Category: History

Today’s must read

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Charleston and Amalek.

It’s an essay by my brother, Bear who Swims, on Dylann Root and the ethics of whether or not he can/should be forgiven by his victims.

At his bail hearing, some of the relatives of the victims, driven by their faith, stated that they had forgiven him.

My brother suggests, convincingly IMHO, that Torah forbids such forgiveness:

I cannot criticize this on their part, and would not deny them the right to do this.

This forgiveness by the survivors may be very helpful to them, in an existential way. It can help them to choose to continue on with their lives as real people, and not as victims and exemplars.

For them, as they bear the direct consequences of the act, this is a supportable moral choice. I will say that to me rage would also be a supportable moral choice. Whatever helps them.

………

But it is arrogant for the rest of us to speak about forgiveness.  Who are we to forgive, who have not ourselves been injured.

I am not, here speaking about the terrorist*.  He is an irrelevant detail.  Forgive him, if it makes you feel good.

Consider instead, Amalek.

In Torah, Amalek is a nation related to the Israelites, but an implacable enemy — see D’varim (Deuteronomy) 25:17-19**.  In later rabbinic writing, the term is used to describe all implacable evil.

The greatest of the crimes was

he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were enfeebled in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary

This passage is one of those sections of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) that makes ‘modern Jews’, itchy, as it goes on to say:

thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget

as it doesn’t seem speak about how we would like the world to work.

However, I will suggest that this message of non-forgiveness is applicable and to the world today.

I would embrace and extend this, and apply this to people who seek to subjugate and destroy other people using scriptural justifications.

Think that Christofascists and gay marriage, ISIS and basically everyone else,  the domestic terrorists who murder abortion doctors, or the Hindu nationalists in India.  (I would note that the death toll from Hindu nationalism dwarfs that of the other three)

Not only should there be no forgiveness for people like this, but there should be no attempt to accommodate their sensibilities.

Their views are a perversion of what it means to being a civilized human being.

In any case, go read his full essay.

Can We Please Not Talk Silver Linings Here?

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Gov. Nikki R. Haley called on Monday for South Carolina to do what just a week ago seemed politically impossible — remove the Confederate battle flag from its perch in front of the State House building here. She argued that a symbol long revered by many Southerners was for some, after the church massacre in Charleston, a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.”

“The events of this week call upon us to look at this in a different way,” said Ms. Haley, an Indian-American, who is the first member of an ethnic minority to serve as governor of the state as well as the first woman.

She spoke at an afternoon news conference, surrounded by Democratic and Republican lawmakers including both of the state’s United States senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, an African-American. “Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it’s time to move the flag from the capitol grounds,” she said.

It was a dramatic turnabout for Ms. Haley, a second-term Republican governor who over her five years in the job has displayed little interest in addressing the intensely divisive issue of the flag. But her new position demonstrated the powerful shock that last Wednesday’s killings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church have delivered to the political status quo, mobilizing leaders at the highest levels.

For Haley, and her ilk, this is not a moral decision, it is merely one of political expedience.

Businesses have never been particularly fond of the flag, and the controversy that it engenders, but politicians who pander to racism (largely the Republican party these days) have been afraid about a backlash from a fanatical minority come election day.

The terrorist attack on the Emanuel A.M.E. Church has changed this political calculus, for a while at least.

I hope that the legislature moves quickly.

Another Clown Exits the Republican Presidential Primary Car

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I am referring, of course, to John Ellis “Jeb” Bush, who has finally made his run for the Presidency official.

While many in the Republican Party see him as a potential respite from the clown car, the fact that his staff is suggesting that they should go all “Pickett’s Charge” on his opponents, which I guess means slowly marching ¾ of a mile against an entrenched opponent backed up by artillery that is both copious and highly competent:

………

Mr. Diaz, who seared John Kerry in 2004 and Mitt Romney in 2007 with charges of flip-flopping on issues, and other Bush aides are determined to develop new lines of attack against Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the two Republicans who represent the greatest threats to Mr. Bush’s nomination, according to his advisers and allies.

The Bush campaign sees Mr. Rubio as vulnerable on his Senate record, which is short on legislative success and includes shifts on immigration, and on his history of managing his finances. And they regard Mr. Walker, too, as susceptible to attack on issues on which he has changed his positions, according to the advisers. By hiring Mr. Diaz, Mr. Bush wanted to send a clear signal that “the culture of the Bush operation will now be a Pickett’s Charge engagement campaign with his main opponents,” according to one Bush ally.

(emphasis mine)

So, yeah, they are clown car too, though what is likely the biggest clown in the 2016 Republican Presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, looks to be announcing his candidacy tomorrow.

I cannot believe that we will have a more absurd candidate than “The Donald”, but if one turns up, I will be there, staring at the spectacle with a stunned look on my face that will resemble that of a cow that has just stepped on its own udder.

(H/T Paul Krugman for that quote.)

