Seymour Hersh published a lengthy piece at the London Review of Books on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Long story short, Hersh claims that many elements of the story we were told by the Obama administration about the raid are lies — including how the CIA found bin Laden, how the SEALS killed bin Laden and how the military disposed of his remains.
To summarize, Hersh’s story claims that the CIA didn’t find bin Laden at all but rather figures in Pakistan’s ISI gave him up in exchange for massive piles of cash and basically presided over a premeditated homicide in the guise of a raid. Hersh’s story further claims that many of the details we were told about the raid and aftermath were invented to cover up a series of massive fuck-ups.
I haven’t read the entire piece yet (it’s long), but the reaction to it has been about what you’d expect on the left. But the response on the right has been interesting. You’d think wingnuts would be on a story that boils down to “You lie!” like dung beetles on a cow patty, but the usual suspects have been strangely muted. Steve M at No More Mr. Nice Blog explains why:
One reason the story is unsatisfying to the right is obvious right away: If Hersh’s version of how the U.S. learned about bin Laden’s whereabouts were to prove true, it would end forever the discussion of whether torture had anything to do with bin Laden’s death, and not in the right’s favor… The right loves torture. The next Republican president will openly and unabashedly torture. So if this is true, it’s buzzkill.
That sounds about right to me.
Like I said, I haven’t read the whole piece yet, but I skimmed it. One part that seems made-up to me is the following, about the disposal of bin Laden’s carcass, which Hersh says wasn’t via a burial at sea off a US Navy vessel as officials claimed:
The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed.
So, just for kicks, the SEALS randomly flung bin Laden’s body parts out the helicopter door, and for all we know, Osama’s head crashed through some dude’s yurt? I guess stranger things have happened, but that sounds like bullshit to me.
John M. Burt
A whole lot of preposterosity here, but just to observe one thing here: If they weren’t going to carefully collect all of bin Laden’s body parts for autopsy, someone would have insisted on saving a “souvenir”.
D58826
Pewter Bergin on CNN has a lengthily piece dissecting Hirsch’s piece. Essentially he says Hersch got punked. On the other hand there is a certain plausibility to the Hersch version in that the US and Pakistan might want to keep the level of co-operation a secret.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/11/opinions/bergen-bin-laden-story-a-lie/index.html
Totally OT and a raging shock and surprise to everyone ,an Orlando TV station is reporting that Zimmy has been involved in another shooting. Details are a bit scarce at the moment
dmsilev
There’s a lot of Hirsch’s story that flat-out reeks of bullshit (it needs a conspiracy so convoluted that SPECTRE would have to be called in to run it), and unlike some of his previous exposes (My Lai, Abu Ghraib), he includes basically no hard evidence for this one.
Germy Shoemangler
Could it be they’re all huddled together getting their talking points straight?
I’ve noticed silence from the right after a big story before. It takes a day or so, and then suddenly they’re all talking at once, using the same sentences. Everyone from the paid talking teevee heads down to the anonymous wingnut message board folks.
Betty Cracker
@Germy Shoemangler: That’s an excellent point. Stay tuned!
Germy Shoemangler
@D58826: I saw this in the comments section of their local news media:
Napoleon
After decades and decades of Hirsch pieces, my distinct impression is that he is more often spectacularly off then more or less right.
Cluttered Mind
George Zimmerman, defending the good state of Florida from the scourge of people who George Zimmerman doesn’t like. True American Hero.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Yeah, this really doesn’t shock or scandalize me. Is this really supposed to be his big reveal?
What should be a scandal is Jeb saying that knowing everything we know now, he would have invaded Iraq in ’03. He’s wearing a giant sign on his head that says “I’m a dangerous fucking moron!”, and he’s the Very Serious Moderate Republican. Even Laura Ingram thinks he’s crackers, fercrissake!
RaflW
@Germy Shoemangler: No doubt that is part of it. They have to figure out how to impugn Obama without damaging their torture-depravity or making the military which they generally support look too bad (though the whole Texas/Jade Helm thing makes me wonder if they’ve become so deranged that they can only think of it as Obama’s Army now?).
I expect some test-marketing of RW nutjob memes on lesser market radio this afternoon, and a full court press on the 7pm TeeVee bobblehead shows tonight. Ugh.
D58826
@Germy Shoemangler: You don’t think those brilliant talking points and critical analysis gets written in an hour. It takes some time to dream up the response, distribute it to everyone and then memorize it so they can repeat it without using a teleprompter. 24 hours seems like a reasonable amount of time for the well-oiled elephant echo chamber to do it’s thing
redshirt
Not paying any attention – should I be outraged or not?
Rex Tremendae
There are also a fair number of people involved in the raid. Tough to keep that many together on a lie.
Villago Delenda Est
Given how much of this far fetched story is based on “sources”, it seems that Hersh is getting sloppy, or senile, in his dottage.
Belafon
I posted a comment about it yesterday, and noted in the second paragraph that Hersh tries to conflate the Pakistani Army knowing where bin Laden is with it being involved with the US attack. It’s a bait and switch.
Also, Vox notes the weakness of the argument: Why would the Pakistani military allow the US to perform a raid that would make it look weak?
smintheus
Republicans also would dislike the assertion that the Pakistanis knew where OBL was hiding as early as 2006 but kept that from Bush and only relented and allowed the US raid after intense arm-twisting by Obama.
Germy Shoemangler
@RaflW: I’ll check some other blogs that the RWNJs comment on. I’m sure there’ll be some basic “Obama is a big phony” trash talk, but more refined talking points will develop in a few days.
@D58826: I have to admire their discipline. They write a script and stick to it down to the last syllable. Sometimes for fun I’ll copy and paste a small fragment of a RWNJ’s comment on other blogs, run it through the magic google, and see it appear word for word in a bunch of other places.
the Conster
Wingnuts would only care if the story was that OBL was still alive. Bringing more attention to the fact that Obama got him by disputing certain details doesn’t interest them in any material way.
smintheus
@Belafon: Apart from the holes in Hersh’s story, there’s also the fact that it appears to be based almost entirely on a single anonymous source – which makes it a non-starter. Hersh has a reputation for being overly credulous of his sources, and he has had several elaborate conspiracy stories in the past that appeared to evaporate upon inspection.
Also, worth noting that Hersh told the Guardian back in 2013 that the Obama administration’s story of the killing of OBL was “one big lie”. What was his evidence for that then? He never said. If it was his current anonymous source, then why did he sit on the story for 2 years? If it was other sources, then why isn’t he using their info now in this story? The two-year gap in rolling out this conspiracy theory strikes me as highly suspect.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
Well, the story does introduce an explanation of what the weirdest thing was to me at the time: how could anyone have hid in a city with so much of the Pakistani army in it? It’d be like hiding in Annapolis. The claim that they had caught bin Laden and were keeping him seems more plausible. But who can tell how much is true?
Ruckus
@the Conster:
Good point, with an exception. If they thought they could get the President in a lie, they’d love that.
dmsilev
@the Conster: Let’s start a rumor that Barack Obama really _is_ Osama bin Laden. Look, bin Laden dropped out of sight in 2002, and Barack Obama appeared virtually out of nowhere in 2004. _Clearly_, that intervening time was spent in plastic surgery and some intensive dialect coaching. And the whole Kenyan birther thing? Just a smokescreen to cover up the _real_ conspiracy. And obviously, “bin Laden’s” “death” was just to clean up a few loose ends.
Paul in KY
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: They’ll try to brazen it out. Will say it was humanitarian to remove the monster Saddam.
Of course, this is the neocon position in a nutshell: Remove Saddam & turn Iraq into a failed state that can never threaten Israel.
smintheus
@Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim: I used to live in Annapolis. There was a lot of weird stuff hiding in plain sight there. For example, Spiro Agnew’s den of corruption.
D.N. Nation
It did allow for Glenn Greenwald to serve up some Sick Burns(TM) on Obama, so Mission Accomplished.
