It’s not strictly that it’s been discredited in our minds. It’s that its only confirmed in yours.
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I will admit to a certain personality flaw: initially, I will give too much credit to people with credentials and a reputation. But when those same people start insisting that I should believe them based only on their titles or degrees or what they’ve done before, I start to resent it. And when they ignore contrary evidence and start calling people stupid, well, fuck them. I would try to change this since it’s never benefited me afaik, but I’m too old now so hell with it.
And again, Hersh points out that the CIA uses open source data as part of their cover stories. They’re planning for all this. Is this a conspiracy theory? Literally yes, there was a conspiracy to blow up the pipeline!
Maybe they used their open-source data trick to fool Hersh! Clever bastards. You can always concoct a story to fit the observed facts when there aren’t very many.
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I agreed with you that Sy might be wrong in that exact way: duped by the CIA or whoever as part of some disinformation campaign.
OK, great. But he does not agree that’s possible. He insists he’s right and everybody else is dumb.
duped by Zee Germans? or Zee Rusisans? why stress CIA there?
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Unshakable faith. We could have a video come out tomorrow of Argentine scuba divers jumping off an Argentine ship taking explosives down to the pipe, and he’ll still consider us idiots if we don’t think the CIA is ultimately behind it.
Of course Sy doesn’t think that he’s been duped. Until its been demonstrated that its so I don’t see why you should hold it against him that he’s not inclined to entertain that suggestion. A journalist should stand by his story. He thinks he’s right, and he’d better think that if he’s publishing such an impactful story.
That’s fine, but Sy did respond to that open source boat location guy. He said first, the boat was there, and the boat guy says that the boat was there. And that the information the boat guy is relying on can be easily gamed and manipulated by state actors, and of course the CIA type guys will take this into account. That’s not a compelling response to you?
And as far as appealing to reputation goes, that’s the only thing that the public can really refer to when a journalist uses anonymous sources. Right?
The boat location stuff introduces uncertainty. I don’t see how it can possibly increase confidence in Hersh’s claims.
A journalist using a single anonymous source who hasn’t talked to anyone else should acknowledge the limitations of this kind of reporting. Reputation only goes so far and Hersh isn’t doing himself any favors by being so arrogant.
I disagree though. It’s obvious that the CIA might mess with open source information and, in fact, probably has to in some way, but that’s a bit like saying companies are going to cook the books therefore accounting or looking over a company’s books after the fact is meaningless.
The article is interesting because combines the difference sources of open information together to insolate that there could only be one potential ship that could have done it according to Hersh’s story. That’s good reporting! It’s something that Hersh didn’t bother to do.
They then show that the one ship that could have done it seemed to follow a course that would have made it difficult to do an operation. They use satellite photography and beacon information to plot the ship’s course, so it’d be one thing to say they just turned off their beacon and had all the time in the world to do it, it’s another to say the ship was at point A at X time and at point B at Y time based off of multiple sources of information. They then ask a diving expert about it and he doesn’t say it couldn’t be done, he said it’d be difficult to do. Remember Hersh’s rebuttal to all of this doesn’t try to refute any of this, he just hand waves away all the publicly available information, but like a company cooking the books, it’s easy to cook one report it’s harder to cook multiple reports in a way that’s undetectable or that coordinate with each other. I imagine it’s the same with the CIA and publicly available information
I can’t believe that I’m actually surprised by you refusing to admit you were likely wrong. I know so much better
I might be confused by all the back and forth, but I don’t see a disagreement about this. Except maybe that though not meaningless, looking over the books isn’t the final word either. Maybe the accountants or regulators were paid off or lazy or incompetent or just missed something. The final assessment and the amount of confidence we have has to be based on all the possibilities.
I agree. The more information we have the better judgment we can make about what the truth is.*
*Edit: Well, maybe not but you know what I mean.
Except it’s not like cooking the books because a company should never cook the books but the CIA of course will spoof transponders, throw the transponder into another boat while they do their thing, check when military and commercial recon satellites will be over the operational area, whatever. You could easily imagine a team of people would be planning for weeks getting all these ducks in a row. That’s why Sy is so dismissive of this. You’re seeing what they want you to see. They’re not stupid, they have all the resources in the world, and they had months to plot this sabotage.
Which isn’t to say that they did spoof any transponder or anything like that. Maybe the boat was exactly where the public data says it was (very close to but not loitering over the explosions), and did the dive like that, from a small boat launched off the warship. I don’t know. There’s a hundred ways they could have done it. And it’s not clear Sy even knows the operational details. But he never claimed the boat loitered over the explosion site, so nothing in his story seems even close to debunked to me, even if all the location data is correct.
Sir this is the same CIA that did the bay of pigs. You are assuming far too much about the CIA’s competency.
A speculative thread. From the images of the pipe, the cuts look pretty clean. It does not look like an excessive amount of explosive was used.
https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1636020576828440576?t=koMiu8uhEW8OrbmDwsMFTg&s=19
https://twitter.com/ChuckPfarrer/status/1636063107419107328?t=4o7KH59_J8OIBP8ncfLRuQ&s=19
wasn’t the only thing putin said. he claimed that they detected another detonation receiver upstream on the pipe. which is brand-new information that even hirsh’s source did not know.
yeah okay 
a different speculative theory was thrown out by milov. the “easiest” way to move a detonation charge somewhere in the pipeline to blow it isn’t with divers. but rather by attaching it to a PIG. A specially made device for inspecting and cleaning the inside of the pipeline during maintenance, which if you remember NordStream was shut for maintenance for months before the explosion.
guess how the operators would put the PIG into the pipeline. there’s a special terminal to do it on the russian side.
The pig method was featured in a Bond movie, The World is not Enough. But from at least the one pic, it doesn’t look like the explosion could have been initiated from inside the pipe. And at least to me, it doesn’t look like an improvised device either. It’s been cut nice and clean, like a Thanksgiving turkey. But that’s not to say different methods couldn’t have been used in different locations.
yeah i can see the method was mentioned in news articles at the time of the explosion, without any confidence because no investigation had taken place yet.
i don’t know what i’m looking at on those pictures, nor have i ever known anything about underwater explosives. but it does seem russia has access to it without divers.