“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We don't want political or nationalistic flamewar here, and any substantive point can be made without it.

You repeat, above, that HN is not for nationalist flamewar, and requires substance. But this post is nationalist flamewar and isn't substantive. Allowing it while shutting down similar content from the opposite perspective is... unsettling.

Wouldn't it just be written off as a conspiracy theory that provides little to no evidence for its claims?

If the only thing that gets this on HN is Seymour Hersh's reputation (which has lately become somewhat questionable) then you might want to reconsider. Plus, the quality of the comments has not been very good so far.

Unless it's a miskey of some kind which sounds like the most plausible explanation.

Heck, the Baltic states, along with Poland and the Scandinavian countries, have some of the best naval divers and EODs on the planet, virtue of having the priviledge of cleaning two world wars worth of mines, bombs and torpedoes from the Baltic sea...

This piece should be flagged to death, especially since it is, giving it the most (and IMHO undeserved) credit pure speculation.

Edit: Just looked Seymore Hersh up, now I know why the name rang a bell. Well, for My Lai he had proof and sources, didn't he?

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle

You're just baiting everyone in this comments section. How long have you been moderating this site? Have you ever seen a post like this cultivate a productive comments section?

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Evidence? I don't see much evidence of anything here

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like

This last one you are guilty of, maybe this post was being flag brigaded for a reason

I would encourage any who disagree to consider truly why this reporting upsets them.

Seymour Hersh, famous for his coverage of the My Lai massacre, Project Azorian, and more. You probably should know him.

> Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”

"This is ... complete fiction." is a claim that the story was fabricated. I think it's worth examining who would be doing that fabrication and what they would have to gain, especially considering who is making the counter-claim and what they would have to gain from that.

Are you familiar with Christopher Hitchens? That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Until the author provides evidence of their claims, there's nothing required to dismiss them.

This topic in not "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

This is an actual case of speaking truth to power. He clearly (and rightfully IMO) does not trust the US government and his "somewhat questionable" and recent work has continued that trend. Is it any surprise that the same institutions/people that continuously carry water for the government now rush to label him a conspiracy theorist?

No level of reputation or historical track record should exempt anyone from the basic responsibility of providing evidence for claims they make.

Both were corroborated with evidence. I'm scanning this post for new evidence and coming up empty. The fact that American action was technically plausible has always been known.

One might twist Hersh claiming he has an anonymous source as new information. But that's the closest we get. On its own, that's not sufficient to advance the discussion in a meaningful way because it presents no new facts.

Either way, you should at least know who the man is if you want to maintain any pretext of knowing modern American history.

Btw, I haven't gone back and looked at the history but I'd be willing to bet that the same things were said about Hersh's reputation from the beginning. That's standard fare for counterargument.

p.s. It's astonishing how narrow the space is for someone to say they don't know the truth about X but it's interesting. If X has any charge at all, you get pounced on by people who feel sure that they do know what the truth is. But if you think about it, it's a precondition for curiosity not to already know (or feel one knows) the answer—and this is a site for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So I don't feel that this is particularly a borderline call from a moderation point of view.

Sure. Russia and geopolitical destabilization

> who is making the counter-claim and what they would have to gain from that

This part doesn't make sense to me - the accused party naturally is the one making the "counter-claim", and naturally they will make "counter assertions" without evidence - how do you disprove an unfalsifiable claim?

I overall don't think your comments really align. "The US has done bad things in the past" doesn't mean "all accusations of bad things pointed at the US should be treated with credibility and have to be disproved with an ironclad case by the US to not garner further suspicion"

Edit: Ok, I've read the first half and looked over the second half, and I think the moderation call was the correct one. Not saying this to pile on; I just wanted to report back.

HN is not in a position to determine the success of breaking news and this story fits the mold of things that are usually flagged. Let other credible media sources start picking up on the story if it turns out to amount to anything. Before then, let this one die just as the others like it do on HN.

It is not gatekeeping to demand that extraordinary claims are backed up by evidence.

And there is an absence of evidence here.

I'm not going to ban you because you might not have seen that other comment, but please look at it now and please stop posting like this. Regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are, you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

These tensions have been brewing between NATO (mostly America) and Russia for at least a decade. It's unfortunate that the situation escalated in Ukraine though, which AFAIK is the victim in the scheming and plotting of those two powers.

I don't support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it seems like that's the only thing people are focusing on because it makes the situation simple for them, and it's easiest to have a single villain and the rest are the good guys.

I assume most people offended by this submission here are American (or at least heavily support America) and want to think of their current government/country as the good guys.

I don't think there's any good guys in this situation.

I'm not even going to continue down this "argument from authority" path. Completely baffling conspiracy drivel

Care to comment?

b) There is a lack of evidence in the article. I can claim that you destroyed the pipeline and it would be equally as valid at this point.

c) His previous reputation is important but history is littered with examples of people making mistakes and relying on their own hubris. That is why we demand evidence.

Wasn't the U.S. being behind the bombing a leading alternative hypothesis when the news broke?

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713661

Of course. You don't think there are people claiming to have anonymous sources about Putin doing all manner of things?

I'm not sure. Bloomberg and Reuters are two media outlets who regularly release information while only citing anonymous sources and not releasing any evidence.

Just posting proofster.png [1] doesn't undo America's long history of doing weird stuff to achieve its goals. Thinking about funding terrorism in Cuba, backdooring all electronic communication ever or saying that your President did not have a stroke.

Also, someone posted further down in the comments that the White House has a history of discrediting witnesses and questioning motives. [2] Interestingly enough, it appears to me that this tactic engages citizens to follow the ad hominem attacks of their policymakers, although they don't gain anything from doing so. Maybe this dynamic is even more interesting than the article itself because the causes of this crime are only for history books. America got what it wanted anyway, and nothing will change that.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/proofster

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34709596

Edit 2: I've replaced the question mark with quotation marks following a suggestion by bee_rider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713987.