El Caganer
If everything Hersh wrote were 100% accurate, what difference would it make to us? Obviously some Pakistani military and intelligence folks wouldn’t be very happy, but I don’t see how we’re affected here in the USA. He seems to be ginning up some righteous rage that the President made political hay off of this operation; I would submit to Mr. Hersh that any person holding or seeking elective office who wouldn’t make political hay off this is a complete moron.
Ruckus
@Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim:
Would the majority of the Pakistani army be looking for him? Would the majority of anyone’s army be looking for any particular person?
MattF
I was thinking that the story could be US intelligence agencies trying to do a number on Obama– killing bin Ladin has been a big achievement for the administration, so saying that it’s due to info from our pals in Pakistan’s army and intelligence services would make it all appear less significant, or maybe just more confusing and uncertain.
But I find it hard to believe that Pakistan’s ISI and/or military actually had any interest in killing bin Ladin. Depositing a turd on the White House, sure. But otherwise, not so sure.
Amir Khalid
I said it then and I’ll say it now: whatever problem there were with the man, the US had no quarrel with his dead body, and neither did Americans. It would have been despicable and unbecoming to abuse the remains for no reason beyond hatred of the man. That’s why I expect that bin Laden really did get the proper Muslim burial at sea the US says he did.
@John M. Burt: I consider taking a “souvenir” from human remains an act of abuse. I’m aware that taking such souvenirs was fairly common up through the Vietnam war, but it’s an uncivilised practice; hasn’t the US military outlawed it by now?
the Conster
@dmsilev:
Obviously – Obama/Osama is playing the long game to establish shariah law in America by using WalMarts to invade Texas. Fiendishly clever, when he’s not pushing the stock market and corporate profits to record heights.
Gene108
@Belafon:
I do not think, anyone who observed Pakistan’s ” moral support” for terrorists operating in India for the last 25 years, is surprised the ISI knew he was in Pakistan.
The more cynical are surprised the ISI did not air lift bin Laden out of Tora Bora.
justawriter
Then there was the whole story of the CIA’s fake vaccination program to get DNA to confirm it was OBL. Why bother with that detail, especially since it got a bunch of healthcare workers in Pakistan killed and allowed endemic polio to reemerge.
Cacti
Just applying a bit of Occam’s Razor to Hersh’s story…
To believe Hersh, you also have to believe that the Pakistani government was willing to have their military and intelligence services made to look like fools publicly, and has kept up a years long ruse with the US of deteriorated diplomatic and security relations…
All for the sake of killing one person.
sharl
Until reminded today via Twitter, I had totally forgotten that NatSec journalist RJ Hillhouse already covered this turf a few years ago. She writes about it here:
rp
@El Caganer: I had the same reaction. If the big reveal is that Pakistan was cooperating, well…who cares? If that’s true, they probably asked us to say we did it without them for PR reasons, but it makes no difference to me. And the disposal of Bin Laden’s body is even less significant.
ruemara
I read the piece and my takeaway questions were: what does anyone gain from this article? How is throwing a destabilizing narrative that says Pakistan cooperated help anything? How does this make a damned thing better?
Tree With Water
One morning in 1970 the San Francisco Chronicle published a story on its front page about an American patrol in Vietnam at a place designated by the U.S. Army as ‘Pinkville’, known to the natives as My Lai. I read it at the breakfast table before I went to school.
This is the first I’ve heard of this report. Aside, that is, from a headline that caught my eye twenty minutes ago, in which a CIA honcho has called Hersh a liar. Which is something akin to Jeff Davis accusing Abraham Lincoln of violating the Constitution.
And my initial reaction here to the body parts story is Hersh was merely quoting what was said, not what was done.
Brachiator
What would that be? I’ve barely had time to read all the Hersh piece (I’m going through this on break), and have not looked at any reactions to it.
But this piece is driving me crazy. I don’t see that it’s about whether torture works. I don’t even see that it is much about left or right visions of regional military activities.
It is that the American people are played for suckers and that men and women are sent off to die for bullshit reasons while politicians and spies play games. Hersh’s piece suggests that journalists and spies and political leaders all have a cozy relationship in keeping wars and political intrigue going, and the only people kept in the dark are the citizens. And there is more smug bullshit here than in any of the Snowden revelations.
If bin Laden was a guest of Pakistan since 2006, why didn’t they give him up? If the Saudi’s were paying for his upkeep, why the fvck do we have any relations with Saudi Arabia at all?
Here’s one gem from Hersh’s story:
Understood by who? We have allied with Pakistan almost from the beginning of partition, often against India (supposedly too commie), but what have we ever really got from the arrangement? Especially when you consider this little gem:
I don’t give a rat’s ass about Pakistan’s designs on Kashmir, and their continued obsession with India is delusional, a perpetual chip on their shoulder.
For decades, both Republicans and Democrats have been sucked into a pointless and poisonous relationship. And both fools on the right and the left want to believe that Pakistan is either a sometimes unreliable ally or a puppet. But Pakistan are the ones pulling the strings, just as despots in the region pulled the strings of the British and the Russians, who believed that they were playing the “Great Game” of Western imperialism in the region.
Dopes then. Dopes now.
And did Hersh get punked? Interesting question. A brief look seems to indicate that some making this claim are armchair analysts who haven’t been to the region in years, if at all. But they heard from someone who heard from someone who knows….
Some of Hersh’s stuff may not be strong, but his essential facts about the stupidity of our relationship with Pakistan has been borne out time and again.
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: No argument there, but abusing the corpses of enemies is a fairly common practice, even in recent times, though it is illegal. I remember a brouhaha several years ago when US soldiers got in trouble for pissing on some deceased Taliban soldiers.
@El Caganer: If true, the story would suggest we’ve wasted untold billions ineffectually pursuing bin Laden. That might have implications for CIA / DHS budgets, if nothing else.
Jeffro
@Germy Shoemangler: Mitt will be complaining about how this unfairly tilted the 2012 election in five, four, three, two…
kc
@John M. Burt:
What makes you think someone didn’t?
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
The national security apparatus’ lack of bang to show for for the bucks allocated to it will have but one meaning to certain politicians on the right: it’s not getting enough bucks.
rikyrah
Man!
Pope Frankie breaking it all the way down REAL!!
http://www.ansa.it/english/news/vatican/2015/05/11/pope-says-many-powerful-dont-want-peace_be1929fb-80a1-4f31-a099-7f24443e3928.html
Scott S.
Anonymous source = Cheney? Because that would make a certain amount of sense…
Brachiator
@Cacti:
This has often been the case, even when Pakistan was trying hard not to look foolish.
@Paul in KY:
And yet, what we have now is political and military instability that threatens the entire region.
Germy Shoemangler
@Jeffro: The white horse is in the stable, snorting and kicking in frustration. Mitt paces back and forth, grinding his teeth. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
I was amazed when I learned he hadn’t even bothered to write a concession speech. Anne was already on the phone with decorators planning new drapes for the oval office.
Germy Shoemangler
@Scott S.: I can hear Cheney chuckling to himself over talking to “that old lefty”
Mandalay
@Amir Khalid:
There are plenty of holes in the various official accounts of bin Laden’s death, expecially the notion that the mission was not necessarily hellbent on killing bin Laden. But I am with you on this; there was simply no down side to actually giving bin Laden a proper burial, as opposed to pretending it happened.
Our security forces leak like a sieve when it comes to a juicy story, and having some fuckwit blabbermouths credibly disprove that he was buried at sea would have been enormously damaging. Why take the risk of telling a huge lie when it’s completely unnecessary?
Cpl Cam
I read this yesterday and, if true, it does conveniently answer a few nagging questions I’ve had about the raid (almost too conveniently if answering my questions is anyone’s priority…) But, I guess, I’m just too cynical to care. The main reveal seems to be that it was never a capture or kill mission, that the Seals’ orders were to kill from the start. But it seems to me you’d have to be pretty naive to put assassination past a US president (even one with a Nobel peace prize…
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: Those neoconers (think Doug Feith et. al.) aren’t the sharpest tools in the drawer.
