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“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

(seymourhersh.substack.com)
688 points hunglee2 | 1 comments | 08 Feb 23 12:50 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mmastrac ◴[08 Feb 23 19:03 UTC] No.34713024[source]▶
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".

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drewda ◴[08 Feb 23 22:18 UTC] No.34716271[source]▶
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.

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miguelazo ◴[09 Feb 23 19:07 UTC] No.34729426[source]▶
I imagine there are very good reasons why he can’t trust the editors of certain publications for certain stories. Many of them are among the “power elite” who collaborate with the security state, whether directly or indirectly. There’s a long, storied history of that.
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VagueMag ◴[10 Feb 23 00:23 UTC] No.34733810[source]▶
You're getting downvoted, despite the fact that when he headed the CIA, Allen Dulles used to just call up the editor of the Washington Post to have troublesome reporters fired.
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1. miguelazo ◴[10 Feb 23 02:46 UTC] No.34735015{3}[source]▶
That is exactly right, and nothing has changed— the CIA still has plenty of influence over WaPo, NYT, etc. I would say it’s perhaps slightly less direct now, but even worse because they have such a large network of think tanks and cutouts to shape the narrative. Remember when CBS news had that 60 Minutes piece last year about how most US arms and supplies were not actually getting to the front in Ukraine? How long did it take for them to “partially” retract it for some embarrassingly bogus reason? PS: if you haven’t read “The Devil’s Chessboard” by David Talbot, highly recommend.