He's in "I want corroboration" territory for me. The big scoops - My Lai, Abu Gharaib - were backed up with hard evidence and other organizations confirming the allegations. Stuff like "the US faked Bin Laden's burial and chucked chunks of him into the mountains" have, thus far, not been.
His contention involved the manner in which UBL's location was discovered. The popular narrative is that a courier was tracked with the aid of intelligence gathered during "enhanced interrogation" sessions. Whereas his claim is that an ISI officer walked in and received cash for the information.
> The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed.
> There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.
If this is an accurate summary of what he's claiming, this seems a bit more ridiculous than that:
> The truth, Hersh says, is that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and kept him locked up with support from Saudi Arabia, using him as leverage against al-Qaeda. In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin Laden to the US for increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." Rather than kill him or hand him over discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging an elaborate American "raid" with Pakistani support.
I'm not sure it is more ridiculous. ISI holding him in quasi-house arrest in Abbottabad (home of the Pakistani Military Academy) seems more plausible to me vs. them having no idea he was there and the US finding him as depicted in the propaganda film "Zero Dark Thirty."
Either way, Hersh's story is more than simply 'an ISI officer walked in and received cash for the information', and veers directly into the definition of conspiracy theory territory. Which isn't to say it isn't possible, but many parts just don't make sense:
> And there are more contradictions. Why, for example, would the Pakistanis insist on a fake raid that would humiliate their country and the very military and intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it?
> A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?
> Why not just kill bin Laden, drive his body across the border into Afghanistan, and drop him off with the Americans? Or why not put him in a hut somewhere in Waziristan, blow it up with an F-16, pretend it was a US drone strike, and tell the Americans to go collect the body?
Abu Ghraib happened, and My Lai happened, and Hersh was first who brought these two stories to light.
Neither were some giant secrets, and were previously dismissed as unsubstantiated rumour. Hersh collected enough factoids together to substantiate them enough to become a news story, rather than a military legend.
Similarly, we'll learn more about this operation over the next years, unless of course we get the species-ending nuclear holocaust that some appear to desire.
Hersh was emphatically not the first to bring My Lai to light. Hugh Thompson reported the incident, and although it was initially swept under the rug by lower-level commanders, it wasn't until after Calley was charged (Sept 1969) that Hersh reported on it (Nov 1969).
He deserves credit for his excellent, Pulitzer Prize-winning work covering My Lai. But to my knowledge he has never once been the first to report on a scandal and been right about it.
Granted...he is in his mid 80's. Say what you will about other national leaders in the 80's (some of whom have organizational apparatuses around them to support them, vs. being a lone wolf professional)...but cognition may play a factor vs. Seymour Hersh in the prime of his life...
Why would one assume that the administration made any decisions at all about this? Besides, both the balloon funtime and the destruction of valuable energy infrastructure are stupid and dangerous. Doing one stupid dangerous thing doesn't preclude doing another.
Yup. Hersh also published bogus claims about the Syrian nerve agent attacks on civilians, claiming they were not done by the Syrian government, but by "outside agents".
Among his claims was that the Sarin was made by "mixing two inert chemicals", which is utter bullsh*t; the synthesis pathways for those deadly chemicals are notoriously difficult and hazardous, including things like hydrofluoric acid, which is extremely corrosive, and a itself a contact poison affecting the nervous system.
But he happily spouts his bullcrap stories, the primary beneficiaries of which are the autocracies of the world.