-- original comment: --

We sometimes add a question mark when a title makes a dramatic and divisive claim, because otherwise readers who read the title might think that HN (or its admins) are somehow endorsing the claim. We don't know what the truth is and are neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the claim.

Edit: I dug up a few other examples where we've done this:

This is the year of the RSS reader? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105572

Anthropology in Ruins? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34049130

The great Covid and smoking cover-up? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33869176

The basic idea is that adding a question is a flame retardant because it tends to dampen the meta-comments about the story, e.g. complaints that the admins are taking a side or whatnot.

In this case it's not really working, because the question mark is also generating lots of meta-comments. But maybe fewer than we'd get without it.

Meta comment of my own: it's not only impossible to please everyone with moderation calls like this—it's seemingly impossible to please anyone. That's why it's really helpful to have a first principle to rely on—i.e. to know what you're optimizing for. It occasionally makes it possible to answer an otherwise hard question rather easily.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

No. It's interesting to you.

It's no secret that Hersh's work has become increasingly suspect in recent years. Every time he writes, he cites a single anonymous source and yet manages to go into an implausible level of detail and completeness with neatly tied up loose ends you'd only expect to find in a Tom Clancy novel. The only reason this story has been rescued from the dustbin is due to Hersh's (old) reputation, which though well earned, shouldn't just give him a pass.

https://www.businessinsider.com/robert-grenier-reflects-on-s...

https://www.vox.com/2015/12/21/10634002/seymour-hersh-syria-...

An established reputation is the difference between those claims. You making a claim without evidence is just that.

Hersh making a claim without sharing his evidence is something different. That isn’t to say we don’t need evidence, but there’s a better reason to believe him than you, given the context of the situation.

> His previous reputation is important but history is littered with examples of people making mistakes and relying on their own hubris.

And it’s also full of the opposite. The existence of hubris is not evidence of it.

But even then, that claim doesn’t fit, unless you are implying that he made the whole thing up and concluded that it must be what happened.

Another conclusion is that he has a source, and simply has not shared it yet.

Maybe time will tell.

And there is an absence of it here.

It's bad when they do it too. That's what Bloomberg did with their Supermicro Chinese chip story and it was a disaster (and one for which they still haven't apologized or really even acknowledged).

Huge allegations require evidence. Your name is not good enough, no matter what you've exposed in that past.

And that worked great on that "all server motherboards are compromised" article right?

This article shouldn't be allowed here until that time.

Reputation is not evidence.

Sadly I don’t think your request is the morally good action you presume it to be.

In fact, every single one of your comments on this thread have been nothing but hostile. I'm not sure why you seem to think you're in the clear and everyone else is the problem.

As a person from Eastern Europe this is literal Russian propaganda or in simple words - dogshit. You know why somebody like Baltic countries wanted to get in NATO? Because Russia was/is a genuine threat after these countries were deoccupied from the Soviet Union. Russia thinks that these former Soviet Union countries are still their own property, they can't imagine that these countries don't want to live "the Russian way".

Some of that interest, rather predictably, is negative.

When Modi-critical submissions get flagged to death, just to pick another flame war guarantee as an example, there is no such intervention. So it is odd it happened in this case.

  a) I don't understand the relevance at all to Hacker News. There are plenty of interesting things going on in the tech world that aren't making the front page.

the war/defense industry is the foundation of all US technology:

https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Chom.h...

ukraine is a massive test ground for us weapons/tech -- including operations which don't occur strictly in Ukrainian territory.

and, the world might be over any day now because of the war, so there's always that.

is there a HN in heaven/hell?

If John Carmack says there is an exciting breakthrough in 3D rendering that will give 8k 120fps ray tracing on commodity hardware, that’s noteworthy, and his reputation is evidence that there is substance to the claim.

HN would be super boring if only topics that had been conclusively proven could be discussed.

Edit: oops, I missed that your question wasn't to me. Sorry!

The explosion had very real ramifications for the European continent outside the Western political context of the war.

It's safe to assume the reason his sources are unnamed is to protect their safety. Don't know how plausible this is, but I it's possible that the lack of presentable evidence is for the same reason. Maybe the relevant documents could've been somehow fingerprinted, which would identify the leaker/source; the film/tv industry has done this when distributing pilots for private viewings. Heck, even printers did it lol.

However, it's not secret American politicians vehemently disliked the existence of Nordstream, and this outcome is undeniably convenient for them. Maybe too convenient, so they wouldn't dare attempt it? Or maybe they just assumed they'd have a great scapegoat. Maybe it wasn't even them, and it's Russian government playing 5D chess by blowing up their own investment to frame Americans.

Who knows? Maybe time will tell; it usually does.

So this is not necessarily what is interesting to everyone.

p. 112; The Bloomberg Way: A Guide for Journalists; John Micklethwait, Paul Addison, Jennifer Sondag, Bill Grueskin; John Wiley & Sons; 2017 ed.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=5567609899962902 "We will put an end to Abbott's attacks on educators, raise teacher pay, improve their retirement benefits, and fully fund our classrooms."

https://larson.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/larson-... "we will put an end to the decades of price gouging"

Again, "we'll bankrupt them with sanctions" easily falls under "we will put an end to them".

Why ?

I can't find any proof whatsoever as to who actually did it from the western authorities claiming to investigate it either though. In fact, there's been little to no news or updates at all since the incident.

