Sooner or later

I will be eager to read Seymour Hersh's new book. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from an article reveiwing the book that I can't help but find reminding me of the missing Melania Trump...

Almost every person in Hersh’s memoir is a man—a sign of the time and the industry. But there’s an interesting moment that Hersh did not have to include. In 1974, he writes, Hersh heard that Nixon’s wife Pat was in hospital after being punched by her husband. It was not an isolated occasion. He did not report on the story, he told Nieman Foundation fellows in 1998, because it represented “a merging of private life and public life.” Nixon didn’t make policy decisions because of his bad marriage, went the argument. Hersh was “taken aback” by the response from women fellows, who pointed out that he had heard of a crime and not reported it. “All I could say,” Hersh writes, “is that at the time I did not—in my ignorance—view the incident as a crime.”

[...]

“I should have reported what I knew at the time or, if my doing so would have compromised a source, have made sure that someone else did.”

  New Republic

Nobody else considered it a crime in those days, either.

click here

Trump's "Intel" Is Fox News, Alex Jones & Brietbart

Remember MIT professor Professor Theodore Postol's conclusion that the US government was lying about a sarin attack by Assad on "his own people"?

US President Donald Trump ignored reports from US intelligence that said they had no evidence Syria had used sarin to attack a rebel-held town, Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says.

[...]

In a report published by the German newspaper Die Welt on Sunday, he describes how the Trump administration mishandled the media frenzy after the Syrian bombing of the rebel-held town Khan Sheikhoun in April.

[...]

[Trump]ordered his military to prepare options for a response, which they did.

The subsequent Tomahawk attack on the Syrian Shayrat Air Base did less damage that the White House claimed, as was apparently intended by the military planners of the operation, Hersh said. The US mainstream media failed to question the government’s narrative of the situation, instead giving Trump what appears to be the pinnacle achievement of his presidency so far.

[...]

“If you’ve already decided it was a gas attack, you will then inevitably read the talk about a special weapon as involving a sarin bomb,” the adviser told Hersh. “Did the Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely. Do we have intercepts to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president did not say: ‘We have a problem and let’s look into it.’ He wanted to bomb the shit out of Syria.”

  RT

A "Wag the Dog" scenario that secured media praise for Trump and exacerbated the powder keg that is Syria.

You don't suppose that's why the OPCW's request to go to the site and examine the evidence was denied do you?

The reaction to the show of force in the US media was probably everything the Trump administration could have hoped for. MSNBC anchorman Brian Williams described the sight of Tomahawks being launched at the Syrian base as “beautiful.” CNN host Fareed Zakaria reacted by saying that Trump finally “became president of the United States.”

[...]

“None of this makes any sense,” one US officer told colleagues upon learning of the White House decision to retaliate against Syria. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack... the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth.

[...]

Hersh’s report is based on interviews with several US advisers and evidence they provided, including transcripts of real-time communications that immediately followed the Syrian attack on April 4. According to the advisers, the Syrian Air Force’s attack on Khan Sheikhoun targeted a meeting of several high-value leaders of jihadist groups.

[...]

The US was informed of the operation in detail beforehand as part of a conflict prevention arrangement with Russia.

An arrangement that Russia suspended in response to the strike.

The target of the Syrian bombing was described as a two-story cinder-block building. According to Russian intelligence, the jihadists used the second floor as a command and control center. The first floor housed a grocery store and other businesses. The basement was used as a warehouse for weapons, ammunition, and goods, including chlorine-based decontaminants and fertilizers.

[...]

According to a US assessment of the morning airstrike cited by Hersh, the 500-pound Russian bomb triggered secondary explosions. The heat could have evaporated the chemical products in the basement, producing a toxic cloud that spread over the town, pressed close to the ground by the dense morning air.

The scenario is consistent with the accounts of patients who reported a chlorine odor in interviews with Medecins Sans Frontieres. It could also explain the symptoms of nerve agent poisoning that were attributed to sarin, but may have been caused by organophosphates used in many fertilizers, Hersh said.