Fair Economist
@El Caganer:
My thoughts too. Even assuming it’s all true, what should the US/Obama have done differently? Ignored the intelligence and allowed bin Laden to go on living? No way. Directly attack the Pakistani government? (attacking a Talibani compound is VERY different from attacking a Pakistani government safehouse!) Backstabbed the Pakistanis by revealing the truth after the chopper went down and there was no longer any way to conceal our involvement?
Mandalay
@Scott S.:
How so? I think it is safe to assume that Cheney hates Hersh with the heat of a thousand suns for his past reporting. If Cheney was going to blab Hersh would be the last reporter on earth that he would trust or help.
Botsplainer
http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/18/seymour-hersh-unleashed/
There’s the brilliance of Sy Hersh at work. Conspiracies galore.
Barry
@Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim: ” It’d be like hiding in Annapolis. ”
Why not? There’s a lot of stuff going on, and so long as OBL was careful about actually showing his face (or the faces of those known to be close to him), who would know?
boatboy_srq
@MattF: @rp: @El Caganer:
The tale does indeed seem to paint the ISI in an unusually proficient and cooperative light, doesn’t it? This despite a long history of secrecy so porous the tribal regions seemed to know when strikes were taking place before the US DoD did, and generations’ worth of futility in using ISI intel for anything remotely productive that didn’t involve Kashmir. When 9/11 happened and Musharraf signed on to the GWoT almost immediately, my first thoughts were that there was something he wasn’t admitting to, because having Pakistan as an anti-Taliban / anti-AQ ally was a bit like Gun Owners of America volunteering to support an assault weapons ban: startling, but with little hope of a productive outcome and high likelihood of something nasty going on under the radar. Hersh makes them sound much more effective than they’ve proven to be in the past, and much more supportive of US efforts than they’ve been; that makes the whole thing sound false.
The intel angle seems halfway believable, too: there are plenty of Teahadists in that camp – perhaps not WITHIN NSA/CIA/wherever, but within the contract sphere. Timing is interesting: if Hersh had this information in 2013, and published after two additional years with little more than the source he references, waiting that long to discover nothing substantial to corroborate the info he got back then seems very odd.
Hillhouse’s comments are pertinent as well: this isn’t exactly news at this point. If there’s a point besides “Gubmint bad; intelligence gathering worse; we can’t trust any WH to tell us the truth at any time” it’s escaping me.
Is it just me, or does Hersh have a h#rd0n for Gubmint Corruption that he sees in almost every public announcement or event – something that makes him look for it everywhere, and believe everything that reinforces that preconception? It’s like he needs to find the clay feet of every single public figure and take a sledgehammer to them, and stand back when everything falls apart and insist it was journalistic integrity that made him do it.
Barry
@Brachiator: “And yet, what we have now is political and military instability that threatens the entire region.”
No – it doesn’t threaten Israel, for example, except quite indirectly. And Israel has been dealing with individuals and small bands quite successfully.
Betty Cracker
@Brachiator:
Confirmation bias — Obama-haters on the left take it as further evidence that Obama is no better than Bush. Obots who can’t abide a critical word against Obama attack the messenger. Same old same old.
Cluttered Mind
@Germy Shoemangler: Well, all the news sources that he listened to told him he was certain to win. That’s the problem with living in the right wing bubble of lies. Occasionally the real world intrudes, and then you’re not prepared.
boatboy_srq
@Botsplainer:
Not having a single thing to do with Shrubbery pushing the Axis of Evil line, or enabling FundiEvangelist Xtian denominations to pwn the chaplains, or anything.
boatboy_srq
@Germy Shoemangler: Entitlement, in a nutshell.
Heliopause
There might be a whole lot of BS in the article and some of it seems far-fetched, but you don’t have to read very far to see that it’s at least as well-sourced as most of the “sources say” stories we get spoon-fed on a daily basis.
Tree With Water
@El Caganer:
“If everything Hersh wrote were 100% accurate, what difference would it make to us?”.
Good question. Certainly his story about My Lai meant nothing to many Americans, beyond the massacre providing a rallying point for supporters of continuing the American War in Vietnam. Then again, it meant much more to vastly larger numbers of decent Americans. Regretably, it was an event that disappeared down our collective rabbit hole. There is so much we chose to ignore in that war’s aftermath.
Hal
Meh.
Brachiator
@Barry:
Oh, yes, it most definitely threatens Israel. Netanyahu and others have depended on despots to contain the majority, and have used various strategems to avoid outright war (most of the time). But the current instability and the constant metastasis of new extremist groups make it harder in the long run for even Israel to counter or contain them.
@boatboy_srq:
He is so focused on mole hills of corruption and supposed government lying that he can’t see the bigger picture.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Tree With Water:
So killing bin Laden was the moral equivalent of My Lai?
Oooookkkkaaaayyy. You may need to expand a bit on that, Sparky, because on its face, it’s a batshit insane thing to say.
catclub
@the Conster:
I saw a military convoy leaving a base today. They did NOT having a sign saying ‘Off to invade Texas’.
I am disappoint.
Tree With Water
@Hal: My point exactly. “Meh”. That’s what the sign read at the entrance to the aforementioned rabbit hole.
Vishnu Schist
I take everything Hersh says with a grain of salt. I heard him speak once about Abu Ghraib. He really hammered the military and made a bunch of claims. An Army officer stood up when he was nearly done and challenged some of his claims. Hersh rather than addressing them got seriously flustered and basically sounded like a fool. I lost considerable respect for him.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@justawriter:
I suppose it may still have happened if the US wanted to confirm that it really was bin Laden before authorizing the raid. Using healthcare workers for a CIA operation was still an evil thing to do.
schrodinger's cat
So what is the big controversy here? That ISI and Pakistan knew where OBL was? Or that they co-operated with the Obama Administration?
catclub
The Vox article seemed to be a pretty complete evisceration of Hersh’s story. From all angles. Pakistani cooperation? No, it has gotten worse. Why build a replica of the safe house for training if you know Pakistan already has him. More Pakistani access in Afghanistan? Again, no. More funding and weapons, again, no.
Other stories are the starting points for a flood of corroborating information – Abu Graib, My Lai. Here, nothing yet.
Anonymous sources who have been out of the business for 20 years.
Because of the completeness, no anger, very clinical.
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden
Just One More Canuck
@dmsilev: not SPECTRE, KAOS
Haydnseek
The U.S. was paying the Pakistanis a metric shit ton of money every month to search for Bin Laden. Therefore they had an enormous financial stake in not finding him. Does Sy mention this? Dunno, but I suspect not.
catclub
@Haydnseek:
No wonder they were so pissed when we got him.
There is a demotivator poster about consultants in that line above.
“If you’re not a part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@schrodinger’s cat:
The big controversy is that the US is Bad, because My Lai.
Brachiator has a good point above that we’re probably throwing good money after bad in our support for Pakistan, but I don’t think that’s where the controversy lies.
boatboy_srq
@Haydnseek: Distinction: US was funneling cash to Pakistan and ISI; IIUC Hersh is suggesting that payments for this escapade went to specific ISI officers, who probably wouldn’t see a rupee of the larger program. Distinction, difference, but there you are.
Arclite
Hersch’s story is true. This picture, widely explained to be Obama and staff watching the raid in real time, is actually them watching the NBA playoffs: Mavericks vs. Lakers on May 2. It was a nailbiter, the Mavs won by 2 points, 96-94. If you look at the guy with glasses you can see the game reflected in his lenses.
Cacti
@catclub:
Sy Hersh’s biggest stories had both been published in the New Yorker, My Lai in 1972 and Abu Ghraib in 2004.
They passed on this story, in spite of their history with Hersh.