Why do you believe that it's desirable to push at best unfounded assumptions and at worse questionable propaganda?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713787

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713529

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713479

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34712496

I honestly panicked reading this! At first I was under the impression that this was breaking news. And if true it has major implications. But that’s a really big if. It wasn’t until I read the article that it became obvious I was being manipulated to believe a narrative without evidence. The most disingenuous part of the article is that it starts with a bold claim presented as truth, and then immediately includes two sentences about the White House denying the claim before jumping into thousands of words of hearsay and a story presented as fact. As if to say, “what you’re about to read is a story, and you should know that, but you have to be smart enough to parse between the lines to see that — and I’m avoiding stating it directly so that I can get away with writing the story the way I want to write it on the chance it’s true.”

Substantiate the claims and I’ll rescind criticism. I like to believe I’m a thoughtful and relatively apolitical person, I just have a visceral reaction to being manipulated in this way (bold claim, no evidence) and I’d hope other people share the same standards.

Whether it turns out to be true or false, this article is interesting right now.

If it’s true, for obvious reasons.

If it’s false, for what it says about Hersh, and a myriad of followup questions that arise.

No it isn't. The guy's reputation is reason to give the benefit of the doubt, but either his claims are proven sound or else they are just as bullshit if Joe blow himself made them.

You are endorsing the claim when you override the ranking system and allow opposing views to be flagged and thus never appear for balance.

You can of course argue that I've made a wrong call in this case, but the point I'm making here is different: you need moderators who make judgment calls, including to override flags sometimes. And of course no one is ever going to get the calls 100% right; we have failure modes too.

That's precisely the point, isn't it?

"We will put an end to X" does not mean "we will physically blow up X". Pretending Biden had an "oops, we're gonna do a terrorist attack against Russian and German infrastructure and I said it out loud at a press conference!" moment and that there's no other legitimate explanation for the statement is just goofy.

It's a matter of striking a balance: holding space for what the community finds interesting* while allowing for a certain amount of idiosyncracy and unpredictability, but not too much. Without that, things would be more humdrum and therefore less interesting. There are tradeoffs along every conceivable axis with this thing.

* (note: community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment)

Is there a change to the guidelines and should we expect you to not override the ranking system for opposing view points.

The concept of the benefit of the doubt still relies on this form of evidence. That doesn’t imply that this is sufficient.

Regarding Hersh vs. Joe Blow, there is still a meaningful difference in them getting things wrong.

When it’s Joe, you don’t care to begin with, and the revelation of wrongness doesn’t change your opinion of Joe.

When it’s someone like Hersh, such a revelation brings reputational harm, and raises more questions about how he became so convinced of this information to begin with.

I agree with that guideline. I don't want HN in general to devolve into standard tribal mudslinging.

But I don't believe this is the standard 'breaking news' chum of the day, mostly because of the reputation of the author, though I readily admit the sensationalist title is click-baity.

So far (7 hours after this was first posted) most comments seem to be complaining that the HN users can't flag this away. I found the story interesting, it makes you think about just what the USGov is doing, if it's true or not is somewhat immaterial...the story was an interesting read, whether it was a non-fiction story or not.

Your comment suggests an assumption that without moderation, the ranking system would indicate "what is interesting to everyone". That assumption isn't just wrong, it's super wrong. Here are some past comments about that, if anyone cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... The short version is that without moderation, the site would be dominated by the same few hot stories repeated ad nauseum, plus an endless supply of riler-uppers. This is no way to optimize for what is interesting to everyone. As I said elsewhere in a reply to you, there are tradeoffs along every axis of this thing.

Also saying Hersh only writes this kind of thing supports the idea that Hersh is biased enough to be taken for a ride by a source with an agenda.

This seems a little partial and hard to implement consistently. Can we assume the same metric will be applied to every Robert Woodward story, or any of many single-sector journalists with a lengthy track record, such as Radley Balko who has spent years writing about policing?

I also don't think adding a question mark to the headline clarifies; I can treat an assertion with skepticism, but 'How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline?' reads like a submission from a non-native English speaker, of the sort which often clutter up the New submissions page.

It is neither desirable nor possible to exclude political topics from HN completely. At the same time, it's important that the site be protected from being overrun and dominated by political topics. Lots of explanation of how we handle this can be found at these links, if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

* here's pg making the same point 10 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426

The other tell is that in the follow-up, Biden was pressured to explain what he meant but he refused to comment. Sanctions could have been mentioned here without repercussions but they weren't.

Judging how incredulous one should be of an author’s writing based on their reputation is something else.

The number of attempts to either shame or coerce him into doing things the way you think should be done, versus what he thinks is appropriate -- seems childish to me.

But such submissions also suck up a lot of oxygen and it's understandable that they are often flagged or discouraged when they get too flamey. It might be worthwhile to have a designation like 'Chat HN:' which is understood to be non-technical, and which users can filter in or out of their feed.

Opinion -- cloaked in shame and coercion.

For you.

But maybe, just maybe, other people are willing to to accept claims backed by reputation.

I mean, do you have any idea how difficult some of these stories, throughout history, would be to bring to light with "hard evidence"? What would "hard evidence" even entail? A whistleblower?

When you're just speculating or building a conspiracy theory then those "ominous" comments are worth quoting.

If you are claiming to be in contact with someone with deep knowledge of the actual operation, why even mention those? Worse still, add some extra twist where the spies have a meta comment on their cover being blown by those comments.

They even have a term for it - "Cordon sanitaire": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(internationa...

Re your other question, the answer is somewhere in the space demarcated by (1) yes, (2) we'll try, (3) moderation consistency is impossible, (4) we're always open to reader input. (I'm sorry that I'm responding in shorthand but I'm being inundated atm)

> The assertion that someone made up a story is the logical conclusion to the assertion that there is no evidence to back up their claims.

It is a logical conclusion. One might still arrive at a different logical conclusion.

