The reason for the lack of media interest is the (D) behind the President’s name.
I don’t think the claims are patently absurd - there are plenty of reasons that factions of the ISI might keep the whereabouts of OBL secret, or even have him sequestered somewhere. It actually seems more absurd to me that OBL would be able to remain hidden without some kind of official help from someone. And the idea that the U.S. raid was coordinated and then covered up is also not implausible to me - the relationship the U.S. has with Pakistan is very complicated, and there is a lot of money, a lot of intelligence and a lot of regional power considerations at stake. I’m not saying I believe Hersh, but I don’t think the knee-jerk “crank” response is warranted either. Then again it’s worth noting that any reasoned, investigated response to Hersh’s claims would take time, and the only response that could possibly come within hours or days would be knee-jerk and simply repeating the official response.
Exactly. An anonymous source gives you a clue, a foot in the door, a direction in which to investigate further. “Anonymous Source Says OBL Clone Army Gestating In Vats Under Denver Airport” is not a story yet, because that source could be any lunatic off the street. The source is a starting point. Woodward & Bernstein didn’t just write up transcripts of what Deep Throat said in the parking garage.
So any criticism ought to be of the follow-up investigation or lack thereof, not the fact that a source was unnamed.
Wat?
You’re saying the corporate media aren’t challenging the official story, and are attacking Hersh instead, because they back Democrats?
If so, come now – they barely challenged Bush’s massively deceptive push for the war in Iraq. And he was, you know, an R.
Exactly. Hersh is no amateur, and the quickness with which people are rushing to “discredit” him is what really disturbs me. I’m reserving judgement, and I don’t really have a way of knowing if Hersh’s sources are any good, but I’m not going to pretend armchair criticism is any excuse to ignore what he’s saying out of hand. If someone gets off their ass and comes to the conclusion that Hersh got bad info, fine. That’s not what’s happening. What’s weird is that I find myself in the position of not caring that much about this story one way or another. Hersh’s story and the official version both make me question the same things to the same extent, no matter who I believe. Either way, we have a weird and unhealthy relationship with Pakistan. Either way the ISI is shady as fuck. Either way, the United States is somewhat incompetent in how the raid was executed. Either way, Bin Laden is dead.
Perhaps that’s why I find the knee-jerk reaction so puzzling- I don’t see how the story invites shock or incredulity. I can absolutely see how modern assault rifles would tear the man to pieces (without necessarily pouring “over a hundred bullets” into him) and I can absolutely see how SEALs would treat the body of the most reviled man in America with disrespect. A few shots in the body-T bringing Bin Laden down? Equally believable. One shot to the head? Believable. By all accounts he didn’t see it coming and was pretty much facing overwhelming force. There’s nothing about the Hersh story that is outlandish on its face.
Oh, for sure. I mean, even if I implicitly trusted the US government (I don’t), as an Indian I’m almost genetically predisposed to mistrust the ISI. It’s easy to believe that the ISI was sheltering bin Laden, that it was an ISI officer who tipped the CIA off (though it’s possible they were trying the polio vaccination route), and that this is what led to the operation. It’s even believable that the ISI or the army or some faction thereof was complicit with the Americans in the whole thing. I’m just finding the whole package a bit difficult to accept - the “thrown out of a helicopter” thing, for example - there seems to be no advantage for the US in lying about this (and there’s a source who says he saw the video). Or, why would they deliberately crash a Black Hawk? If it were really a joint op with the Pakistanis, why wouldn’t they announce it? Why would they hold the whole thing over Abbotabad? I mean, if it was a joint operation, the fact that the US penetrated into the core of Pakistan’s military establishment is… embarrassing to say the least. Why wouldn’t they have done it over the desert, or at least claim that it was so?
I can think of two reasons for the last:
- The Pakistanis don’t want to be seen as betrayers of bin Laden, which would set them against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But then, they’re already fighting a war against these groups and there’s no love lost between the two.
- It wasn’t the entire establishment of Pakistan, but one faction - maybe a group of ISI, maybe the army, maybe even politicians who had become too uncomfortable with the biggest international boogeyman being held in the hometown of Pakistan’s military. There was either no official sanction, or there was another faction opposing. This would easily explain the shooting down of one helicopter, for example.
I can actually imagine the US lying about torenhanced interrogation having provided the intel - hey, that justifies a lot of things!
He may have uncovered some real facts, but other things, prima facie, don’t sound possible.
That polio angle alone makes me care… One way or another, the actions of the CIA have set back public health initiatives a long way, and given the closeness (and population density) of the two Punjabs, I’m afraid it’ll illegally immigrate across the border and reintroduce it here, just as we were getting rid of it!