They were obviously uncomfortable with something or somethings about it.
catclub
@schrodinger’s cat:
Hersh has proved that Sasquatch Isreal!
ruemara
What truly disturbs me is the amount of well respected media critics closing ranks around Hersh and validating this story simply because the WH is saying it’s false. I got Jay Rosen being a snarky bitch about the reaction because denial means it’s real. Too many so called journalists are fucking full of themselves especially since a black guy became president.
catclub
@Cacti: The Vox article also mentions something about a fight with the Editor at New Yorker.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Yeah, I guess. Hersh does seem to lean a bit hard on the “no better than Bush side.” And the weird sourcing of much of the story (retired old hands) and the lack of focus other than “he’s a lying liar” makes it easy for Obots to do their dance.
But he also weirdly argues for an intelligence gathering status quo. We are supposed to be concerned about betrayal of Pakistan’s intelligence chiefs, instead of asking whether our relationships with supposed allies or enemies has any real value or purpose.
Laertes
The Vox piece is not impressive.
This is one of those half-assed “debunkings” that makes perfect sense to anyone desperate to accept it, but falls apart after a moment’s thought. And, frankly, it leads one to wonder if the writer actually read the Hersh piece. Someone who’d read the Hersh might have written that second graf thusly:
Hersh explains this seemingly fatal contradiction by suggesting that the deal called for the Americans to keep quiet about the raid and then, a week later, claim to have killed Bin Laden in a drone strike. The helicopter crash bollocksed that plan and there was no good contingency plan. Winging it, the White House quickly cooked up a cover story that damaged relations with the Pakistanis.
Here’s the strongest evidence that Fisher didn’t read the Hersh piece. If he had, he’d know that in Hersh’s version of events, the “humiliating” raid on the Abbatobad compound would remain forever a secret, and the cover story would be a drone strike in Afghanistan.
Fisher does it again:
Fisher Did Not Read The Hersh Piece.
Haydnseek
@boatboy_srq: Your last sentence says it all. Hersh might be right. Things change, and the money spigot is shut off for a few ISI officers. All in a days work, nothing lasts forever, and they’ll be on to their next scam as soon as the opportunity arises.
Brachiator
@catclub:
I read that as Sasquatch Israel.
@Just One More Canuck:
Or HYDRA
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator:
I think you were supposed to.
boatboy_srq
@Laertes: Interesting that a) BHO’s Presidency is supposed by Obots to have magically changed everything about how the US executive branch operates overnight; b) Hersh and Obama-haters can conclude that a lack of immediate and instant change is proof that BHO is a sellout and BSDI.
lawguy
If you want to know how the “left” reacts just go back and read the comments here. The entire scope of the reaction is laid out in 84 comments. Maybe not as perfectly on point as the right, but here it is.
Davis X. Machina
Hersh correctly called Bush’s attack on Iran, didn’t he?
I’ll trust him on this one…
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
It’s just weird. Some of the controversy seems to be “ooh, Obama is a bad man for killing bin Laden.” This is weak, since nobody much cares.
Or, “ooh, Obama promised he would never lie to us, but he lied about the SEAL mission and the terrible murder of bin Laden. And he made our Pakistani allies feel bad.” There seems to be some folks using this for a furious pearl-clutching session.
The rest seems to allow room for free floating anxiety.
It also seems to be of huge importance to Hersh to declare that bin Laden held no operational importance anymore. But then he fails to demonstrate how this is relevant to anything at all. Were we supposed to do a Dubya, and declare that we were not worried about bin Laden?
Here, Hersh steps on his own story. Apparently, killing bin Laden was bad, but trying to capture him or have Pakistan turn him over to us for prosecution would have been worse. For some reason known only to Hersh and a cabal of retired military men and former CIA officers.
Because knowing the truth is essential. Unless you are an anonymous source with the real (unverifiable) story.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Laertes:
I still have to ask, the problem is … what, again? The US offered to create a cover story for an ally if they let us get Bin Laden. The cover story went south. And … ?
I mean, I know some people are OUTRAGED! that we killed Bin Laden, but most of them are 9/11 troofers who think Bin Laden was framed.
Cacti
@Davis X. Machina:
His reporting that Turkey was responsible for the Sarin gas attack in Syria was equally impeccable.
Laertes
@boatboy_srq: @Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Yeah, I dunno. You two are doing the same goddamn thing everyone else is doing in this thread: Breezing past the question of whether or not Hersh is correct and focusing on the political implications of this or that story. That’s kind of creepy.
To lay it out as simply as I can: I love and support Obama. I think he’s a great president. And I’ve got no problem with what he did in EITHER version of the story. And I think Hersh’s account seems perfectly plausible. I really don’t give a damn what it means, politically, or what the “problem” is. I’d just like to know what really happened.
Elie
I read parts of the article but agree with commenters here that I am missing the big “so what?”. The whole story just seems a bit of a nothingburger.. maybe he needed to generate some income? I read that he had to shop the story around a bit– that the New Yorker and WAPO weren’t interested and he was a bit miffed about it. Not sure if there was a lesson for the administration, what would it have been?
Yawn
Repatriated
The Bush Admin shut down the CIA group looking for OBL in ’05 — though it was announced in mid ’06. Assuming that the Hersh story is correct, perhaps there’s a connection. After all, if the only thing they’re reporting is “yep, ISI still has him, same as last week”, why bother?
But that raises another couple of questions. First, why would we trust the ISI to keep him in custody? And second, why should we accept the assertion that they only had him in custody as of ’06 and not before then — possibly long before then?
Just adding another layer of tinfoil here, that’s all.
sharl
@catclub:
Ah, memories of Donald Douglas and Sasquatch
Is RealIsrael, a dim bulb even by the low standards of online rightie writers. I assume he is still a teacher (comm. college) – lucky students!liberal
@boatboy_srq:
We already know from his flogging of TPP that he’s a sellout.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Laertes:
I guess the question for me is, why does it matter if Hersch is or is not correct? What does it add to the known story? I can completely understand why the US would create a cover story to protect their informant, so what does it add to know that it was an ISI informant rather than independent detective work by the US?
I mean, it’s interesting to have new details like that, but I guess I don’t get what it adds to the known story.
Elie
What I think is more interesting and a sign of changing strategies and strategic relationships is the non attendance by key ME/Saudi Arabian and other leaders of the summit held by the Obama administration. While there are a variety of excuses, it is quite clear that the Saudis are not feeling the love for new policies that balance their relationship with the US against our increasing contact with Iran. After years of carrying their water and fighting their fights, alas, a little daylight. I hope more to come as the US fundamentally changes our exposure and room to maneuver. As we already know, the Israelis have already had their meltdown…
CrustyDem
@Cacti:
Exactly my thought. This reminds me of an older scientist with a favorite theory he expounds for years to anyone who forced to listen. Finally it’s published in a non-peer reviewed journal.
The appropriate response is [crickets].
Brachiator
@Repatriated:
Or restating this. If the ISI had him in custody, could they be trusted to turn him over to US authorities?
All the people who insist that the hunt for bin Laden should have been just a police investigation assume that he would be extradited if he were ever captured by US allies.
Hersh asserts and seems to be OK with the idea that ISI kept bin Laden and would not turn him over because it suited their purposes (get money from the US and play nice with Islamic extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan).
boatboy_srq
@Laertes: Even more interesting that my observation of the two knee-jerk reactions you are treating as a “nothing to see here” comment.
David Koch
Well, if TWO government agents are telling NBC News that Obama was a CIA time traveler, who traveled to Mars, then it must be true.
I’m surprised Hersh didn’t dig this out first, given his government contacts.
boatboy_srq
@liberal: Yeah, all that Lily Ledbetter, and Affordable Care, and stuff was just window dressing. The idea of pragmatically seeking what’s achievable doesn’t mesh with The Perfect Reformer image, does it…
David Koch
you realize Hersh once wrote JFK personally had the FBI murder Marylin Monroe and he based it on iron clad documents that later turned out to be forgeries.
1. Ooops.
2. Feet of Clay.
3. Obama Derangement Syndrome.
4. HOOOOCOOODNAONE!
Betty Cracker
@Elie: I’ve been following that with interest too. Don’t know what it all means yet, but a little distance between the US and the fanatics and leeches who run Saudi Arabia strikes me as a good thing.