It makes it less surprising to me. Back in 2006 I believed Hersh when he reported that the U.S. had troops inside Iran laying the groundwork for an imminent American attack. This was also based on anonymous sources. After the attack failed to materialize, I learned to take such reporting with a large grain of salt.

No, it wouldn't. The narrative provided by Hersh's source, whether it's true or not, explains many of the facts that demand an explanation. It provides plausible answers to the questions "How were the explosives placed", "How were the explosives triggered" and "how weren't they detected". Not necessarily true ones! But plausible ones that are internally consistent, and don't in themselves raise huge new questions.

If you want to be in the running, that's what you need to supply too.

This is not a defense of Hersh, it's a defense of his article. You should consider the claims in an article for their internal consistency, and consistency with public evidence, even if you don't trust the source.

This article is remarkable for how different it is from Hersh's Syrian gas claims. There, to the degree Hersh has answers at all to the similar questions how were the chemical weapons acquired, how were they placed and how were they triggered, they just raise impossibly hard questions (like "how was this coordinated", "how did all the participants go along with it" and "how did Russia and the Syrian government utterly fail to expose and document any of it convincingly")

However, evidence is not the only valid form of claim-making. Predictive power also has value: if someone can assert something unlikely without evidence, but with sufficient specificity that it describes a subsequent development very accurately, then it's fair to presume that person probably has insight into the issue.

So while I am somewhat skeptical of Hersh's claims, they're also detailed enough that corroboration could be sought for.

Not an evidence.

> the source

Remains anonymous. Also, not an evidence.

Wasn't Watergate also reported relying on a single source (deep throat)?

     1) The US would wait 7 months after Russia invaded Ukraine
     2) The US would risk Navy divers for such a petty operation achievable without risking valuable personal
     3) The US would not simultaneously detonate (17 hour delay between? wtf)
     4) President Biden would not have immediately after taken the opportunity to interrupt broadcast and cable programming to remind us how tough he is. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Pipe

- only use unnamed sources if no other sources will come forward

- highest levels of editorial and legal need to approve

- fact checkers vet the info

A gracious interpretation is that not being a paper of note in news LRB were unaware and published what did not pass rudimentary scrutiny possibly because editors were star struck. A cynical interpretation is that they had motivation to look the other way.

In any case, journalistic outlets had largely long stopped running Hersh because he was penning unsubstantiated and illogical conspiracy theories.

This easily could be a Russian psyop -- and even if it isn't -- it is definitely political and a potential flamewar. Totally lost here

Re flagging: that's supposed to be for comments that break the site guidelines. If you (or anyone) see a comment that breaks the site guidelines and isn't flagged, or a comment that is flagged and doesn't break the site guidelines, remember that we don't come close to seeing everything, and that you can always let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. It's best to only do that in egregious cases though. For non-egregious cases, it's best to remember that consistency in moderation is impossible and not sweat the small stuff.

It’s a signal to pay attention to the issue. To keep an eye out for evidence. It’s not evidence per se.

Your stance seems to be that this unsourced conspiracy theory is a story worth discussing because, and only because, it is Seymor Hersh making the claim. Then make that clear in the title: "Seymor Hersh claims America took down Nord Stream", or something. It goes against the standard HN practice of stripping out any such attribution from the title, but it's also not standard practice for an article to only be worthy because of who wrote it.

If you wanted to hear it, you could just read it as it's been stated repeatedly ITT and it's in the HN Guidelines #1:

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

One of the unironically hardest things about maintaining a community is Saying No. And I'm not just speaking abstractly here, I'm talking personally. When you have a community of interesting and intelligent people who you've enjoyed discussing things with, it's completely natural to start to want to bring everything there for discussion. But some topics inspire far more substantial discussion than others. Some topics are inherently meaty, in particular when they are about things that we, individually or in our direct organizations, can directly take action on, extent further, or otherwise make use of in our lives/work. That helps ground discussion in reality vs emotion and subjective infinities. Other topics risk being more and more intellectual empty calories, where many words can be written that have no actual use of any kind, pure jawboning and ever more self-referential spirals. This is particularly risky for something like this, which is a level removed from hard reports due to lack of hard proof which in turn naturally results in much of the discussion going one or more levels more meta: rather than even discussing the impacts, however useless it might be, it's discussing the report, the author of the report, their credibility etc.

It's not that it's inherently wrong to have those discussions, but does it need to be here? The answer to a lot of us is no. Even if we want to discuss it very much. Self-discipline (and community enforced discipline, and moderator enforced ultimately) is key to maintaining a place like this, and that includes erring towards not having low quality, highly meta and vacuous discussions with no ability for anyone in the community to do any grounding or contribute anything you couldn't read in a newspaper.

I can take issue with some of the other stuff you wrote, but ultimately it comes down to that. Maintaining good communities often involves picking areas and sticking to them, generalization being death. If this was a forum devoted exclusively to space habitats and cats, someone taking out pipelines would still be very important, but it would be neither space habitats, nor cats. It would be completely reasonable for the community to flag it dead. That's not a judgement on the topic nor discussion of it in general. It's just not space habitats or cats.

Edit: I've put quotation marks up there now, as explained in the GP.

Here's a collection of sources compiled by someone on Quora. I dont know how biased or accurate this person is. However, there were other instances that made me think this isn't so black-and-white or "clean" as I'd like it to be.

https://www.quora.com/If-Putin-is-indeed-the-real-aggressor-...

A lot of the sources he used are from Ukranian websites so you might need to run them through Google Translate. Some are from reputable (for at least some definition of reputable) western media outlets like CNN, BBC, NYT, etc.

The embedded vidoes don't seem to work in Chrome (they just disappear when I click them) so I've extracted the link for one of them here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 - Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? Featuring John Mearsheimer, uploaded by The University of Chicago

Other videos are shorter clips to prove a point, but if anyone's interested they can see the video ID in the embedded image URL when inspecting the element.

