds a nice story to the only realistic explanation for what happened. Even if it’s totally made up and the “real story” came out twenty years from now whatever the real story is would be pretty much the same because… this is basically what must have happened because the US government and military are pretty much the only ones who would want to do this and would be able to do this.
The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight.
Lol so congress knows the US has a school for elite military divers that not even spec ops get to attend, and they don’t say “hey how come normal soldiers are getting such advanced training?” Something tells me congress is looking the other way to allow covert operations to occur with official deniability
It’s really funny how liberals insists that bureaucratic rituals must be performed flawlessly, yet they are completely fine with rendering the rituals materially pointless by rules-lawyering. If they don’t want to tell politicians about their shady operations they could just not have told them. But no, that would have been against the rules. Doing it this way is completely legit though.
I imagine every government is like this to create a paper trail. Plus some of these ghouls are unable to sleep at night unless they believe they’re not ghouls by respecting da rulez
All this paper-thin plausible deniability shit comes up constantly and they use it to shield each other from consequences. Reagan says he didn’t know about Iran Contra. Bush says he has a memo that lets him violate US law, the UCMJ, international law, and every other law and torture people because a lawyer wrote “torture is not torture” on a napkin.
Obama can hunt down and assassinate US citizens but citizens can’t sue to keep him from assassinating them because his orders are all secret so they’re not allowed to see them so they can’t prove that he’s using the sceret orders to illegally murder him, and since they can’t prove it the courts are helpless, and it just goes around in circles. It’s all bullshit, it’s all makebelieve. Power does what it wants and there are no consequences.
This also explains Trump and Biden announcing plans and shit publicly, apparently if you that you can bypass congress and the “gang of eight” lmao.
Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”
The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it—but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”
Yah JSOC and Delta Force specifically are basically a black hole that sucks in money and spits out drug and human trafficking
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fort-bragg-murders-1153405/
It’s probably a bit of both. There are a huge number of wacky hyper-specialized military units in case you need to erect a portable missile launcher in Antarctica or need someone who is specialized in assassinating whales using kung fu or something. And using utterly transparent bullshit like “Well technically the president said this even if no one knew what he meant so that means this law technically doesn’t apply so when this all comes out ten years, millions of deaths, and trillions of dollars later we’re going to technically walk out of the court house and in to cushy consulting jobs.”
When Reagan did it the line was “What did he know and when did he know it” and the response was “I do not remember at this time” and there were basically no consequences for Iran Contra, where the president literally did literal treason literally.
There were also shades of it during the Clinton “I fucked my intern” scandal where the line “it depends on what your definition of “is” is” was uttered.
It’s all bullshit. The law is whatever they need it to be at the moment and people only get in trouble if they piss off too many of the wrong people or they’re selected as the disposable cut-out.
Like the president of the US launched a covert first-strike AGAINST NATO without congressional knowledge or approval and no one cares and nothing is going to come of it.
This is the dude that broke the My Lai massacre story? Seems legit.
What the fuck how has he not been suicided yet
Edit: not that I want this to happen to our guy here, hope that’s clear in context
Character assassination is so much easier, most of his reporting in the last decade is seen as crackpot Russia-backed conspiracies so he’s not seen as a reputable journalist as much these days despite being proven consistently right in his reporting for 40 years