All my life I’ve been hearing about how the US has to influence events in the Middle East to protect our access to their oil. I’d love to see an honest cost-benefit analysis of that proposition. I’m sure it enriched many individuals in the US, but I doubt very much it advanced the interests of ordinary Americans one iota.
Laertes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I’m just kind of a history geek like that: I’m interested in knowing what really happened simply for its own sake.
I don’t know if it’s true. It’s just another version of the story, and the evidence isn’t rock-solid. As I read Hersh’s version of events, though, it seems to hang together pretty well. A bunch of win-the-day types are playing their appointed roles, and throwing exactly the kind of stupid shit you’d expect them to throw, but I tune them out.
Just to break this down, here’s my takeaway from one lunchtime reading of the Hersh piece:
ISI held OBL captive in Abbatobad for several years. Some Saudis knew they had him, and no Americans did. They were under various pressures and mostly just sat on him because it was the least bad option available. Americans then learned about this from a walk-in who wanted the reward money, and that set things in motion. Pakistani and American spooks hatched a plan whereby the Pakistanis would let American operators fly in and kill OBL and slip out again with the body, and then a week later claim to have killed him with a drone strike in Afghanistan. That plan was a win-win in several ways:
1. It gets Pakistan off the hook for OBL’s fate. Their fingerprints aren’t on the murder weapon and their domestic nutters won’t throw a fit. Presumably some higher-ranking Saudis would guess at what really happened, and would still be pissed, so this point isn’t perfect.
2. The Americans get to claim to have killed OBL.
3. The Americans get a nice PR boost for their controversial drone program.
4. The Americans get to cook up whatever story they like about how they tracked him, and what he was up to when he died. This could serve any number of political ends.
The plan went pear-shaped when a helicopter crashed. At that point, there was simply no denying the place and manner of OBL’s death, nor the identity of his killers. With no script in hand for this scenario, people improvised, with about the results you’d expect. Some Pakistanis got burned pretty bad, and hit back in various ways.
Vox went all “OMGOMG holes in this storeeeeee!” but their article is sloppy and weak and I stopped reading after the third howler. I gather lots of people think Hersh’s story is obvious bullshit, but I simply don’t see the implausible part.
People read something like “The Americans say OBL was running his terrorist network from his secret HQ in Abbatobad, when in reality he was a sick old man in an improvised prison who was butchered in his cell with the cooperation of his guards” and freak out because all they hear is “Dear leader is under attack!” I’m not so horrified. Spycraft is messy. And only someone too young to remember the names Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch will be surprised to learn that the military/intelligence apparatus is capable of squirting vast amounts of weapons-grade bullshit at the public.
balconesfault
Pretty sure that if any of this were true … we’d have already heard of it via Wikileaks long ago …
Elie
@Betty Cracker:
You and I see eye to eye on the same question/concern… I am happy to put a little “stress” on that relationship. Lets see what happens,eh?
David Koch
@balconesfault: which means Snowden is part of the cover-up. He obviously had access to these documents but choose not to realize them. Wow. He’s worst than I thought he was.
Laertes
I might mention that as conspiracy theories go, this one’s pretty sensible. The plan that Hersh lays out looks reasonable to me, but what the fuck do I know about special operations? Looks like it should have worked. If that helicopter hadn’t crashed, I imagine we’d have heard, just a week later, that OBL was blasted into charcoal briquets somewhere in the mountains of Southeast Afghanistan and that story would likely have held up for God knows how long.
The Tonkin Gulf incident held up, mostly, for what? Fifteen years or so?
boatboy_srq
@Elie: Well and truly about time the US and SA built a little distance. One of the things that drives me nuts with the DrillBabyDrill bunch is the idea that energy efficiency is a national security concern – and reducing consumption means that SA and others have less influence on US policy as a result. WAY too much ME policy is driven by the obsession with placating al-Saud.
Turgidson
@David Koch:
Seeds of a wannabe Vonnegut novel in there, I think.
David Koch
@Laertes: you want the implausible part – how about the part where the guards leave only when hearing the helicopters, yet they were stealth copters which used silent rotors. Anyways, why would they go through the trouble of using double super secret stealth helicopters if the US knew they were coming. And if he was under house arrest, why did they let him release video and audio tapes.
But of course, according to Hersh, JFK got the FBI to murder Marilyn Monroe and make it look like a suicide.
Omnes Omnibus
@David Koch:
No helicopter is silent.
balconesfault
@Omnes Omnibus: Aerodynamic magic!
If they could make rotors quiet – there would be some VERY happy windfarm neighbors out there …
David Koch
@Laertes: another implausible part: bin laden’s multiple wives and various children were left alive at the compound. why didn’t they ever say, “oh, we were under house arrest by the ISI, and they sacrificed to the infidel”? Are they part of the conspiracy too?
Laertes
@David Koch: I guess that didn’t strike me as implausible because I imagined that “silent” helicopters, like “silenced” guns, are still pretty goddamn loud. So it didn’t strike me as implausible that they’d instruct the guards to flee when they heard the helicopters approaching.
So, yeah, if you could point me to some article somewhere that explains that these helicopters are so quiet that there’s no way the guards at the compound could have heard their approach, I’d be grateful, and that would certainly shoot a big hole in Hersh’s account.
I think that’s probably not likely, though?
boatboy_srq
@Laertes: It’s not the content here that gets me; it’s the timing. 2013 (buildup for 2014 elections): Hersh hawks the beginnings of this story, and nobody listens; come November ’14 the GOTea goes up a bunch of Congressional seats, but not enough to make the majorities veto-proof. 2015 (build-up to the ’16 elections): Hersh hawks the presumably-final product, gets printed, and the BSDIism makes HRC’s election not quite so sure because BHO is just like every other pResident (ergo she will be too) – and in the wake of this, expecting Warren to submit to being drafted has gone right up in smoke because it’s crystal clear he’d do the same to her. I’d like to think that it’s coincidental, but if it were then Hersh’s sense of timing is flat-out horrible.
David Koch
@Omnes Omnibus:
David Koch
HOLY SHIT
Brady suspended for 4 games.
Pats lose 1st round and 4th round pick!
I smell Pulitzer for Hersh!
Laertes
@David Koch:
In Hersh’s account, these people “were left for the ISI to interrogate and relocate.” I don’t know what became of them, or if any of them told their stories. Nor am I clear on what would have become of them if things had gone to plan. Maybe they’d have been disappeared? Seems plausible, but Hersh doesn’t say. So, yeah, that seems like a possible weakness in Hersh’s story. If things had gone to plan, what would ISI have done with the witnesses?
Elie
@boatboy_srq:
…AND the ME is not where our strategic interests lie. Our focus has to be on new markets in the Pacific and Asia and South America. Our economic and market strategy has to follow those imperatives. That means we have to modify all non strategic relationships. Right now we are still #1 and therefore can still maneuver our relationships to play them off of one another, as we are attempting to do with SA, Turkey, Israel and Iran. We have to play them off of each other to focus on what we need to do and minimize our risk and investment in the ME.
See this kinda interesting piece.
Laertes
@boatboy_srq:
I don’t play “It’s the timing.” Too many wingnuts find the timing to be suspicious whenever Obama does anything. It’s always an interesting time. A year from now is the run-up to the election. A year ago was the run-up to the midterms. Right now is interesting because, I guess, it’s the buildup to the 2016 elections? I mean, for God’s sake, we’re almost exactly halfway between elections–if the timing with respect to elections is suspicious, this is about the least suspicious time there is.
So, no, poke holes in the story if you can, please. But no dark muttering about “timing.” There’s ALWAYS something going on somewhere, so it’s ALWAYS an interesting time. That’s bullshit.
boatboy_srq
@Laertes: IIRC “ISI” and “witnesses” don’t generally go in the same sentence…
David Koch
@Laertes: 3 to 4 decibels is effectively silent.