Again, maybe this is all dogshit like you say, but I find that too dismissive of the facts presented.

The soon the better you do X, is quite an authoritative stance to take.

Seymour Hersh's unnamed source on how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline

I do appreciate you replying! Thanks!

I realise it's an incredibly difficult question to answer because of the what-ifs, though.

I would also like to think you'd have the same stance... And for what it's worth I do believe you would.

I'd argue that your stance is currently harder to uphold since it makes the whole situation a lot morally murkier, and also because it goes against popular opinion (one can only be immune to it so much).

As far as I can see your position evaluates to ‘dang trusts Hersh‘.

Since it’s 2023 and we use machines to do our thinking now, I consulted ChatGPT about this. I draw your attention to the last paragraph.

—————

strawpeople: Can Seymour Hersh’s reporting always be trusted?

chatgpt:

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has had a long and storied career. While he has been praised for his investigative reporting and his ability to uncover important stories, it is important to note that not all of his reporting can always be trusted. Like any journalist, Hersh is human and may make mistakes or have biases that affect the accuracy of his reporting.

Additionally, some of Hersh's reporting has been called into question, and he has faced criticism for making claims that are not supported by evidence or for relying on sources that are not credible. For example, in 2017, Hersh faced criticism for his reporting on the chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria, which some experts said was based on unreliable sources and was contradicted by a large body of evidence.

In conclusion, it is important to approach Hersh's reporting with a critical eye and to carefully evaluate the evidence and sources he relies on. While some of his reporting has been praised for its accuracy and impact, it is not always reliable and should be independently verified.

Far more heat than light being generated though, though. Which is predictable with this kind of story, raising emotion is part of the desired outcome of posting it (1). "interest" in baseless speculation and conspiratorial thinking is not a good thing.

Standards are slipping, that this story is protected.

1) https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/more+heat+than...

Even extending to the international community (which is generally a reflection of American politics, much to the chagrin of Europeans who are unwilling to admit it), there is mixed levels of enthusiasm for getting to the truth. The countries are all anti-Russia, and so the pipeline sabotage is generally seen as a "good thing" except by the countries with direct profit motive for it. However, those countries aren't about to publicly accuse US intelligence of carrying out the operation, because their relationship with US intelligence is too important to lose, especially given all the weapons and intelligence they provide.

It should still be approached critically, though.

People here seem largely seem dismissive of this story because they don't like it (or the author).

I've addressed in another thread why the sources are unnamed, but it's plausible it's to protect their safety, and lack of presentable evidence could also be the same reason. Information could be somehow fingerprintes to identify leaks. Hollywood did/does it; printers do it too.

---

> Since it’s 2023 and we use robots now, I consulted ChatGPT about this

On a lighter note, this made me laugh. Somehow makes it seem like we're in 3023, not 2023... but also like it's 2023. What a time to be alive.

Likely pieces of the torpedo could be found and traced back to American manufacture.

Nope. The normal flagging rules are a sperate threshold.

I don't actually doubt the veracity of this information. But it's grossly irresponsible to publish "some guy's" claims as facts!!

Do you have stats on what percent of regular HN readers have ever commented on any story? Or are stats more like, for every 100 readers of a story, 1 will comment on that story? To put another way: if I read 100 stories and comment on 1, would I be counted as lurking 99 times and posting 1?

Basically, I'm curious if engagement is lopsided toward lurking because some users never comment, or because most users never comment on every story they read.

It really isn't:

>What became clear to participants, according to the source with direct knowledge of the process, is that Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines …

>… Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.”

>… Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City."

That's exactly the sorts of things from his other recent articles that people who know how things actually work would immediately know is BS.

No, it's not harmless to repeatedly claim things without evidence. No, people do not make their own judgments.

When reality and your expectations are out of sync, it's probably best not to call it arrogance.

If the comments turn into a flame war, blame the commenters, not the article.

I think it was something like 1% of total readers and 5% of logged-in readers but I'd have to check again to be sure.

Thanks dang. I'm glad HN has moderators that make calls like.

I’m not putting words in anyone’s mouth.

Given that it’s clear he wouldn’t give this post special treatment if it wasn’t from Hersh, we can reasonably infer that dang trusts Hersh more than a random poster as you suggest he should.

I don’t think you represent dang, and at question here is dang’s reasons for giving the story special treatment, which unless you are a dang sock puppet you don’t have special insight into.

He used to be credible. Then unfortunately a lot of shady people learned they could manipulate him and get away with it, and so they've done. He can publish something like this and when anyone says, "prove it" he can't. Because Top Secret.

It's possible the tech stack for the detonator was written in Rust.

The "mainstream" "establishment" position on the death of Osama Bin Laden is that Bin Laden was living in the middle of Abbottabad, which is the Pakistani equivalent of the town of West Point, and no high level Pakistani Army official knew he was there, and no high level Pakistani government official knew he was there.

It is a completely absurd story. The "truthers" are the people who believe that story. The White House gave a lot of information about bin Laden's death, as well as the Pentagon, and the government had to walk back some of their story shortly after. The New York Times reported the government statements as fact, although later another section of the paper printed some of the questions about the mainstream narrative. This caused an internal Times squabble, some of the "memoes" of which were subsequently leaked.

If you want a better account of what happened, read the Pakistani press.

The ISI worked with the US and bin Laden hand in glove in the 1980s. The idea no one high up on Pakistani intelligence, government or military knew he was there is absurd. Yet you call this "truther".