Not to mention, how the official story can be used to justify certain actions the US has taken, which everyone else was up in arms about…
But finally, yeah - bastard’s dead, and good riddance!
“Make it look like a drone strike” justifies still more.
it’s only a stub, but the following wikipedia article is highly suggestive. Look at the purported examples,
I did like PBS and a couple of breaking sources, but honestly, no one even talked about the Protest during that whole time (on major networks). It was sickening to see everyone clam up and reprint AP feeds. We know it happened, and there’s no blaming GW if everyone pushed away. Cronkite even warned us against “embedding.” Now I was working at a relatively left-leaning source, CBC, so I am sure there were questions about the war, but it greatly saddens me that we had to relive another Vietnam, and people should have felt free to directly question the president.
Media access is one of the tools wielded, and to what end?
Follow the money. It would do fundamental harm to America to have a conversation about Haliburton and Carlyle, but you have to wonder if that small harm would be worth it if people could think more clearly. As we’re now lined up ( in NA) behind China, maybe we could get back on track.
It is rather strange that so many people view journalism as giving one’s opinion about whether certain actions are positive or negative. Good journalism is about explaining how things happened. It is then up to each reader (or viewer) to make up his or her mind about its relative merits. Given the lapdog performance of the American media in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq and the devastating consequences of that disinformation, I find it more than a little ironic that American journalists view themselves as the guardians of the truth.
My advice to them is:
“If you don’t like Hersh’s reporting, then get off your butts and do some reporting yourself.”
Good journalism isn’t reprinting what you’re told, either, if you want to get to the crux of the matter.
Most journalism does come down to repeating what other people say. Careful journalists try to confirm information from more than one source. They also treat information from people who have a clear “agenda” with healthy skepticism. I would recommend that you listen to Robert Baer, formerly of the CIA. He does not confirm Hersh’s account, but he does question the veracity of the official account.
Hey, it worked out well doing that for Titanic
What is striking to me is the intensity of the establishment newsmedia’s negative response to Hersh’s article. As Timm mentioned: 5 antagonistic hit pieces poured out of Slate before their incoherent “interview” with Hersh. It was overkill.
While Hersh’s piece may have been sensationalistic in tone, the major assertions he made were not particularly horrifying, and many weren’t even new. Example: outing that there may have been a different source (than claimed) for the original tip re bin Laden’s location. This is not an earth-shaking revelation; it’s an interesting tidbit. You wouldn’t know it though, from the rash of pearl clutching that ensued.
Considering Slate’s publication pattern together with their many pro-drone program jeremiads (Saletan’s), you’ve got to acknowledge that they are not a particularly credible organ in re natsec issues. Their top editors and writers have a strong – and quite theatrical – bias in favor of the Strong Democratic Leader, and they rush to defend him at every opportunity.
This strong bias is common throughout the upper reaches of the Serious East coast newsmedia – at places like the New York Times, for instance. They take themselves very seriously indeed, and believe in the sanctity of their Man in Washington. But… I know of no reason for me to share in their (very) good opinion of themselves. In regards to anything. They are a rather silly bunch of preening roosters.
There probably are journalists who are honestly trying to corroborate or disprove what Hersh said (and a few saying “we published similar information months ago.”) But the important thing for much of the media, whether the right-wingers or the mainstream pro-establishment media, is to disparage Hersh’s story because it not only contradicts the Obama Administration’s and Pentagon’s versions of what happened, but exposes the media’s willingness to accept administration stories as true by default.
As far as the “Hersh is getting old and cranky” stories, they have to try some sort of ad hominem like that, because Hersh has a long history of telling unpopular true stories that are embarrassing to the political establishment, and now that he’s old that gives them something they can push to pretend that this isn’t yet another unpopular true story.
I would note that last year Hersh had a big piece in the London Review of Books that accused Turkey of supplying sarin to Syrian rebels in a false-flag operation to make it look like Assad was gassing people. That story fell apart under examination, e.g. this technical analysis.
ETA: The New Yorker, who reportedly passed on Hersh’s article, is famous for its stringent fact checking. The London Review of Books seems to have a different attitude.
I generally think the ends do justify the means… because what else would? But you have to assess the end as a totality. So part of the “end” here is that vaccination campaigns are discredited, which is a greater harm than Bin Laden was likely to ever again cause.
Incidentally, it’s astonishingly rare for anyone to question why, instead of killing him on sight, they didn’t capture Bin Laden and hold a public trial. We can well imagine the reasons, of course, but it struck me at the time as quite telling that so few questioned that.
The single source criticism is ridiculous. How many times has the media lead a story with “An un-named source at the White House…”? The media single sources stories every single day and no one says boo.
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