Omnes Omnibus
@David Koch: Sorry, sport, this is not silent.
El Caganer
@David Koch: So Brady’s gonna be traded to ISI at the end of the season?
J R in WV
@Laertes:
I’m with you, either story is a good story, dunno which one is more real, don’ care at all!
I’m believing if they were supposed to descend silently (as silently as two giant helicopters can, anyway) into the night and whisk bin Laden away into a secret world, well, yeah, that went south when the other copter crashed BOOM! and then protocol called for them to blow up the sekret sauce on the crashed helicopter.
But they got their man, and everyone got away OK but for bin Laden, and who cares about him? Murdering fool. Oh, not to compare with Cheney and his komerades, but still an evil killer.
All these supposed details from Sy don’t mean a thing, cause it ain’t got that swing!
No one who matters cares. I had a lot of respect for Sy, from the 70s on up, but how old is he now?
David Koch
I realize the right has birthers, and sadly their are a few on the left who are truthers.
so naturally there will be members from the so called “reality based community” who will subscribe to Hersh’s neo-trutherism, no matter how thin and silly, no matter that he was proven demonstrably wrong when he said JFK got the FBI to murder Marilyn and make look like a suicide, and no matter that his buffoonish Rand Paul CT last year that the BENGHAZI! was an arms deal gone wrong blew up in his face.
That’s just the way it goes.
Laertes
Indeed, 3 to 4 decibels is nothing. If those helicopters are producing noise in the 3-4 db range, I’d expect that the noise from the ground debris being pushed around would be louder than the blades. And so there’s just no way you could expect the guards to distinguish approaching copters from, say, a brief gust of wind.
I’m puzzled by that quote, though. There’s two ways to read it, and both seem implausible. A literal reading is that they reduced the blade noise by 3-4 db, which is so small a reduction that it’s scarcely worth mentioning, so it’s probably a botched bit of phrasing? And yet, it seems similarly implausible that aircraft can really be that quiet. because, goddamn.
Also, they’re focused there entirely on the noise produced by the interaction of the blades with the air. Are there other sources of mechanical noise from a helicopter? The motors maybe?
Brachiator
A report about the Hersh story on Gawker makes the following claim:
http://gawker.com/hersh-everything-we-were-told-about-osama-bin-laden-s-1703587387
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/05/hersh-did-not-break-bin-laden-cover-up-story.html
Keith G
Maybe Hersh’s tale is filled with truths and maybe it isn’t. Either way, OBL is dead and either story still reflects well on Obama. No need to circle any wagon’s. Hersh’s story even if true will have no impact on this administration’s legacy on this issue.
@Laertes:
Very pertinent.
If spinning a yarn, or blowing a lot of smoke is needed to cover some unsavory horse-trading in the national security environment, I cannot be surprised. It’s one of the things that presidents and their minions do.
David Koch
@Omnes Omnibus:
The data says 3 to 4 dB. You can choose to accept the data or not.
I have found self described member of the “reality based community” often have trouble accepting data and reality.
Life will go on, or not.
Omnes Omnibus
@David Koch:
It says reductions “of” not “to.” Did you listen to the comparisons?
Laertes
@David Koch:
Take a minute to think about the difference between a “reduction of 3-4 db” and a “reduction to 3-4 db”
Laertes
@Keith G:
Hersh alleges that the USGov’t has fudged the details of OBL’s death to make it look less like cold-blooded murder and more like a capture attempt that regrettably led to the death of the subject because he resisted.
This is plausible because we know for a fact that the gov’t has lied or misspoken about precisely this incident in precisely this manner: Early official versions of the story had OBL reaching for or using a weapon. Some short time later those statements were rendered no longer operative and new accounts emerged in which OBL was unarmed.
Fog of war is a thing. It’s an easy detail to get wrong. But it definitely adds to the plausibility of Hersh’s account. There is nothing at all implausible about special ops guys going in with the intent to kill OBL rather than capture him, no matter what he did. And nothing at all implausible about spokespeople and politicians fudging the details to tell a more palatable story to a frankly juvenile public who craves a more heroic narrative.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Laertes:
Okay, fair enough. I actually do like to hear the full story about things (if you don’t read it already, you would probably like Mike Dash’s A Blast from the Past history blog).
The people I don’t get are the ones who seem to be trying to spin this into some kind of huge conspiracy to cover up something other than a mechanical failure and subsequent ass-covering. Hersch has some interesting details, but I don’t think they really change the underlying events much. But, then, I’m intensely cynical about both the Saudis and the Pakistanis and have no trouble believing that one or both of them were hiding Bin Laden from us.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Laertes:
Honestly, it doesn’t bother me that we assassinated Bin Laden, but I know there are people who would have preferred a public trial. I feel about it the same way I feel about John Wayne Gacy being executed — I am opposed to the death penalty, but I was not going to protest that particular execution.
Laertes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Right? I’m right there with you.
I found the stuff about “did he have a gun” to be particularly childish. Possession of a living OBL would have been a political nightmare, domestically and internationally. God only knows how many Westerners would have been kidnapped and eventually murdered behind that. And his presence at Gitmo would have made that an even bigger political clusterfuck than it already is. And can you imagine the freakshow if he’d been brought onto American soil and dropped in a holding cell where the justice system could reach him? Civil liberties where terror suspects are concerned is already a losing battle. Who wants to make OBL the face of the “let’s be civilized to our prisoners” side of that debate?
I’ve got absolutely no problem with cutting a deal with his captors to stand aside while American operators butcher him in his cell. Statecraft is bloody sometimes. Mostly it chews up people far less guilty than OBL. I’ve got no problem with the order to kill him in cold blood. I’ve even got no problem with the gov’t lying to me about how they did it. That’s cloak and dagger for you.
But I’ve also got no problem with some reporter learning and exposing the truth. That’s life too.
Brachiator
@Laertes:
And this also assumes that US officials quickly rejected any plan that would have Pakistan turn over bin Laden to the US for prosecution and decided on an assassination.
And I don’t know if any aspects of Hersh’s account becomes more plausible. And it may be that the public craves a more heroic narrative. Or maybe they’re just happy that bin Laden is dead.
But Hersh and his sources fudge on how soon the US discovered and confirmed not only bin Laden’s location, but that Pakistan had him in cozy custody. It is odd that none of bin Laden’s allies could find out where he was or try to have him released. And once bin Laden’s location was known, Pakistan officials seemed to quickly and easily let the US set up the attack.
And, except for the childish notion that the US should never, ever, lie about something like this, why is Hersh claiming that this is such a scandal?
David Koch
@Laertes: @Omnes Omnibus:
typo. The entire article is about silence and noise cancellation. the article says the blades “virtually eliminate the loud air chopping”. Eliminate. Eliminate.
Fine. Don’t believe it. There are people all over Deadspin right now telling me Brady was framed. I’ve got bigger CTs to fry.
Laertes
@Brachiator:
It’s not clear to me that Hersh is claiming that it’s such a scandal. Seemed to me he was merely claiming that it was true, and then people who didn’t want to hear it decided to respond to what the wish Hersh had written, rather than what he wrote. But, hey, I only read it once. Maybe there’s a bit in there where he lays out why he thinks this is such a scandal. Maybe you could quote it for me.
Cervantes
@Laertes:
Good luck.
Laertes
@David Koch:
Virtually. Virtually.
And you’re still talking only about the noise from the rotors, and not from the engines. Which you try to paper over by stating that since helicopters are commonly called “choppers,” the rotors must be the only part of the craft that makes noise. Well, you’re not stating it outright because it sounds really silly if spelled out, but you’re strongly implying it. Aren’t you?
J R in WV
It takes a specific amount of energy to support a given weight above the ground. For that given amount of energy, there will be an amount of sound produced, related to that amount of energy being used.
Airplanes, hovercraft, rockets, helicopters, all use energy to remain in the air, above the ground. They all make noise. Gliders are nearly silent, they don’t use any energy other than that present in updrafts. But they also don’t allow you to drop vertically into a courtyard, as helicopters do.