> a advocate of the Syrian rebel chemical weapon conspiracy

Chemical weapons were released in Douma. The rebels and government blamed each other. If the "conspiracy" as you call it that the rebels released it were true, it would tend to have been a mishandling of them - a mistake. Hersh reported on the attack, including information pointing to the rebels controlling it. I have no idea who had control of the weapons - it could have been the government as you imply. I don't have a problem with Hersh reporting on the information he had on that.

Moreover, the article has little to do with tech and has obviously loaded statements such as this:

> From its earliest days, Nord Stream 1 was seen by Washington and its anti-Russian NATO partners as a threat to western dominance.

If we can’t filter out misinformation and propaganda, we are screwed as a community. (Is this misinformation/propaganda? Maybe, maybe not, but better to have false positives in cases like this.)

This is from 2015:

"The way to understand Hersh is to visualize most of his sources as Michael Scheuer-like individuals. It is not difficult to find such people in the intelligence world: obsessive, frustrated idiot savants who perceive themselves as stymied by the paper pushers, the bureaucrats"

"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. Like diplomats who “go native,” gradually sympathizing with the government or some faction in the host nation while losing sight of their own country’s national interest, Hersh long ago adopted the views of America’s adversaries and harshest critics."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/05/seymour-hershs-u...

There is definitely propganda on both sides (and how much of it is true is hard to tell). Russia isn't the only one with a propaganda machine, if anything the US is much more successful at it than Russia could ever hope to be.

I encourage you to read more of the Quora article, even if I appreciate that some of the stuff in the article might be hard to stomach, since you seem emotionally closer to the issue than I do. I believe a lot of it is very unlikely to stem from Russian propaganda.

Some of the stuff you attributed (eg you mentioned tribalism and spite) to Russia isn't unique to them or their politics; it's just a very primitive part of human nature that we still struggle with.

And to close with a tangent: it's always good to keep in mind that nobody (neither you or I) is immune to propagand; especially when it's pushed by state actors with a larger agenda. This is why I often indulge in reading stuff I don't agree with (within reason). Does give me a bit of cognitive dissonance occasionally, but alas.

... And since we're indulging in unnecessary snide comments: They've outlined their reasoning already in a few places. Maybe if you read this thread instead of conversed with ChatGPT, we wouldn't be in this situation to begin with.

The article has an anonymous source. Your comment complains about “propaganda” and “nationalist flamewar” (unfounded) and asks for moderation. The submission is more substantive than your comment.

You question people's motivation when it comes to submissions. Why not when it comes to flagging? Does it foster intellectual curiousity to flag a story by a renowned investigative journalist?

In any case, what's surprising to me here is the reaction to dang's reasonable justification for disabling the flags on this story. I think those who continue to push for its removal after flagging have moved beyond "I personally don't think it's a suitable topic" to "I don't want anyone else to read it". I find the latter attitude very worrying.

I am also worried that HN's moderation has a bus factor of one, and has effectively no recourse. That's a lot of community-shaping power in one person's hands, regardless of how good of a job dang normally does.

Anything discussing controversial social topics is nuked. Which would explain the sheer panic and replies to dang: it must be truly terrible to not be able to make undesirable stories disappear instead of having to refute them. :-/

In the end this story doesn’t really present any ironclad proof and should be easy to point that out. Except that would open a discussion which could make the EU and US look quite poorly…

No.

Especially in stories involving classified information it's very rare to get unequivocal proof at first. For better or worse leaks are how stories break, and the leakers are careful about how they do it so to avoid criminal charges.

Given this, all you have is the reputation of the person doing the reporting. Historically have they shown good judgement in discarding the crackpots and do many of their breaking stories from unnamed stories subsequently turn out to be true?

In this case I think Hersh's reputation isn't what it used to be. This century only one of his major claimed stories (the Abu Ghraib prison story - which I don't think he broke anyway?) has turned out to be true, while most (all?) of his other major claims have turned out to be either false or completely unverified after many years.

That being said, Woodward and Bernstein didn't publish verbatim what Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat) told them; they used his tips as starting points to look for corroborating evidence, which they published to great accolade.

The WaPo and other mainstream media were also institutions of far more integrity at that time: their mission was to publish truth regardless of the implications, and they weren't under the kind of pressure the press is under today. Also, society (and media outlet owners) trusted truth itself to result in societal good far more than they do today.

> You question people's motivation when it comes to submissions. Why not when it comes to flagging?

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/seymour-hersh-...

But also just look at what happened here in the comments. It's totally predictable. Those of us that read the article and flagged the post had prevented this. In this case flagging had worked and was not abused.

If that is what you are up to, let’s end at this point.

That judgment normally should not weigh as much as the combined judgment of the community members with flag powers. At that point you may as well disable the flags because your trust in the judgment of the community has eroded to the point of non-existence.

I think at best this should be presented with a title of 'How America could have taken out the Nord Stream pipeline' because as it is the facts are not supported by any evidence and there are some clear flaws in the article (for instance, see the comments by user 'weatherlight'). The reputation of this particular reporter was at one point in time absolutely stellar but has gone steadily downhill and I think you should update your priors as to whether you still want to stand by him when making unverifiable claims. Note that no reputable paper would put this in print, which is why you find it on substack, the place where conspiracy and controversy finds its audience.

Note also that this article essentially claims privileged knowledge about an act of war, gets a whole pile of details factually wrong and yet the main claim apparently should stand and get the benefit of the doubt, including a title that states this all as fact (those quotes and question marks are just confusing). Something that grave should not be amplified until it is presented with more foundation.

i don't have opinions about journalists, because i'm a normal person, but that sounds like a needed antidote to, say, slate's complete lack of skepticism regarding the pronouncements of the U.S. national security bureaucracy.

What is your judgement based on, intricate knowledge of explosives, experience of deepwater diving or training in black ops?

Because if you have none of those things, then no, you cannot form informed judgement. There hardly any difference between asking me, you, or a random child.

