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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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For a story based on a single source, it's weirdly detailed - technical aspects of the bomb, with informative anecdotes about the White House, Navy, the Norwegian Secret Service and Navy, CIA, State Department, NSA, Air Force ... for such a secret operation, all known to one person?

Hersh is a well-known investigative journalist, "exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting", "covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia". But more recently "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", and "U.S. Defense Department spokesman Bryan G. Whitman said, "This reporter has a solid and well-earned reputation for making dramatic assertions based on thinly sourced, unverifiable anonymous sources." ... Slate magazine's James Kirchick wrote, "Readers are expected to believe that the story of the Bin Laden assassination is a giant ‘fairy tale’ on the word of a single, unnamed source... Hersh's problem is that he evinces no skepticism whatsoever toward what his crank sources tell him, which is ironic considering how cynical he is regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy."[26][76]". The wiki article has detail on many questionable claims.

Maybe if he'd managed to confirm parts of the source's story, but eh. The piece could've anticipated objections like 'one anonymous source with no other evidence', or more generally tried to convince instead of just providing novel-style narrative, but didn't. There's plenty of information in the article not from the source, but removed from the narrative it's just 'regular military exercises', 'military bases existing', 'media is unsure why explosions happened'. It's not implausible the US blew it up IMO, but this isn't convincing.

But more recently "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"

Is the intended message that both of those are so obviously false that it's not even necessary to say out loud that you believe them to be, let alone to argue for it?

U.S. Defense Department spokesman Bryan G. Whitman said

I don't think much information is added by quoting a spokesman for $organisation saying that someone who accused $organisation of malfeasance is wrong.

Of course, the question is (especially considering the Slate quote) what sort of secondary source would in fact be informative regarding his trustworthiness, or more generally how to evaluate claims that amount to "the sources you currently use to evaluate claims are untrustworthy". Trusting a particular set of sources shouldn't be an epistemic black hole.

Is the intended message that both of those are so obviously false that it's not even necessary to say out loud that you believe them to be, let alone to argue for it?

I don't really know what he said about Assad but his claims about Bin Laden were pretty out-there as I recall. Things like the raid on Abbottabad being completely staged, and how the Bush administration had actually known where Bin Laden was since 2006 but instead of going after him, they had instead paid the Pakistani government to apprehend him on their behalf.

Is the intended message that both of those are so obviously false that it's not even necessary to say out loud that you believe them to be, let alone to argue for it?

Seriously -- I'd put ~90% odds that the public story on the death of OBL was significantly manipulated from true events, and "USA uses misinformation about chemical weapons as a casus bellum" is... not exactly unprecedented.

I don't know enough about what Hersh said on either of these cases to form an opinion as to the accuracy of his reporting, but this argument sounds too much like "fall in line, peons" for it to erode his credibility on the NS issue.

The vox article linked below points out many specific holes in Hersh's OBL claims, which hold even if you significantly doubt the public story.

The intended message is that he has a recent history of making controversial claims based on single sources that haven't been confirmed since, and has a reputation of unreliability.

After making that comment, I read more about him - this article pretty convincingly makes the case he's unreliable.

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