Pretty much exactly what the Russians said at the time.

Meanwhile, US intelligence had no evidence to indicate the presence of sarin gas at or near the Shayrat Air Base, from which the bombing mission was launched.

[...]

“No one knew the provenance of the photographs. We didn’t know who the children were or how they got hurt,” the adviser said. “Sarin actually is very easy to detect because it penetrates paint, and all one would have to do is get a paint sample. We knew there was a cloud and we knew it hurt people. But you cannot jump from there to certainty that Assad had hidden sarin from the UN because he wanted to use it in Khan Sheikhoun.”

“The president saw the photographs of poisoned little girls and said it was an Assad atrocity,” he added. “It’s typical of human nature. You jump to the conclusion you want. Intelligence analysts do not argue with a president. They’re not going to tell the president, ‘if you interpret the data this way, I quit.’”

Sadly true. And not only was the missile attack based on Fox News intel, it was bungled.

Of the 59 Tomahawk missiles fired at Shayrat, as many as 24 missed their targets because the initial strikes hit gasoline storage tanks, triggering a huge fire and a lot of smoke that interfered with the guidance systems of the following missies. Only a few actually penetrated the hangars, and these only destroyed nine aircraft that were apparently not operational and could not be moved during the window of opportunity between the US warning of the looming attack and the strike itself.

“It was a totally Trump show from beginning to end,” the senior adviser told Hersh.

[...]

“The issue is, what if there’s another false flag sarin attack credited to hated Syria? Trump has upped the ante and painted himself into a corner with his decision to bomb. And do not think these guys are not planning the next faked attack. Trump will have no choice but to bomb again, and harder. He’s incapable of saying he made a mistake.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

(Contentious) Sy Hersh Interview

In case anyone reading is too young to know, Sy Hersh is the journalist who broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war.  He also had sources who told him about the criminality and torture at Abu Ghraib, but his claims were roundly dismissed. The U.S. Government and its media shills do not like Mr. Hersh.

[Seymour] Hersh’s piece claims that Bin Laden was being held prisoner by the Pakistani military and intelligence service (the ISI), who were using him as a means to control Taliban and al-Qaida elements, and hoping to use him as leverage in their relationship with the United States. According to Hersh, who relied largely on an anonymous intelligence source, the Obama administration found out that Pakistan had Bin Laden, and eventually convinced Pakistani military leaders to allow a raid on the compound where Bin Laden was being held. The plan, Hersh writes, was to say publicly that Bin Laden was killed not in the raid but in a drone strike. The White House, however, supposedly broke this deal because of the political value of making the details of the raid public.

Hersh’s story has been much debated over the past several days, with many calling it into question and (a comparable few) others applauding its willingness to undercut the official narrative. NBC News and the AFP have both backed up small elements of Hersh’s story, although both outlets have also called other elements of his piece into question (and NBC later backed away from its original reporting). And no news source has supported Hersh’s largest claim—that the president lied about the raid.

I spoke to Hersh by phone this week. Here is a transcript of our conversation….

   Isaac Chotiner: Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/05/seymour_hersh_interview_on_his_bin_laden_story_the_new_yorker_journalism.single.html

"I just said what I said. I don’t want to hear what the upshot is. If you have another question then ask it. This is going on too long. I am too old and too cranky and too tired. I have been doing this fucking thing for a day. I told you, I warned you, that I am really irritable."

Dick Cheney Is Not Happy

In the immediate aftermath of Seymour Hersh’s winding narrative on the killing of Osama bin Laden and an alleged cover-up by the U.S. government, officials, spies and even other journalists have been quick to label the story a sham.

But now, multiple news sources are backing up at least one aspect of Hersh’s controversial account on the 2011 raid: It was a Pakistani tipster who ultimately led U.S. special forces to the fugitive’s Abbottabad compound, not the courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whose identity was supposedly revealed by CIA detainees.

