“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

It's a great story, but it's all unsourced and could be a decent Tom Clancy story at best. You could probably write a similar one with Russia or German agents as the key players and be just as convincing.

The only anchor in reality appears to be Biden suggesting that they knew how to take it out which seems like a pretty weak place to build a large story.

What I find particularly odd is that this entire thing appears to be based on a single, unnamed source "with direct knowledge of the operational planning".

Seymour Hersh has decades of credibility from reporting the My Lai Massacre to the abuses at Abu Graib.

But he does often rely on sources who remain anonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Use_of_anonymous...

I did find it interesting in that Wikipedia article to read that The New Yorker's editor insists on knowing the identify of all of the anonymous sources that Hersh has used when his reporting is published in that magazine. That suggests to me that while Hersh can probably be generally trusted, his work is of a higher quality when it's published in an outlet like The New Yorker, as the editor-in-chief and other staff submit it to a more rigorous internal discussion. That's in comparison to probably no internal review or discussion by Substack.

Seymour Hersh has had a long and storied career, and he has made some very bold claims that later turned out to be correct.

He's also, especially recently, made some very bold claims that so far have not turned out to be correct, whether because the truth just hasn't been revealed yet, or because Hersh was wrong or misled by his sources.

It's also worth noting that Hersh - as with any journalist - is only as good as his sources. If people choose to leak juicy secrets to him (not implausible!) he may end up publishing accurate stories that reveal nefarious conspiracies (which has happened). If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead. And as he keeps publishing, the odds that this will happen (if it hasn't already) keep increasing.

So I absolutely wouldn't write off any claim Hersh makes, but I wouldn't blindly believe it either. And here he is relying, by his own admission, almost entirely on a single anonymous source, giving details that can't really be independently confirmed.

Was Hersh told by someone that the US took out the pipeline? Probably! Does that mean the US did so? I'm not sure I'd seriously update my priors based on this.

>If people choose to give him lies and misinformation, he may end up publishing conspiracy theories instead.

I am an investigative reporter who covers crime, and my sources often insist on anonymity. There are ways to mitigate the possibility of being lied to.

All of my sources know that we have a deal: I promise to do everything that I reasonably can to keep their identity secret, and they promise me the truth. If a source lies to me or intentionally misleads me, my agreement to keep their identity secret no longer stands.

There’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist, and it has worked well for years. I have never burned a source, and as far as I know, I have never published an investigative story that is wrong about anything material.