9 ms·

Seymour Hersh has decades of credibility from reporting the My Lai Massacre to the abuses at Abu Graib. But he does often rely on sources who remain anonymous:

by drewda 4y ago

Seymour Hersh has decades of credibility from reporting the My Lai Massacre to the abuses at Abu Graib. But he does often rely on sources who remain anonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Use_of_anonymous_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Use_of_anonymous... I did find it interesting in that Wikipedia article to read that The New Yorker's editor insists on knowing the identify of all of the anonymous sources that Hersh has used when his reporting is published in that magazine. That suggests to me that while Hersh can probably be generally trusted, his work is of a higher quality when it's published in an outlet like The New Yorker, as the editor-in-chief and other staff submit it to a more rigorous internal discussion. That's in comparison to probably no internal review or discussion by Substack.

btown 4y ago
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi... goes over how his more recent work verges on conspiracy theory. That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story purportedly relied on two distinct sources, and yet his Nord Stream story purportedly relies on only a single anonymous source, should be a significant red flag here. I have no reason to doubt that Hersh heard the quotes in his Nord Stream story from at least someone in government, but that source's motivations and truthfulness were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting.
- ccn0p 4y ago
  [flagged]
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting since by his own admission, [what you said], that is credible reporting. it might not be a credible source or story
  - evrydayhustling 4y ago
    No, credible reporting includes verifying what sources say. Hersh is transparent about not verifying, but he continues to present their statements as fact. That's not dishonest, but it's not a standard of reporting anyone should accept.
  - btown 4y ago
    I have to disagree. The very first line in https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp is "verify information before releasing it." Disclosing that there is only one source is a first step, but an insufficient one. And the tone of the article, from the headline onward, reports not only that "a source said X" but presents "X" as factual. That's simply not a credible practice.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      you're suggesting that the ethics code requires you to state how many sources you verified with, and the number Hersh reported is too small a number. (you're going to deny you suggested that, but just keep reading, there's a point here) I suggest that the ethics code says don't report facts as facts that you haven't verified as facts, but if you say "I could not verified this and I heard it from one source" you are within the code. "Sources in the Administration" often report things to reporters, and most of what they say can't be verified, it can only be echoed by more than one person. And if a reporter has a relationship with one leaker who has been reliable, you're claiming they can't use that, and I'm claiming they can and do. Sure, verify what you can, but being an honest reporter is what is required, not certain fact patterns. Yes, in a deep dive publication like the New Yorker, they will often kill certain facts or an entire story if it cannot be corroborated, but that doesn't define journalism.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Can you name a single news org or reporter who does not engage in that practice?
      - brianwawok 4y ago
- GAN_Game 4y ago
  > That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story Worth noting that both the White House and the New York Times walked back inconsistent claims they made in the days after bin Laden's death. So the White House and Times were self-admittedly inconsistent about it. If Hersh is inconsistent it is in that light. Hersh pokes holes in different points of the official narrative. Particularly the idea no one high up in the Pakistani government knew bin Laden was in the compound. Contradicting the White House, but very convincing to me and others. However, to be fair to you, Hersh goes into a great deal of detail about the initial intelligence, the raid etc. Was any part of that wrong or inconsistent? It's hard to know. He didn't just make a few statements but went into a lot of detail. So there could theoretically be inconsistencies in Hersh's reporting about it too, since he covered so much ground. It is hard to know though. You just take what the White House said, what Hersh says, what the Pakistani press says and try to figure out what actually happened.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Thanks for that angle. The desire to repeat ones brightest hour can certainly be a strong force and might lead even the most careful astray when a big scoop like Abu Graib makes all further successes seem trivial. I'm not suggesting that he personally made it up, but his desire to believe could be spectacularly strong, turning him into an instrument that is easy to play by people with an agenda. But I'm biased as well, my desire to believe is strong, only that I'm in team "'t was an inside job" so my bias is in clear opposition of these claims (but in limited to speculation, I find "Russia jumped from excuse to excuse to keep the pipelines closed anyways, so the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow who felt threatened by some real or imagined "make money not war" faction" logically compelling, but that's all there is, I guess, strongly, but can't claim to know)