Whiny Bitch of the Day: France

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France has its panties in a bunch because Belgium has produced a €2.50 coin commemorating Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo:

Perhaps befitting a battle that ended French hegemony in Europe, Paris, it seems, has been outflanked once again.

 After it objected to a decision in March by Belgium to introduce a new 2 euro coin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Belgians retreated, scrapping 180,000 coins they had already minted.

 But victory for France is proving elusive.

 This week, Belgium decided to circumvent French resistance by invoking a little-known European Union rule that allows countries to issue euro coins of their choice, provided they are in an irregular denomination.

 That led to the unveiling of a €2.50 coin — a first in Belgium — and 70,000 of them have now been minted. The coins, which can only be spent inside Belgium, display a monument of a lion atop a cone-shaped hill on the site of France’s humiliation, as well as lines indicating where troops were positioned when forces led by Britain and Prussia defeated Napoleon in the countryside near Brussels.

 Johan Van Overtveldt, the Belgian finance minister, insisted on Monday that the new coins were not meant to provoke Gallic anger.

 “The goal is not to revive old quarrels in a modern Europe — and there are more important things to sort out,” he was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. “But there’s been no battle in recent history as important as Waterloo, or indeed one that captures the imagination in the same way.”

 ………

 In Britain, where the 19th-century poet laureate Robert Southey called the Battle of Waterloo “the greatest deliverance that civilized society has experienced” since Charles Martel repelled an Islamic conquest of Europe in 732, the new €2.50 coin aroused similar adulation.

 “Well done Belgium beat the French at their own game of finding ways around EU rules, the English should take note!!” Michael Dunn, from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote on Twitter.

 Others were less impressed. On Facebook, Manuel Di Pietrantonio suggested that the value of the dispute was about €2.50.

I agree with Mr. Di Pietrantonio.  It’s a tempest in a teapot, and it is the French who are making it so.

Commemorating its 200th anniversary is completely appropriate.

Waterloo is a very big deal:  Not only did it end the career of Napoleon, but it was the triumph of the General Staff over the lone general, which served to transform war.

I so want to get one and try to spend it in Paris.

Obama Has Learned Nothing, and He Has Forgotten Nothing*

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And the escalation in Iraq continues:

President Obama has authorized the deployment of up to 450 more American troops to Iraq to train and assist the Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State, the White House announced on Wednesday, signaling a major shift of focus in the fight against the Sunni militant group.

 The United States forces will use Al Taqqadum, an Iraqi base near the town of Habbaniya in eastern Anbar Province, as their training hub, the White House said. Mr. Obama opted to send them at the request of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, and after consultation with Ashton B. Carter, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 “These new advisers will work to build capacity of Iraqi forces, including local tribal fighters, to improve their ability to plan, lead and conduct operations against ISIL in eastern Anbar under the command of the prime minister,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, referring to the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL. “This train, advise and assist mission builds on lessons learned during the past several months and is just one aspect of our commitment to support the Iraqi Security Forces.”

Al Taqqadum is near the front lines with ISIS in Iraq.

What could possibly go wrong?

“These new advisers will work to build capacity of Iraqi forces, including local tribal fighters, to improve their ability to plan, lead and conduct operations against ISIL in eastern Anbar under the command of the prime minister,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, referring to the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL. “This train, advise and assist mission builds on lessons learned during the past several months and is just one aspect of our commitment to support the Iraqi Security Forces.”

 Mr. Obama will also speed up the delivery of weapons and equipment to Iraqi forces, including pesh merga and tribal fighters who are under Iraqi command.

So, we will somehow being improving the the Iraqi military, all while giving large quantities of weapons to the Iraqi military, which is where ISIS got many of its weapons from.

Shortly after entering office, Obama, and most of his cabinet, read the book Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, which argued that the disaster in Vietnam was driven by a military that did not understand the war or the bigger picture, while around the same time, the Generals were reading A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam, which argues that we were winning the war in the 1970s, and would have won, if not for those meddling kids if the civilian leadership and the general public had not lost their nerve.

If you take advice on the making of war from a community that holds themselves blameless for our loss in Vietnam (i.e the military) and holds literally everyone else in the United States at fault, this is not a recipe for successful policy prescriptions.

After all, the US Military still promulgates the myth that it never lost a battle in Vietnam, (we lost at least 70 battles), and David Petraeus literally wrote this into his doctoral thesis.

Note that even after his guilty plea for giving classified information to his mistress and lying to law enforcement about this, he is still consulting with the White House on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To not quote Talleyrand,† “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”

*Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié. This generally ascribed to Talleyrand, referring to the general idiocy returned Bourbon monarchs after Napoleon’s final defeat. It is likely that the quote did not come from him.
†Again, this is probably not an actually a quote from Tallyrand. It was likely said by Joseph Fouché, but, “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute,” is all too frequently credited to Talleyrand.