The text doesn’t support silent helicopters, it supports slightly quieter helicopters.
Laertes
Here‘s an article about the noise of the UH-60M.
It cites this as a source for the UH-60M
The UH60M produces a maximum of 80db while overflying at 500′ AGL, and under 65db at 2000′ AGL. Compared to the UH-60A’s 88.4db and 80.8 at identical altitudes, that’s quite an improvement!
Is the UH-60M the craft that was used in Abbatobad? The articles I’ve found say it was, but maybe they’re talking about something else? Either way, doesn’t sound like they’re anywhere near 4db.
Cervantes
@Laertes:
We can acknowledge that Nusca’s article is not the clearest. For example:
While a reduction of three to four decibels may sound good (so to speak), a reduction of just three to four decibels sounds less impressive.
Plus the number of reporters and readers who actually understand the decibel (as a measure) is quite small, I imagine.
Brachiator
@Laertes:
I’ll let you read it again.
Is he just saying, “here’s the real facts behind what happened. Thanks for reading it.”
chopper
@Laertes:
3-4 dB is so far below the limit of human hearing it’s not even funny.
Laertes
This article says that 65db is what a normal conversation sounds like from three feet away. So, if one of these stealth helicopters 2000′ above you sounds about as loud as a normal conversation 3 feet away, it doesn’t seem at all implausible to have the guards use that as a signal to stand down.
chopper
@chopper:
Or at least is lower than pretty much anything we hear in real life on any given day.
sharl
@Laertes: I thought I might be able to add something to the conversation about chopper noise by poking around in the live tweeting by, and subsequent interviews (e.g.) with Mr. Sohaib Athar, a Pakistani IT guy who moved to Abbottabad to get away from his stressful life in Lahore. Unlucky him!
Unfortunately I don’t think Athar’s observations offer any kind of definitive proof, one way or the other. At least one of the choppers was certainly noisy before one of the choppers crashed, but perhaps the same mechanical failure that caused the crash gave rise to extra noise from the failed chopper.*
Poor Mr. Athar; media’s after him again, this time to respond to the Hersh article. No peace for the poor guy.
*IANAHE {I Am Not A Helicopter Expert}
ETA: And by “chopper”, I of course don’t mean commenter “Chopper”, who may be noisy and/or prone to crashes for all I know, but that’s none of my business.
ETA2: fixed a couple little thangs.
chopper
@Laertes:
3 dB would be like sitting in an absolutely quiet room meditating only quieter. i mean, come on.
Cervantes
@chopper:
No, the human ear can detect sounds down to about zero decibels.
±3 decibels is about the smallest difference that the ear can detect.
As I said, the number of reporters and readers who actually understand the decibel (as a measure) is quite small.
chopper
@Cervantes:
yeah, I corrected that statement. thanks for googling it for us tho.
Cervantes
@chopper:
Your “corrected” statement is still incorrect.
But do carry on.
chopper
@Cervantes:
Whatever you say, dogg. You’re the expert.
catclub
The point in the Vox piece that made sense to me was that, after My Lai and Abu Ghraib, there was a waterfall of confirming news on the subject. I guess we will have to wait and see if there is similar confirming news here.
Cervantes
@catclub:
But many people are constitutionally incapable of doing that.
Cervantes
@chopper:
From the frying pan into the fire, as usual.
Tree With Water
“..What’s clear is that, in the war on terror, or whatever it is in which we’ve been engaged since we handed the military policy over to the spooks and thrown international crisis diplomacy into the vast, deep underbrush of myth and legend generated by the conjuring spells of the intelligence world, that we willingly surrendered self-government to magic and spell craft..”.
Damn straight. Charles Pierce wrote that.
chopper
@Cervantes:
so, what about “3dB is like meditating in a calm room only even quieter” is wrong?
chopper
@Cervantes:
come on, dogg, don’t tell me I broke the pedantry rules or something.
Omnes Omnibus
I’ll just reiterate my original point: no helicopter is silent.
The Blog Dahlia
@Cervantes:
LOL. Of course, you people have no understanding of the measurement of sound pressure, which I just looked up 45 seconds ago. Scoff!
Keith G
I think on some other nearby blog, folks are arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Let’s combine these two threads.
Major Major Major Major
@Keith G: Five, and it sounds like a calm conversation from ten feet away.
Idiot.
Laertes
I can’t keep track of the bitch and counterbitch here, but if someone can break it down for me: Do we still have anyone insisting that the helicopters were so quiet that the guards could not possibly have heard their approach?
Major Major Major Major
@Laertes: Monsignor Koch
Or he’s just being pedantic, I dunno. Don’t wanna make enemies.
The Blog Dahlia
In all seriousness, 0dB is the ‘limit of human hearing’ only on paper. That’s considering a perfect quiet room, a subject with perfect hearing and a single tone. In real life the limit for your average adult is measurably higher. 3dB is totally below that limit.
boatboy_srq
@Laertes: No, not bullshit. We’re seeing the beginnings of the Dem primary season (GOTea primary season seems to be 24/7 these days), and the only three meaningful names are HRC, O’Malley and Sanders, which is a fairly small pool. There’s a lot of discussion about a worthwhile primary, with somebody to present an effective challenge to HRC if only to push her in a more progressive direction; and there’s a tremendous squealing from the far left for a Warren campaign to do just that, though she’s said repeatedly that she isn’t interested. Hersh’s article is another nail in that coffin but good: anyone interested in the office has just been served notice that he’ll dig up any dirt he can find and publish it whenever he feels like it because Nobody’s Perfect And Here’s Proof. Hersh may or may not be interested in torpedoing any candidacy he finds lacking – but his relentless search for clay feet he can bash isn’t helping anyone but Hersh. His standard for public service is high enough (despite the standards for his own sources – as mentioned elsewhere in this thread – being somewhat lesser so long as they contain dirt on somebody in a position of power) that nobody human will be able to meet them. That’s a little less than pragmatic here.
Laertes
In any case, nobody is talking about a 3dB source. Koch has turned up some articles claiming a reduction of 3-4 dB. I’ve still seen no article which suggests that a helicopter of the sort used in the Abbatobad raid couldn’t be clearly heard by an observer on the ground at a distance that would allow them to flee before it was upon them. I’m finding sources that suggest that at 2000 feet directly above you it’d be about as loud as a normal conversation three feet away.
Seriously, this can’t be hard. If it’s true that UH-60Ms are so quiet that they could be upon you before you even heard, them…where’s the link? Some article showing a 4db reduction in prop noise is barely even a tiny step in that direction.
Laertes
@boatboy_srq:
The squid ink here is pretty thick. I can sort of make out that I’m supposed to believe that the guy who broke the story of the My Lai massacre is now a wingnut. Or something?
And, somehow or other, the suggestion that Bin Laden’s body was tossed out the door of a helicopter somewhere over the Himalayas and not, as we were told, off the flight deck of an American supercarrier, is part of a plot to kneecap Hillary Clinton? Have I got that about right?
El Caganer
Until somebody pointed me to the following, I didn’t realize how much of Hersh’s piece was cribbed from elsewhere: http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/05/hersh-did-not-break-bin-laden-cover-up-story.html
Laertes
It’s all lies! Also, it’s old news! We totally knew all of this already!
Also it’s lies!
The Blog Dahlia
@Laertes:
DK is not being clear. Either he thinks a 3-5dB reduction in a loud-ass chopper makes it silent (which is silly) or he’s thinking of a reduction to 3-5dB actual which is notably below what you and I and Cervantes could actually hear.
Brachiator
Is helicoptergate still whirling?
On a local talk radio station, one of the hosts with military cred is saying that it was known that some guards disappeared at the sound of helicopters.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
The only thing I know about helicopters is that when I was at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl a few years ago, the orchestra had to stop playing for a few minutes while an LAPD helicopter hovered overhead (and the conductor jokingly shook his fist at it) because it drowned out the music. So if a helicopter’s noise could be reduced down to that of a normal conversation, that’s a pretty big difference.