  - VagueMag 4y ago
    > the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow Come on now. I get the desire for people to believe their own government could just never possibly engage in this kind of skullduggery (at least, not until they're comfortably removed from the incident in question by many decades and can safely file it under "well we don't do that kind of thing anymore"), but the idea that the Russians were the only ones with motive?!
    - usrusr 4y ago
      Given the circumstances, which were Russia refusing to send meaningful amounts down those pipes anyways, yes. Next best candidate would be some rogue group refusing to accept that all their preparations were made pointless for the time being.
- kubectl_h 4y ago
  Did you see Zero Dark Thirty? If so, do you trust it to be accurate?
  - smsm42 4y ago
    Does Zero Dark Thirty claims to be a factual description of the events, or a work of fiction?
    - kubectl_h 4y ago
      It is a dramatization of the hunt for OBL. It elides names, sources and methods for obvious reasons. The larger shape of the story aligns without how the administration and CIA claim the search and assassination of OBL played out. It is alleged that the CIA cooperated heavily with the filmmakers. This would make sense given the amount of torture apologia that is in the movie.
      - smsm42 4y ago
        > It is alleged that the CIA cooperated heavily with the filmmakers. I'm sure if they did, that was with the sole purpose of ensuring maximum factual accuracy, and no other purpose whatsoever.
tootie 4y ago
It's unfortunate, but Sy Hersh has kinda flown the coop in the last 10 years. He egged on the Seth Rich conspiracy and tried to deny the US killed bin Laden. The New Yorker has basically disowned him and he hasn't had a byline in many years.
- kraussvonespy 4y ago
  Too bad the New Yorker abandoned him. If your writing makes it past the editors, fact checkers and attorneys at that mag, you're probably golden. The effort they spent on Lawrence Wright's Scientology article was pretty hardcore: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133561256 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133561256
  - tootie 4y ago
    They explicitly dumped him because his reporting could not be validated and he insisted on publishing anyway. https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/the-new-yorker-passed-on-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-206933 https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/the-new-yorker-...
- GAN_Game 4y ago
  > tried to deny the US killed bin Laden If he denied the US killed bin Laden he would be unreliable. He never denied the US killed bin Laden. You saying he said that is what is unreliable. He said that some of the White House and Pentagon assertions about bin Laden, which the New York Times did not question in the days after (but did question, to some extent, later on) were not accurate. Particularly that no one high up in the Pakistani Army, government or intelligence knew Bin Laden was in Abbottabad. Hersh asserted that was incorrect, as were some other things.
  - jessaustin 4y ago
    The alleged "compound" of bin Laden was located less than a mile from PMA Kakul [0]. So there was at least one odd thing about this event: would we expect that the world's most wanted terrorist could live across the street from USMA West Point for five years, without the government knowing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden%27s_compound_in_Abbottabad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden%27s_compound_i...
Lazare 4y ago
Seymour Hersh has had a long and storied career, and he has made some very bold claims that later turned out to be correct. He's also, especially recently, made some very bold claims that so far have not turned out to be correct, whether because the truth just hasn't been revealed yet, or because Hersh was wrong or misled by his sources. It's also worth noting that Hersh - as with any journalist - is only as good as his sources. If people choose to leak juicy secrets to him (not implausible!) he may end up publishing accurate stories that reveal nefarious conspiracies (which has happened). If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead. And as he keeps publishing, the odds that this will happen (if it hasn't already) keep increasing. So I absolutely wouldn't write off any claim Hersh makes, but I wouldn't blindly believe it either. And here he is relying, by his own admission, almost entirely on a single anonymous source, giving details that can't really be independently confirmed. Was Hersh told by someone that the US took out the pipeline? Probably! Does that mean the US did so? I'm not sure I'd seriously update my priors based on this.
- jonstewart 4y ago
  The thing that a good journalist would do is be skeptical of his crank sources and try to confirm them with reputable sources and evidence. He does neither. But a broken clock is right twice a day and a bad journalist can break two big stories in a career of publishing lies.
  - beaned 4y ago
    How can you call his sources crank without knowing who they are yourself?
    - tazjin 4y ago
      Easy - they reported things that don't fit into this person's worldview.
    - camgunz 4y ago
      Because if the best you can do as a whistleblower is to give anonymous info to an independent reporter who won't verify it, you're probably on the crank side of things.
slantedview 4y ago