Which, if true, would mean the key to bin Laden’s location was not, as the agency tells it, torture.

  Huffington Post

Sy Hersh Reporting on bin Laden Kill

Sy Hersh Story on bin Laden Kill Is "Old News" from Different Sources

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh.

Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about bin Laden’s location from tracking an al Qaeda courier, but from a member of the Pakistani intelligence service who wanted to collect the $25 million reward the U.S. had offered for bin Laden; (2) Saudi Arabia was paying Pakistan to keep bin Laden under the equivalent of house arrest; (3) Pakistan was pressured by the U.S. to stand down its military to allow the U.S. raid to proceed unhindered; and (4) the U.S. had planned to claim that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but was forced to abandon this when one of the Navy SEAL helicopters crashed.

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Hillhouse wrote another post on August 11, 2011 with more detail, and her story was picked up by numerous papers outside the U.S., such as the New Zealand Herald.

At that point, according to Hillhouse, “my understanding was there was great concern with the security guys … Everything that I’ve written on national intelligence, [that] was the first time I ever had a [former] senior member of the intelligence community signal me to basically go black … I’ve never been waved off like I was signaled to [then].” Because of this, Hillhouse says, she destroyed her notes from her conversations with her sources.

  The Intercept

And, why were we not shown evidence of the body they supposedly threw into the sea?

Hillhouse also claims that one of her sources told her a particular detail that she did not include in 2011 because she could not confirm it: that the Navy SEALs threw bin Laden’s body out of the helicopter while traveling over the Hindu Kush mountains from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Hersh’s story includes an assertion from his main source that “during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains.” While this seems bizarre in retrospect, it would be plausible if the SEALs had believed at the time that the Obama administration planned to say publicly that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike.

Sounds more than plausible to me.

The Real Story of Osama bin Laden Kill

 And you want me to believe that if the Pakistani government knew it, the US government did not?

OK, let me modify that...the CIA did not?

 Sy Hersh, once again, comes up with the story.

 Read it; it's quite interesting.

 According to his source, Pakistan had captured bin Laden, and the Sauds paid them to keep him alive and away from the Americans. He also says that the US was cutting back aid to Pakistan, and in return for several millions of dollars, the Pakistanis allowed the US to go in and take bin Laden out. Not in the way the movie line went, or the SEAL story, however, as he was reportedly ailing badly. ‘The truth is that bin Laden was an invalid, but we cannot say that,’ the retired official said. ‘“You mean you guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?”’

There's still plenty of fishy angles, but the media excitement is the fact that Washington has been lying. Really? It would be more exciting to find out Washington wasn't lying.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Seymour Hersh Is Still Here

He's been around a long time, a lone voice in the wilderness often enough. But he's still at it, Lord love 'im. I wonder if he'll be doing any work for Glenn Greenwald's new venture.

Though President Barack Obama eventually decided not to strike Syria, the administration made a public case for war by saying that Assad’s regime was responsible for a poison gas attack in the outskirts of Damascus. The U.N. later concluded the attack had involved the nerve agent sarin.

In his piece -- titled "Whose Sarin?" – [Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistSeymour] Hersh reported that al-Nusra, a jihadi group fighting in Syria’s long-running civil war, had also "mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity.” Therefore, he wrote, “Obama did not tell the whole story” when stating with certainty that Assad had to be responsible, thereby crossing a so-called "red line" that would trigger U.S. retaliation.

  

Well, what a surprise. And what a surprise that Hersh had a hard time finding anyone willing to publish the story.

Shawn Turner, spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement to BuzzFeed that "any suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”

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Indeed, Hersh didn't seem particularly bothered by having to shop the story to different outlets, telling HuffPost over email that “these things happen on tough stories presented by a non-staff writer ... the way it goes ... freelancing is not for the faint of heart.”