Given who authored this, and who is referencing it, this is now a “thing.”

This being published is for sure going to have an impact on diplomatic relations. Removing it from HN doesn’t stop anyone of relevance in this from seeing it. Presidents, ministers, ambassadors, senators, etc. are probably being briefed on this. The White House is going to have to deal with this regardless of its truthiness.

I suspect countries are going to want answers. The U.S. saying “this is not true” probably isn’t going to cut it for the countries involved.

This story has relevance regardless of its truthiness.

It doesn't seem so reasonable. It seems bizarre, frankly. It's utterly out of line with (what I percieve to be) the whole history of HN moderation on this kind of subject.

There's zero excuse for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I don't even see how this is semi-debatable.

This is something that will always be problematic when reporting on something that hasn't happened yet. As the future hasn't been written, there's always room for all actors to adapt and change their plans.

b) You chose to override the will of this community who largely did read the article.

Conveniently for Russia, Nord Stream 2 still exists. Only one of its two pipes had exploded. Everyone forgets about it.

After seeing how Germany handled the USA spying on Merkel (phone saga), I do not expect them countries involved asking further questions or taking appropriate actions.

Welp, maybe taking no action IS the appropriate action. The west must stay united and trade must flow.

Hersh is 85 and in the past decade he has already done quite a bit of damage to his prior reputation

It just seemed inexplicable to me at the time because of Biden's prior remarks. In that light I can't see how anyone wouldn't immediately assume the US didn't do it-- the US hadn't even denied it at the time!

You guys seem to be seizing on my saying I didn't read the whole article as if it were a horrifying gotcha. Let me try to disabuse you of that: it isn't necessary to read all of every article to make reasonable moderation calls, and that's lucky, because it would be physically impossible to do so. I can barely keep up with the titles.

I haven't overridden the will of the community because the community has no single will on this. It's divided along obvious political/tribal lines. It's not my job to align with any political or tribal view, including my own. The moderation principle on HN is simple and clear: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Literally anyone with strong political views can expect to occasionally encounter something on HN that outrages them; if not, then we're doing a lousy job, because one thing's clear: intellectual curiosity ranges across political and tribal fences.

I don't think the comments were as disastrous as you suggest. It's true that the majority were negative, but not all—and in any case, it's important that HN's front page not just be a product of majoritarian sentiment. If it were, then we would clearly be failing the core principle of HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

Did I pick the right hill to die on at the hands of the majority? Maybe not, but (a) the sentiments would be the same if I had; and (b) we have to take some chances; if we don't, we fail for sure.

But to the parts that aren't, I'm open to be convinced. Tell me what you think is unrealistic in the substance of the narrative, and tell me how you came to know how these things work better than the rest of us.

I know from many jobs that the image we would like to preserve for outsiders about how you work, especially in leadership and decision making, is a lot prettier and competent than how it actually works. Hearsh's source tells a story about a messy process, which he sounds, despite it all, kind of proud that still worked. Only he thinks the whole thing should never have happened. I can totally relate to that. It's completely different from typical conspiratorial stories (including some of Hearsh's).

And you sound, unfortunately, like one trying to defend the reputation and preserve the prestige and mystique of planners and decision makers in hierarchical institutions. All that's missing now is that you reply with some variant of a huffy "think what you will" to this.

But you can try to prove me wrong, by spelling out in detail what's so implausible about the sources story.

> I know nothing of him, but given that there's an entire paragraph about Jens Stoltenberg where almost every sentence is just completely factually wrong in a way that could be verified to be wrong with a look at the first paragraph on his Wikipedia page, I'm not inclined to take what he says seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34717803

This is something that could be verified quickly by you and others.

He had a lock on the genre like nobody else before or since.

>Especially in stories involving classified information it's very rare to get unequivocal proof at first. For better or worse leaks are how stories break, and the leakers are careful about how they do it so to avoid criminal charges.

>Given this, all you have is the reputation of the person doing the reporting. Historically have they shown good judgement in discarding the crackpots and do many of their breaking stories from unnamed stories subsequently turn out to be true?

I think we're back to an Appeal to Authority.

Flagging exists for a reason, doesn't it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

To me either negation is about the same but not a deal breaker because I can exercise reasonable judgement.

Yes, but in my mind that reason is to call the moderator's attention to an article and force a conscious decision. It's not to automatically allow some tiny percentage of participants to decide what the majority are allowed to read. Probably most of the time, the flaggers are right, discussion would be unproductive, and the article should be removed.

But some of the time, some of the flaggers are ideologically driven to prevent discussion that will damage their ideology. The moderator's goal should be to distinguish these cases. Making it tricky, it's not always a binary whether an article is worthy of discussion or not. Sometimes a good discussion can be created if and only if the moderator has time to spare on guiding the discussion, and sometimes the same article is flagged for different reasons.

A good discussion on a bad article is a great outcome, and bad discussion on a good article is a poor outcome. The "illusory truth effect" is a danger, but failing to properly challenge a false narrative is a danger too. I feel like Dan usually does a good job of trying to weigh these factors, based on the amount of time he is willing to spend babysitting the thread to avoid the worst outcomes, and based on his intuition on what sort of discussion will result.

You mean like most mainstream news that parrot state-sponsored talking points? It seems counterpropaganda propaganda pieces are the only way to balance out state propaganda these days.

Well that explains why you're so against this type of article. You should reconsider whether the rot you're perceiving isn't in the West, rather than in Greenwald's brain.

Maybe you're not familiar with the practice of journalism where anonymous sources are routine, and have successfully uncovered a great deal of misconduct by governments. Reserve skepticism of course, but dismissal of a routine practice with a proven track record is not justified.

Yikes.

No one is claiming that a journalist’s reputation removes the burden of proof.