Biden stated last year: "If Russia invades [Ukraine] there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." [1] This was a clear threat, clear as day, that the US could destroy Nordstream. It should surprise nobody that the US was involved. Since Nordstream was destroyed amidst public pressure from US energy companies who wanted to takeover the European energy market, the US has become the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas, Europeans are paying record natural gas prices, and US energy companies are reporting record profits. Again, the relationship between these things should surprise nobody. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/08/bidens-big-nord-stream-2-pledge-provides-major-test-after-unfulfilled-promises/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/08/bidens-bi...
- arisAlexis 4y ago
  actually gas prices in Europe are lower than just before the invasion and in any case the provider of Nord Stream is blackmailing with nukes. Finally, threatening does not lead to proof. Maybe yes, maybe not.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  It’s not out of the realm of possibility but that statement is hardly an admission of future sabotage. I would imagine the US has more tools than deep sea bombing to convince their allies. Very high risk operation
  - slantedview 4y ago
    Sure, a threat is not an admission of guilt. But I think most people were unaware of this statement, and how aggressive the US' posture towards the pipeline was, which is important context for this article.
    - coffeebeqn 4y ago
      They must have not been paying attention. Trump was very vocal against it and was laughed at by the genius German technocrats. The Obama admin was also against it
mannerheim 4y ago
I know nothing of him, but given that there's an entire paragraph about Jens Stoltenberg where almost every sentence is just completely factually wrong in a way that could be verified to be wrong with a look at the first paragraph on his Wikipedia page, I'm not inclined to take what he says seriously. I mean, par for the course for modern journalism, I suppose.
- redbar0n 4y ago
  > "Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg ... He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War." During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Stoltenberg (born 1959) was -4 to 16 years old.. Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980. Links/sources follow: «Thorvald Stoltenberg and Reiulf Steen visited Hanoi in 1970.» https://vietnamkrigen-wordpress-com.translate.goog/2010/02/22/stoltenberg-steen-propagandabesøk/ https://vietnamkrigen-wordpress-com.translate.goog/2010/02/2... «In a new biography of Thorvald Stoltenberg, it is described how Norway brokered peace between the parties in the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s.» https://www-vg-no.translate.goog/nyheter/innenriks/i/Pk947/norge-meglet-under-vietnamkrigen https://www-vg-no.translate.goog/nyheter/innenriks/i/Pk947/n... «Defense Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg was praised for his negotiating skills in a so far classified CIA report from 1980.« https://www-nettavisen-no.translate.goog/nyheter/cia-vurderte-norske-politikere-i-hemmelig-rapport/s/12-95-5240140 https://www-nettavisen-no.translate.goog/nyheter/cia-vurdert...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jessaustin 4y ago
  Yeah, the idea that he was involved in the American war in Vietnam seems far-fetched. Perhaps this is a confusion with some other, older Stoltenberg?
  - redbar0n 4y ago
baybal2 4y ago
And he also claimed that Moraji Desai was... an American spy. The guy is obviously picks up lobby chatter, and lets his imagination to run. My Lai was never a giant secret, he was just the first to bring it to the wider audience.
boplicity 4y ago
What makes you think this was even written by Seymour Hersh?
- nkurz 4y ago
  In the first few hours after publication, that would be a reasonable question. But since it's been a full day, and Seymour Hersh hasn't stepped in to say "Hey, that's not me", at this point it's quite reasonable to believe that he wrote it. It seems unlikely that the piece generated a full Whitehouse response but somehow Seymour, his agent, his publisher, or any of his close friends haven't yet issued a denial of authorship. Not impossible, but not the way I'd bet.
- newsclues 4y ago
  matt taibbi confirmed it on twitter.
jonstewart 4y ago
He has decades of renown from his My Lai reporting, and he renewed it with Abu Ghraib. However, substantially everything he's ever written uses anonymous sourcing to tell a story of intrigue and conspiracy... and only those two stores amounted to anything. There's a reason he's publishing this on Substack: nobody reputable will publish him anymore.
miguelazo 4y ago
I imagine there are very good reasons why he can’t trust the editors of certain publications for certain stories. Many of them are among the “power elite” who collaborate with the security state, whether directly or indirectly. There’s a long, storied history of that.
- VagueMag 4y ago
  You're getting downvoted, despite the fact that when he headed the CIA, Allen Dulles used to just call up the editor of the Washington Post to have troublesome reporters fired.
  - miguelazo 4y ago
    That is exactly right, and nothing has changed— the CIA still has plenty of influence over WaPo, NYT, etc. I would say it’s perhaps slightly less direct now, but even worse because they have such a large network of think tanks and cutouts to shape the narrative. Remember when CBS news had that 60 Minutes piece last year about how most US arms and supplies were not actually getting to the front in Ukraine? How long did it take for them to “partially” retract it for some embarrassingly bogus reason? PS: if you haven’t read “The Devil’s Chessboard” by David Talbot, highly recommend.

by drewda 4y ago

btown 4y ago

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi... goes over how his more recent work verges on conspiracy theory. That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story purportedly relied on two distinct sources, and yet his Nord Stream story purportedly relies on only a single anonymous source, should be a significant red flag here. I have no reason to doubt that Hersh heard the quotes in his Nord Stream story from at least someone in government, but that source's motivations and truthfulness were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting.

ccn0p 4y ago
[flagged]
fsckboy 4y ago
> were not independently verified even, by his own admission, by Hersh. And that's just... not credible reporting since by his own admission, [what you said], that is credible reporting. it might not be a credible source or story
- evrydayhustling 4y ago
  No, credible reporting includes verifying what sources say. Hersh is transparent about not verifying, but he continues to present their statements as fact. That's not dishonest, but it's not a standard of reporting anyone should accept.
- btown 4y ago
  I have to disagree. The very first line in https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp is "verify information before releasing it." Disclosing that there is only one source is a first step, but an insufficient one. And the tone of the article, from the headline onward, reports not only that "a source said X" but presents "X" as factual. That's simply not a credible practice.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    you're suggesting that the ethics code requires you to state how many sources you verified with, and the number Hersh reported is too small a number. (you're going to deny you suggested that, but just keep reading, there's a point here) I suggest that the ethics code says don't report facts as facts that you haven't verified as facts, but if you say "I could not verified this and I heard it from one source" you are within the code. "Sources in the Administration" often report things to reporters, and most of what they say can't be verified, it can only be echoed by more than one person. And if a reporter has a relationship with one leaker who has been reliable, you're claiming they can't use that, and I'm claiming they can and do. Sure, verify what you can, but being an honest reporter is what is required, not certain fact patterns. Yes, in a deep dive publication like the New Yorker, they will often kill certain facts or an entire story if it cannot be corroborated, but that doesn't define journalism.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Can you name a single news org or reporter who does not engage in that practice?
    - brianwawok 4y ago
GAN_Game 4y ago
> That even that inconsistent Bin Laden story Worth noting that both the White House and the New York Times walked back inconsistent claims they made in the days after bin Laden's death. So the White House and Times were self-admittedly inconsistent about it. If Hersh is inconsistent it is in that light. Hersh pokes holes in different points of the official narrative. Particularly the idea no one high up in the Pakistani government knew bin Laden was in the compound. Contradicting the White House, but very convincing to me and others. However, to be fair to you, Hersh goes into a great deal of detail about the initial intelligence, the raid etc. Was any part of that wrong or inconsistent? It's hard to know. He didn't just make a few statements but went into a lot of detail. So there could theoretically be inconsistencies in Hersh's reporting about it too, since he covered so much ground. It is hard to know though. You just take what the White House said, what Hersh says, what the Pakistani press says and try to figure out what actually happened.
usrusr 4y ago
Thanks for that angle. The desire to repeat ones brightest hour can certainly be a strong force and might lead even the most careful astray when a big scoop like Abu Graib makes all further successes seem trivial. I'm not suggesting that he personally made it up, but his desire to believe could be spectacularly strong, turning him into an instrument that is easy to play by people with an agenda. But I'm biased as well, my desire to believe is strong, only that I'm in team "'t was an inside job" so my bias is in clear opposition of these claims (but in limited to speculation, I find "Russia jumped from excuse to excuse to keep the pipelines closed anyways, so the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow who felt threatened by some real or imagined "make money not war" faction" logically compelling, but that's all there is, I guess, strongly, but can't claim to know)
- VagueMag 4y ago
  > the only immediate winners of the explosions were people in Moscow Come on now. I get the desire for people to believe their own government could just never possibly engage in this kind of skullduggery (at least, not until they're comfortably removed from the incident in question by many decades and can safely file it under "well we don't do that kind of thing anymore"), but the idea that the Russians were the only ones with motive?!
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Given the circumstances, which were Russia refusing to send meaningful amounts down those pipes anyways, yes. Next best candidate would be some rogue group refusing to accept that all their preparations were made pointless for the time being.
kubectl_h 4y ago
Did you see Zero Dark Thirty? If so, do you trust it to be accurate?
- smsm42 4y ago
  Does Zero Dark Thirty claims to be a factual description of the events, or a work of fiction?
  - kubectl_h 4y ago
    It is a dramatization of the hunt for OBL. It elides names, sources and methods for obvious reasons. The larger shape of the story aligns without how the administration and CIA claim the search and assassination of OBL played out. It is alleged that the CIA cooperated heavily with the filmmakers. This would make sense given the amount of torture apologia that is in the movie.
    - smsm42 4y ago
      > It is alleged that the CIA cooperated heavily with the filmmakers. I'm sure if they did, that was with the sole purpose of ensuring maximum factual accuracy, and no other purpose whatsoever.

tootie 4y ago

It's unfortunate, but Sy Hersh has kinda flown the coop in the last 10 years. He egged on the Seth Rich conspiracy and tried to deny the US killed bin Laden. The New Yorker has basically disowned him and he hasn't had a byline in many years.

kraussvonespy 4y ago
Too bad the New Yorker abandoned him. If your writing makes it past the editors, fact checkers and attorneys at that mag, you're probably golden. The effort they spent on Lawrence Wright's Scientology article was pretty hardcore: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133561256 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/133561256
- tootie 4y ago
  They explicitly dumped him because his reporting could not be validated and he insisted on publishing anyway. https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/the-new-yorker-passed-on-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-206933 https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/the-new-yorker-...
GAN_Game 4y ago
> tried to deny the US killed bin Laden If he denied the US killed bin Laden he would be unreliable. He never denied the US killed bin Laden. You saying he said that is what is unreliable. He said that some of the White House and Pentagon assertions about bin Laden, which the New York Times did not question in the days after (but did question, to some extent, later on) were not accurate. Particularly that no one high up in the Pakistani Army, government or intelligence knew Bin Laden was in Abbottabad. Hersh asserted that was incorrect, as were some other things.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  The alleged "compound" of bin Laden was located less than a mile from PMA Kakul [0]. So there was at least one odd thing about this event: would we expect that the world's most wanted terrorist could live across the street from USMA West Point for five years, without the government knowing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden%27s_compound_in_Abbottabad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden%27s_compound_i...

Lazare 4y ago

Seymour Hersh has had a long and storied career, and he has made some very bold claims that later turned out to be correct. He's also, especially recently, made some very bold claims that so far have not turned out to be correct, whether because the truth just hasn't been revealed yet, or because Hersh was wrong or misled by his sources. It's also worth noting that Hersh - as with any journalist - is only as good as his sources. If people choose to leak juicy secrets to him (not implausible!) he may end up publishing accurate stories that reveal nefarious conspiracies (which has happened). If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead. And as he keeps publishing, the odds that this will happen (if it hasn't already) keep increasing. So I absolutely wouldn't write off any claim Hersh makes, but I wouldn't blindly believe it either. And here he is relying, by his own admission, almost entirely on a single anonymous source, giving details that can't really be independently confirmed. Was Hersh told by someone that the US took out the pipeline? Probably! Does that mean the US did so? I'm not sure I'd seriously update my priors based on this.

jonstewart 4y ago
The thing that a good journalist would do is be skeptical of his crank sources and try to confirm them with reputable sources and evidence. He does neither. But a broken clock is right twice a day and a bad journalist can break two big stories in a career of publishing lies.
- beaned 4y ago
  How can you call his sources crank without knowing who they are yourself?
  - tazjin 4y ago
    Easy - they reported things that don't fit into this person's worldview.
  - camgunz 4y ago
    Because if the best you can do as a whistleblower is to give anonymous info to an independent reporter who won't verify it, you're probably on the crank side of things.

slantedview 4y ago

Biden stated last year: "If Russia invades [Ukraine] there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." [1] This was a clear threat, clear as day, that the US could destroy Nordstream. It should surprise nobody that the US was involved. Since Nordstream was destroyed amidst public pressure from US energy companies who wanted to takeover the European energy market, the US has become the world's leading exporter of liquid natural gas, Europeans are paying record natural gas prices, and US energy companies are reporting record profits. Again, the relationship between these things should surprise nobody. 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/08/bidens-big-nord-stream-2-pledge-provides-major-test-after-unfulfilled-promises/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/08/bidens-bi...