Of course, I suspect that the LAPD deliberately boosts the loudness of their helicopters to be assholes, so there’s that factor as well.
Corner Stone
I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to this thread sooner. I’ve been saying since the killing of OBL that the official cover story was complete bullshit. And anyone who couldn’t get the fact that ISI sold OBL to us when they were ready needs to put on a nice helmet to protect themselves when they continually run into walls in their abode.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I recall some Twitter or other social media post from someone in the neighborhood who heard or saw a copter. Or maybe it was a dream. But I am not going to get into the db arguments.
KFI radio brought on some guy who broadly supported Hersh. But because this is a right leaning station, they also had to lay on that Obama was supposed to say nothing for some unspecified time because the military or the intelligence community wanted to control the story and US relations with Pakistan. But Obama insisted on being president.
Valdivia
@catclub:
I agree. It actually turns out that what seems to be true in this piece had already been reported by others years ago, ie that there was an ISI whistleblower, and that some in ISI knew about where he was. The rest seems totally made up, or spun by someone to SH.
Scamp Dog
A 3dB reduction drops the sound intensity by about half; since the sound power received drops off with distance squared, the reduced noise helicopter is as loud as the standard when it’s at 70% of the distance of the standard helicopter. Nice, but not silent by any stretch of the imagination.
Cervantes
@Laertes:
Comic relief is still relief. Be grateful.
Paul in KY
@David Koch: The Cheatriots got a smacking. Good on Goodell!
Cervantes
@sharl:
And did anyone, then or now, notice her unimpeachable “[s]ources in the intelligence community” who told her everything?
(And just incidentally: Hersh’s sources are not the same as hers.)
Cervantes
@chopper:
@chopper:
@The Blog Dahlia:
A word of advice — you two geniuses ought to take Maurice Switzer to heart: It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
(Too risky?)
chopper
@Cervantes:
so 3dB isn’t quieter than meditating in a calm room? it isn’t lower than pretty much anything we hear in real life on any given day?
or are backhanded insults all you have today?
chopper
@chopper:
Forget it, Jake. It’s Pedantictown.
It doesn’t matter that for all intents and purposes, in real-life conditions, you were right; you see, he looked something up on the internet.
chopper
@chopper:
That was meant to reply to TBD. Of course being on my iPhone I’m lucky if anything actually posts at all.
The Blog Dahlia
Also, consider this; a kid with good hearing under lab measuring conditions (special headphones etc) may have a threshold of 0 dB at 1kHz, but drop that tone a decade and his or her threshold jumps to about 25 dB according to data. And that’s a kid with good hearing, not an adult.
Given that, at least from a distance, the majority of a chopper’s noise is going to be in the low frequencies, a “3 dB helicopter” would in fact, for all reasonable purposes, be notably below your and my threshold of hearing. At least the vast majority of its noise would. In real life.
Not bloody likely.
sharl
@Cervantes: Yeah, I think everyone who looks even half-seriously at the writings of those who cover the NatSec beat – whether reporters or commenters with a particular knowledge or just passion for the topic – notices the inevitable reliance on anonymous sources. Very frustrating, but not surprising, given the nature of what’s being covered. For that reason I almost never to expect to learn “The Truth” of such matters until many years after the fact. It’s a very fertile environment for lazy pundits and purveyors of conspiracy “theories”, and works against the goal of having “a well informed electorate”.
It certainly exasperates reporters who spend a ton of time carefully crafting and filing FOIA requests, only to so often receive nothing of use in return. It’s why Hersh and so many like him will have to “go for it” with limited sourcing, if they want to publish anything at all. I assume that is why so many reporters hold Hersh in high regard despite the acknowledgement – even from his “allies” – of his limited sourcing. And of course there is the fact that he has a good track track record that includes a couple huge stories under his belt; no mean feat given the fact that he works such a difficult, reporter-unfriendly beat.
Well, so she says, but how would we know for certain? They’re anonymous! [By the way, I called her a “reporter” upthread, but it’s probably safer to call her a NatSec writer, or as some of her critics call her, ‘just a blogger’.]
Cervantes
@sharl:
I wasn’t going by what she says. As for Hersh’s sources being anonymous, the question is: anonymous to whom? I related yesterday a comment that his sometimes-editor, David Remnick, made in an interview with the CJR:
So there’s that.
Well, she’s also a novelist who is unwilling to “deny the effectiveness of waterboarding” — not that this means she’s incorrect about anything (else).
Cervantes
@The Blog Dahlia:
But who is talking about a “3 dB helicopter”? Whence came this notion?
Maybe read this again and see if it makes more sense to you now.
The Blog Dahlia
@Cervantes:
David Koch appeared to be, or at least was confused as to the issue. That’s what chopper was addressing, as did Laertes and Omnes up thread. Just look at what chopper was replying to in the first place. It isn’t hard.
sharl
@Cervantes:
His sources are anonymous to the one person who matters most to me: me. Regarding Mr. Remnick, he took a pass on this story. I’ll grant that the London Review of Books has a good reputation AFAICT – it certainly ain’t The Daily Caller – but as a former LRB editor once noted, they do fact checking differently there:
But as I said, we among the lowly unwashed masses of readers won’t likely know The Truth for a long time to come. We read, we take note of what we are told, and whether it makes sense in the context of what we know about the world, and we move on.
In summary, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
chopper
@The Blog Dahlia:
thats what i meant in the first place by hearing threshold. i wasn’t referring to an audiology lab. i was referring to the real world, like the one where helicopters may be flying by. in real-world conditions you wouldn’t be able to distinguish something that quiet from background noise. i’m not sure if Koch meant absolute noise level but several of us weren’t sure and he didn’t seem to want to clarify.
Cervantes
@sharl:
NBC News, such as it is, now asserts some confirmation of what Hersh reported.
Also, re fact-checking, you might take a look at this epic:
If you haven’t already, that is.
sharl
@Cervantes: Actually I tend to believe Hersh is closer to the truth of what actually happened, certainly more so than the “reporters” who act more like Administration stenographers on stories like this. My concern is with the anonymous sourcing, which is, alas, unavoidable for reporters working the NatSec beat.
I wish for an open, democracy-friendly system with minimum cloak-&-dagger and skulduggery, with a press to match. I also wish for a unicorn that shits gold bullion.
I’m not familiar with the book you cited; I’ll add it to my list of stuff to check out – it’s a very long list, unfortunately, but this sound like something that belongs there. Thanks much.
mclaren
I take it as read that Bin Laden was wheelchair-bound and helpless because America’s military *N*E*V*E*R* fights serious adversaries. As a group of rapists, felons and gang members led by incompetent careerists, the U.S. military always chooses to fight only the weakest and most helpless adversaries. The ideal U.S. military encounter is a strapping 250-pound prizefighter with a spiked baseball bat beating a small crippled 5-year-old child to death.
As a nation of cowardly bully-worshipers, Americans are terrified of a fair fight. Thus American military forces will never willingly
attack any adversary who can defend himself.
The enemy of American military interventions must always be unarmed, crippled, old, helpless, a child, a blind quadriplegic, a pregnant woman, and preferably tied down to the ground with stakes.
Cervantes
@sharl:
Yes, but why?
From the article you cited:
Seems as good a time as any to reiterate once again (!) that Remnick wrote to support Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq — so much for the magazine’s vaunted American-style fact-checking. (Discovering the LRB’s attitude towards that invasion is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Cervantes
@sharl:
Yes. It’s a concern. Writer, editor, and publisher all have a track record one can examine. Whereas simply dismissing outright a report of this nature (ostensibly) because one does not know who the source is seems … incautious. (Not that you did this, but others do.)
One of those wishes is worth taking seriously.
I know what you mean. Today was a busy day, largely on the phone. Yesterday I re-read:
And for tomorrow, if I can find the time, an amuse-gueule: