4 ms·

Reporting like this is so unconvincing because all the sources are anonymous and there is no way to corroborate the assertions of the reporter. It's as though h

by slr555 11y ago

Reporting like this is so unconvincing because all the sources are anonymous and there is no way to corroborate the assertions of the reporter. It's as though he asking us to accept a story told by the Easter Bunny and confirmed by the Tooth Fairy. The explanation of why all the subterfuge is necessary is quite unconvincing. If you consider each of the reasons separately they make little sense. Given that the US SpecOps community is nearly completely Republican in its sympathies it makes no sense that this story would go unleaked by those elements. This version of the events also requires a vast conspiracy within the journalist community that has widely reported on the story from the perspective of numerous SEALs. Finally, what of all the injured SEALs on the crashed helo. No medevac, no casevac, no reportage. The US would definitely sacrifice a dozen lives to keep advanced stealth technology out of the hands of other governments. Fails Occam's Razor miserably.

philwelch 11y ago
It's not like the government produced any actual evidence of the official story, either. I don't think anyone knows for sure what happened.
- ted5555 11y ago
  Yes but 60 minutes put on Mark Owen/Matt Bissonette and his story cleared their fact check in which is quite rigorous. He talks openly about others killed in the compound, chopper crash etc. He has been quite vocal in criticizing some accounts that differ from his in minute ways. He did not clear his first book with the military and is still being investigated. Yes, I know the CIA gets paid to lie but nothing in the mainstream (vetted) media supports the LRB story.
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- mikekchar 11y ago
  You can actually see this much more clearly if you live in a non-English speaking country. The journalist community just doesn't seem to fact check very frequently. Many times I see stories being printed about things in Japan which are just wrong. Wire services like Reuters or AP print something and it seems to be taken as gospel. Then other news outlets like BBC seem to run the story without actually checking anything. Quite often it seems to be that the original story just had a bad translation. I've seen Reuters, especially, cock up quotes really badly to the point where a statement like, "We have no option but to continue this policy" would get translated to "We will not continue this policy". However, sometimes this gets blown up to almost fraud levels. A good example of this was a year or so after the big earthquake here I saw a report on BBC that several nuclear reactors were going to be restarted imminently, including the one a couple of km down the road from where I live. As I had seen exactly the opposite statement in the Japanese news, I was curious and rode my bike down to the power station and asked them myself. They told me that there was no way they would be restarting any time soon and that, just the opposite, there was talk of shutting it down permanently. After a few weeks, I saw news that the Japanese government was backing out of their plans to restart the power stations and that this was apparently a big scandal. Except that, of course, it wasn't. The power station was not going to restart. There were never any plans to do so. There was never any backing out and there was never any scandal. Somebody somewhere was obviously covering up for their cock up previously and nobody else bothered to check the sources (or was able to since they didn't speak Japanese). (Just in case anybody is wondering, they are now talking of restarting the power station and will almost certainly do so soon). This kind of thing happens quite a bit more frequently than most people would imagine. Sometimes the error is quite serious. I imagine that it is practically trivial for governments to feed information to journalists and rely on their inability to check facts (for whatever reason). Based on my own experiences, I now personally don't rank the news very much higher in reliability than most other rumours. The more politically charged the topic, the less likely it is to be true, I think.
HillRat 11y ago
Unfortunately, Sy Hersh has built a reputation for both breaking big stories but also getting big claims wrong. Personally, I find his description of his primary source a bit worrying: "(a retired senior intelligence official) ... (knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad) ... (privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid), and (to the various after-action reports)." That's four assertions about his source, and none of them indicate that the source had any official role in the lead up to or the execution of the mission -- or, indeed, that he was even active in the IC at the time. That, plus the source's use of Vietnam-era terminology, suggests he could have started his career in the 1960s or very early 1970s, and thus could be at least five and as much as 10-15 years retired from the IC (assuming he had a full career at the Agency), and relying on contacts still active in the community for his information. The only statement that indicates the source had access to primary-source docs regards the SEALs' AARs, and even then it's impossible to be certain that Hersh's phrasing actually means that. In this, Hersh is starting to remind me of many conservative writers who relied on similar source of often dubious quality -- Michael Ledeen's close connections with SISMI (now AISE) being one example, or the network of former CIA officers who whiled away the post-Stansfield Turner years running private intelligence shops and flowing questionable allegations to the National Review. If Hersh is right -- and "right" in this case, given the explosive nature of his allegations, doesn't even mean in the ballpark, just playing the same game -- then this story is huge, the sort of thing that would forever color Obama's place in history and would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground. But extraordinary claims require &c., and the fact that Hersh had to publish this in the LRB rather than The New Yorker or WaPo (both regular outlets for many of his scoops) indicates that their editors were very uncomfortable with his sourcing as well.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  I read the article, because it's at such variance with the official version. I have no idea how close to reality it is. My gut feeling is that your skepticism is justified. would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground Here we disagree. To put it crudely: NOBODY GIVES A FUCK! Let's look at something IMO much more serious, Hillary's prowess at trading commodities.[1] She supposedly makes a cash deposit of under $1,000 into a trading account, and through a series of quite astute trades walks away with about $100,000 (about $323,000 in today's money) in about ten months, all as part-time activity. As someone summarized it: Only four explanations can account for these remarkable results. 1) Blair may have been an exceptionally good trader. 2) Hillary Clinton may have been exceptionally lucky. 3) Blair may have been front-running other orders. 4) Or Blair may have arranged to have a broker fraudulently assign trades to benefit Clinton's account. Unless she was one of the greatest "amateur" commodities traders of all time, this was nothing more than a bribe to the Governor and First Lady of Arkansas. But, like I said, NOBODY GIVES A FUCK. As Wikipedia put it: "There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_...
neilxdsouza 11y ago
I find it hard to believe, in this version and the official version that Osama was killed and not taken alive. If I was Obama or director of CIA, I would have asked the boys to bring him in alive.
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LordHumungous 11y ago
The source is obviously Robert Gates.
- josephpmay 11y ago
  I think that's one of the only possible sources if this is actually legitimate.
somedangedname 11y ago
What's really unconvincing is the 422 day gap in your commenting history. Any reason why you chose today to start talking again? ;)

by slr555 11y ago

philwelch 11y ago

It's not like the government produced any actual evidence of the official story, either. I don't think anyone knows for sure what happened.

ted5555 11y ago
Yes but 60 minutes put on Mark Owen/Matt Bissonette and his story cleared their fact check in which is quite rigorous. He talks openly about others killed in the compound, chopper crash etc. He has been quite vocal in criticizing some accounts that differ from his in minute ways. He did not clear his first book with the military and is still being investigated. Yes, I know the CIA gets paid to lie but nothing in the mainstream (vetted) media supports the LRB story.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 11y ago

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mikekchar 11y ago
You can actually see this much more clearly if you live in a non-English speaking country. The journalist community just doesn't seem to fact check very frequently. Many times I see stories being printed about things in Japan which are just wrong. Wire services like Reuters or AP print something and it seems to be taken as gospel. Then other news outlets like BBC seem to run the story without actually checking anything. Quite often it seems to be that the original story just had a bad translation. I've seen Reuters, especially, cock up quotes really badly to the point where a statement like, "We have no option but to continue this policy" would get translated to "We will not continue this policy". However, sometimes this gets blown up to almost fraud levels. A good example of this was a year or so after the big earthquake here I saw a report on BBC that several nuclear reactors were going to be restarted imminently, including the one a couple of km down the road from where I live. As I had seen exactly the opposite statement in the Japanese news, I was curious and rode my bike down to the power station and asked them myself. They told me that there was no way they would be restarting any time soon and that, just the opposite, there was talk of shutting it down permanently. After a few weeks, I saw news that the Japanese government was backing out of their plans to restart the power stations and that this was apparently a big scandal. Except that, of course, it wasn't. The power station was not going to restart. There were never any plans to do so. There was never any backing out and there was never any scandal. Somebody somewhere was obviously covering up for their cock up previously and nobody else bothered to check the sources (or was able to since they didn't speak Japanese). (Just in case anybody is wondering, they are now talking of restarting the power station and will almost certainly do so soon). This kind of thing happens quite a bit more frequently than most people would imagine. Sometimes the error is quite serious. I imagine that it is practically trivial for governments to feed information to journalists and rely on their inability to check facts (for whatever reason). Based on my own experiences, I now personally don't rank the news very much higher in reliability than most other rumours. The more politically charged the topic, the less likely it is to be true, I think.