arisAlexis 4y ago
actually gas prices in Europe are lower than just before the invasion and in any case the provider of Nord Stream is blackmailing with nukes. Finally, threatening does not lead to proof. Maybe yes, maybe not.
coffeebeqn 4y ago
It’s not out of the realm of possibility but that statement is hardly an admission of future sabotage. I would imagine the US has more tools than deep sea bombing to convince their allies. Very high risk operation
- slantedview 4y ago
  Sure, a threat is not an admission of guilt. But I think most people were unaware of this statement, and how aggressive the US' posture towards the pipeline was, which is important context for this article.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    They must have not been paying attention. Trump was very vocal against it and was laughed at by the genius German technocrats. The Obama admin was also against it

mannerheim 4y ago

I know nothing of him, but given that there's an entire paragraph about Jens Stoltenberg where almost every sentence is just completely factually wrong in a way that could be verified to be wrong with a look at the first paragraph on his Wikipedia page, I'm not inclined to take what he says seriously. I mean, par for the course for modern journalism, I suppose.

redbar0n 4y ago
> "Today, the supreme commander of NATO is Jens Stoltenberg ... He was a hardliner on all things Putin and Russia who had cooperated with the American intelligence community since the Vietnam War." During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Stoltenberg (born 1959) was -4 to 16 years old.. Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980. Links/sources follow: «Thorvald Stoltenberg and Reiulf Steen visited Hanoi in 1970.» https://vietnamkrigen-wordpress-com.translate.goog/2010/02/22/stoltenberg-steen-propagandabesøk/ https://vietnamkrigen-wordpress-com.translate.goog/2010/02/2... «In a new biography of Thorvald Stoltenberg, it is described how Norway brokered peace between the parties in the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s.» https://www-vg-no.translate.goog/nyheter/innenriks/i/Pk947/norge-meglet-under-vietnamkrigen https://www-vg-no.translate.goog/nyheter/innenriks/i/Pk947/n... «Defense Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg was praised for his negotiating skills in a so far classified CIA report from 1980.« https://www-nettavisen-no.translate.goog/nyheter/cia-vurderte-norske-politikere-i-hemmelig-rapport/s/12-95-5240140 https://www-nettavisen-no.translate.goog/nyheter/cia-vurdert...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jessaustin 4y ago
Yeah, the idea that he was involved in the American war in Vietnam seems far-fetched. Perhaps this is a confusion with some other, older Stoltenberg?
- redbar0n 4y ago

baybal2 4y ago

And he also claimed that Moraji Desai was... an American spy. The guy is obviously picks up lobby chatter, and lets his imagination to run. My Lai was never a giant secret, he was just the first to bring it to the wider audience.

boplicity 4y ago

What makes you think this was even written by Seymour Hersh?

nkurz 4y ago
In the first few hours after publication, that would be a reasonable question. But since it's been a full day, and Seymour Hersh hasn't stepped in to say "Hey, that's not me", at this point it's quite reasonable to believe that he wrote it. It seems unlikely that the piece generated a full Whitehouse response but somehow Seymour, his agent, his publisher, or any of his close friends haven't yet issued a denial of authorship. Not impossible, but not the way I'd bet.
newsclues 4y ago
matt taibbi confirmed it on twitter.

jonstewart 4y ago

He has decades of renown from his My Lai reporting, and he renewed it with Abu Ghraib. However, substantially everything he's ever written uses anonymous sourcing to tell a story of intrigue and conspiracy... and only those two stores amounted to anything. There's a reason he's publishing this on Substack: nobody reputable will publish him anymore.

miguelazo 4y ago

I imagine there are very good reasons why he can’t trust the editors of certain publications for certain stories. Many of them are among the “power elite” who collaborate with the security state, whether directly or indirectly. There’s a long, storied history of that.

VagueMag 4y ago
You're getting downvoted, despite the fact that when he headed the CIA, Allen Dulles used to just call up the editor of the Washington Post to have troublesome reporters fired.
- miguelazo 4y ago
  That is exactly right, and nothing has changed— the CIA still has plenty of influence over WaPo, NYT, etc. I would say it’s perhaps slightly less direct now, but even worse because they have such a large network of think tanks and cutouts to shape the narrative. Remember when CBS news had that 60 Minutes piece last year about how most US arms and supplies were not actually getting to the front in Ukraine? How long did it take for them to “partially” retract it for some embarrassingly bogus reason? PS: if you haven’t read “The Devil’s Chessboard” by David Talbot, highly recommend.