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Yes and you know what all those things have in common? Actual evidence which corresponds to real events, and multiple sources confirming that they happened.

What Hersh's suppositions have is a stunning lack of verifiable evidence and observably factually incorrect assertions (as in the case of his articles on Nordstream).




Saying someone's claims don't (yet) have the kind of evidence you demand is pretty different from calling someone crazy (and in so doing implying that those claims are not worth the consideration of the sane).

The only thing your bullet points were doing is suggesting "look at the delusions of this maniac! He can't be trusted because of them". But because the completely insane shit in my list turned out to be true, Hersh's sorts of claims are at least as plausible as the insane shit I listed in my reply. (And in the case of the first two, they were labeled by bienpensants of all kinds as proof that the claimant was certifiably nuts or at least unworthy of Serious Attention ... until the day they were shown to be true.)

All I'm saying is that, given the factual record of conspiracy and sociopathy on the part of the world's powerful, something like "2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey" can't easily be used to dismiss someone as nuts. Not enough evidence? Sure, whatever (but let's wait a decade or two). Crazy though? Nope.


Over 10 years. It's one thing to have a story out there no one can prove, it's quite another to have been continuously publishing things you can't prove and which no one else can find any evidence of despite looking.

There are multiple factual claims about verifiable vessels, planes and movements being made and none of them are true.

All your saying is, despite obvious factual inconsistencies in the parts of the story which should be publicly verifiable, you've already got a conclusion you like. Which is what everyone's doing because the real big secret is "it was Russia" is a boring conclusion that doesn't move clicks.


> you've already got a conclusion you like

> the real big secret is "it was Russia"


Yes. The previous comment is also problematic. It does not follow from Hersh being one Smiths song short of a mixtape that the opposite of his conclusions are true. It's indicative of how all these discussions happen: points made to impeach Hersh's conclusions are analyzed as if they are arguments for the purity of US foreign policy. Hersh might be "right" that the US is behind the pipeline attack! But that doesn't matter if he got there by guessing. The real question is: can we learn anything from the story he told, and the answer to that seems, pretty convincingly, to be "only that his sources are fabulists".

It would be handy if you could conclude things like "whatever Hersh said, the opposite is true" from his stories! His journalism would be super valuable if that was the case. You'd just read it and draw the opposite conclusions. But you can't do that, because his stories (at least since 2006) are unmoored from reality.




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