If you read what I said, it's the opposite ("In this case I think Hersh's reputation isn't what it used to be") but the point is that reputation is a signal that something is worth paying attention to in the absence of any other useful information.

I often think "false appeals to a logical fallacy without understanding nuanced argument" should be a fallacy itself. Nothing wrong with understanding logical fallacies of course - but often people just mindlessly use them without understanding what the fallacy says.

Expert witness in legal trials is a good counter-example to this fallacy for example. Expert witness testimony is given extra weight because of their reputation in the field. Sometimes this is wrong, but often it is not.

But beyond the article itself, it's worth explaining my priors. The first is that the shifting finger-pointing is a classic Russian disinformation campaign. The second is that America would incur enormous risk by doing this and gain nothing; while Russia would risk nothing and had everything to gain. Both of these deserve further explanation.

Disinformation campaigns, especially false flag operations, are a hallmark of KGB operations. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read The Sword and the Shield, by Christopher and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin archive is probably the best primary source the West has about KGB active measures and internal politics. The Mitrokhin archive confirms that disinformation false flags are a common theme of KGB destablization operations, such as fomenting the degradation of race relations in the U.S. by forging hatemail. Most experts agree it's highly likely Putin himself used this domestically, by staging the 1999 apartment bombings that killed hundreds and injured a thousand people, and blaming it on Chechens; the resulting fear and hatred rocketed him to popularity when he then mercilessly persecuted Chechens, gaining him the Presidency for the first time. To this day, the real facts are unknown, but what is known is this: Achemez Gochiyaev rented basement facilities to an FSB officer for storage; those basements had bombs; after the first two explosions, Gochiyaev called police, who found and disabled the remaining bombs; after Putin's ascendency, the official narrative became that Gochiyaev didn't call, but that an unnamed real estate agent turned him in; that Gochiyaev later disappeared without a trace; and that the Russian government refuses any independent investigation. Other examples of Russia flooding the information space with competing false narratives include the conduct of the 2014 Ukraine invasian (little green men); the build-up before the 2022 Ukraine invasian; and the 2016 Presidential election. Their goal in these cases, according to Mitrokhin, is to overwhelm the populace's ability to critically examine every narrative and "give up," distrusting everything instead. Russia officially blaming the U.K., while getting a senile but formerly respected journalist to claim it was the U.S., perfectly fits their SOP.

In addition, there would be no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to do something like this. The cost is enormous: already concerned about disunity in NATO, the risk of doing something like this and it being discovered would be enormous within NATO, not to mention the risk of Russia viewing it as an act of war. The benefit is nil: Germany had already halted Nord Stream 2 on 22 Feb 22, well before the September 2022 explosion, and their gas reserves were over 90% at the time, minimizing Russia's ability to weaponize NS as an incentive for Germany to oppose Ukraine aid. By contrast, there are multiple reasons Russia would do this. It's essentially zero-cost: destroying their own pipeline is unlikely to bring any retribution from any other country, and certainly wouldn't warrant direct NATO involvement. And the benefits are immense: (1) claim the West did it and galvanize the Russian population, just as Putin did in the lead-up to the bombing of Grozny; (2) make it socially unacceptable to continue the then-current protests against mobilization of reserve units; (3) undercut any later claims against Russia for cutting off fuel supplies, as now it would be impossible for Gazprom to perform on its contracts; (4) now that it appeared the war in Ukraine might drag on longer than Putin expected, make it impossible for any successor to back out from Putin's chosen course of action and resume business as usual.

Bottom line is this: Russian disinformation is the KGB/FSB's modus operandi. We saw this all the time in Iraq: a news outlet would make a claim that the U.S. had caused civilian casualities. We investigated every allegation of CIVCAS. But most of the time, when RT would make a claim of CIVCAS, it wasn't even in a location we had performed a strike. All they were doing was flooding the information environment with the narrative that the U.S. was killing civilians.

This post by Hersh is deeply disappointing. It would hardly be a clearer case of Russian propaganda if it had a giant Z plastered above the fold. It doesn't deserve any credit, and—with respect to dang and the decision he has made—it doesn't deserve to be on HN.

Further reading:

https://www.amazon.com/The-Sword-and-Shield-audiobook/dp/B00...

https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Is-Coming-Garry-Kasparov-audio...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/08/07/u...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKb1Rv_EKwA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gOpI3AieFo

Which seems little different to an appeal to authority. Maybe you better understand the nuance between an appeal to authority and an appeal to someone's reputation as an authority.

However, given all of the information known at the time, there's little evidence to suggest that anyone aside from them was responsible for the assertions without evidence, which again leads to the same logical conclusion.

Right, and these claims are being made by an award winning journalist with a proven track record who has a source. That deserves more credence than just "anyone" making any claim. Not enough to accept it as truth, but far more than claims that can be outright dismissed as you initially claimed.

During the Vietnam War (1955-1975) Stoltenberg (born 1959) was -4 to 16 years old..

Hersh possibly confused Jens with his father Thorvald Stoltenberg. Who travelled to North-Vietnam in 1970 to negotiate between them and USA, and who was commended for his negotiating skills by the am. intel community in a declassified rapport from 1980.

Links/sources follow:

«Thorvald Stoltenberg and Reiulf Steen visited Hanoi in 1970.»

https://vietnamkrigen-wordpress-com.translate.goog/2010/02/2...

«In a new biography of Thorvald Stoltenberg, it is described how Norway brokered peace between the parties in the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s.»

https://www-vg-no.translate.goog/nyheter/innenriks/i/Pk947/n...

«Defense Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg was praised for his negotiating skills in a so far classified CIA report from 1980.«

https://www-nettavisen-no.translate.goog/nyheter/cia-vurdert...