HillRat 11y ago

Unfortunately, Sy Hersh has built a reputation for both breaking big stories but also getting big claims wrong. Personally, I find his description of his primary source a bit worrying: "(a retired senior intelligence official) ... (knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad) ... (privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid), and (to the various after-action reports)." That's four assertions about his source, and none of them indicate that the source had any official role in the lead up to or the execution of the mission -- or, indeed, that he was even active in the IC at the time. That, plus the source's use of Vietnam-era terminology, suggests he could have started his career in the 1960s or very early 1970s, and thus could be at least five and as much as 10-15 years retired from the IC (assuming he had a full career at the Agency), and relying on contacts still active in the community for his information. The only statement that indicates the source had access to primary-source docs regards the SEALs' AARs, and even then it's impossible to be certain that Hersh's phrasing actually means that. In this, Hersh is starting to remind me of many conservative writers who relied on similar source of often dubious quality -- Michael Ledeen's close connections with SISMI (now AISE) being one example, or the network of former CIA officers who whiled away the post-Stansfield Turner years running private intelligence shops and flowing questionable allegations to the National Review. If Hersh is right -- and "right" in this case, given the explosive nature of his allegations, doesn't even mean in the ballpark, just playing the same game -- then this story is huge, the sort of thing that would forever color Obama's place in history and would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground. But extraordinary claims require &c., and the fact that Hersh had to publish this in the LRB rather than The New Yorker or WaPo (both regular outlets for many of his scoops) indicates that their editors were very uncomfortable with his sourcing as well.

PhantomGremlin 11y ago
I read the article, because it's at such variance with the official version. I have no idea how close to reality it is. My gut feeling is that your skepticism is justified. would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground Here we disagree. To put it crudely: NOBODY GIVES A FUCK! Let's look at something IMO much more serious, Hillary's prowess at trading commodities.[1] She supposedly makes a cash deposit of under $1,000 into a trading account, and through a series of quite astute trades walks away with about $100,000 (about $323,000 in today's money) in about ten months, all as part-time activity. As someone summarized it: Only four explanations can account for these remarkable results. 1) Blair may have been an exceptionally good trader. 2) Hillary Clinton may have been exceptionally lucky. 3) Blair may have been front-running other orders. 4) Or Blair may have arranged to have a broker fraudulently assign trades to benefit Clinton's account. Unless she was one of the greatest "amateur" commodities traders of all time, this was nothing more than a bribe to the Governor and First Lady of Arkansas. But, like I said, NOBODY GIVES A FUCK. As Wikipedia put it: "There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_...

neilxdsouza 11y ago

I find it hard to believe, in this version and the official version that Osama was killed and not taken alive. If I was Obama or director of CIA, I would have asked the boys to bring him in alive.

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LordHumungous 11y ago

The source is obviously Robert Gates.

josephpmay 11y ago
I think that's one of the only possible sources if this is actually legitimate.

somedangedname 11y ago

What's really unconvincing is the 422 day gap in your commenting history. Any reason why you chose today to start talking again? ;)