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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

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.

mannerheim 4y ago
There's satellite photography and a picture by a photographer of the ship in question too.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Well, but, how hard could it be for the world's best resourced intelligence agencies to fake that data? Come on, man.
tptacek 4y ago
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 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  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.
  - dralley 4y ago
    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.
    - honkler 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - joshsyn 4y ago
        [dead]
      - pvg 4y ago
        Hersh stopped working within journalistic organizations, with their editors, fact-checkers, second-sourcing, etc - the organizations in which all his previous and more credible and verifiable work was done. That's a concrete fact, not 'tribalistic bias'. There's no basis whatsoever for you to attribute skepticism of recent Hersh to it, it's just namecalling.
nerdponx 4y ago
The same argument makes it easy to spin tales. "Of course there's no evidence, they thought of that."

mannerheim 4y ago

There's satellite photography and a picture by a photographer of the ship in question too.

tptacek 4y ago
Well, but, how hard could it be for the world's best resourced intelligence agencies to fake that data? Come on, man.

tptacek 4y ago

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 4y ago
[deleted]
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
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.
- dralley 4y ago
  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.
  - honkler 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - joshsyn 4y ago
      [dead]
    - pvg 4y ago
      Hersh stopped working within journalistic organizations, with their editors, fact-checkers, second-sourcing, etc - the organizations in which all his previous and more credible and verifiable work was done. That's a concrete fact, not 'tribalistic bias'. There's no basis whatsoever for you to attribute skepticism of recent Hersh to it, it's just namecalling.

nerdponx 4y ago

The same argument makes it easy to spin tales. "Of course there's no evidence, they thought of that."