Today’s Must Read on McKinney, and Bad Cops, and Good Cops

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Law Professor and former police officer Seth Stoughton makes the point that needs to be made about both the incident in McKinney, and in policing generally.

He observes that there are two cops on the film, and one gets people calmed down, and other one is Eric Casebolt:

An officer in McKinney, Texas, dashes down a sidewalk, losing his flashlight as he runs past a teenage videographer toward an emergency. Seconds later, the teen with the camera walks up to another officer, one who is standing with a group of kids. “I’m just saying,” the officer is saying in a calm, corrective tone that parents and school teachers everywhere will recognize. “Don’t take off running when the cops get here.”

He thanks the videographer for returning the flashlight, then listens for a few seconds as the kids around him try to explain who was and was not involved in a prior incident. “Okay, guys, I appreciate that,” the as-yet-unidentified officer says. He responds to their concerns—that the police had detained the wrong people—by saying, “Okay, that’s what I’m saying. They’re free to go.” While not casual, the officer is composed. His tone is friendly and professional as he engages with the kids.

Seconds later, another officer, Corporal Eric Casebolt, is shown interacting with some of the same kids. His angry tone and aggressive attitude stand in marked contrast to the first officer in the video. “Get on the ground,” he commands sharply while pulling on a young man’s wrist in a way that looks like he’s trying to force the man to the ground with a painful joint manipulation (technically a supinating wrist lock or, for martial arts enthusiasts, kote gaeshi).

When that proves ineffective, he grabs the back of the young man’s head and shoves him down. “I told you to stay,” he yells, pointing a large metal flashlight at someone off camera. “Get your asses down on the ground.” Like the first officer, he lectures some of the kids about running from the police, but he takes a very different approach. “Don’t make me fucking run around here with thirty pounds of god-damned gear on in the sun because you want to screw around out here.” He is anything but composed, calm or professional.

The two officers in this brief video represent two different policing styles, two different mindsets that officers use as they interact with civilians: the Guardian and the Warrior. As a former police officer and current policing scholar, I know that an officer’s mindset has tremendous impact on police/civilian encounters. I’ve described the Guardian and Warrior mindsets at some length here and here; for now, suffice to say that the right mindset can de-escalate tense situations, induce compliance, and increase community trust over the long-term. The kids interacting with the first officer were excited, but not upset; they remained cooperative. Had they gone home at that moment, they’d have a story for their friends and family, but it would be a story that happened to have the police in it rather than being a story about the police.

………

Officers should also look out for each other, protecting their colleagues not just from harm, but also from lashing out in anger or frustration. Policing can be intensely stressful, and officers should be trained and encouraged to help their peers deal with stressful situations. When an officer is losing his cool, another officer will often be able to intervene, giving the first a chance to collect himself. That type of peer support isn’t part of modern police culture—particularly not when the officer losing his temper is a supervisor and union official like Corporal Casebolt—but it should be.

A short video of officers in McKinney, Texas, shows us the avoidable results of an unnecessarily aggressive approach to policing. But in the same video, we can see a few seconds of policing the way the way it should be done.

Remember the old days, when people called members of the constabulary, “Peace Officer”?

A warrior cannot be a “Peace Officer”.  Their job is wage war against the enemy.

Peace Officers do not wage war against an enemy, the protect their fellow citizens.

In antiquity, when a “Warrior” took a town, he was supposed to take any male child that he found, and dash its brains out on the cobblestones.

This is not a proper model for policing.

I Mourn Vinnie Musetto

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He wrote Amazing headlines for the New York Daily News:

V.A. “Vinnie” Musetto, a longtime former New York Post editor known for writing the tabloid’s most famous headline more than three decades ago, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 74.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, Musetto’s daughter, Carly VanTassell, told Capital. He had entered end-of-life care at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx recently after receiving a sudden diagnosis.

Musetto had a long career at the Post, where he worked for more than 40 years as an editor and later as a film critic, a position he held until August 2013. He had retired two years earlier but continued writing film reviews until the Post cut off his freelance assignments.

He is most well known for coming up with the headline “Headless body in topless bar” in 1983. It was the type of lurid, can’t-make-this-stuff-up story that the tabloids live for, about a man who fatally shot the owner of a topless bar and forced a hostage to decapitate the body.

The headline was one for the history books and remains an object of fascination among newspaper wonks. But Musetto’s personal favorite is another infamous headline that he wrote, said VanTassell: “Granny executed in her pink pajamas.”*

I aspired to be 1/10 as good at writing headlines as he was one day.

*Velma Barfield, the first women executed in the US after the death penalty came back in 1976.

Oh, Snap!

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In arguments before the Supreme Court, Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia presented the case of convicted murderer Henry Lee McCollum as a perfect justification for the death penalty.

It turns out that McCollum was innocent:

A little over two decades ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was dismissive of then-Justice Harry Blackmun’s concerns about the death penalty. In fact, Scalia had a case study in mind that demonstrated exactly why the system of capital punishment has value.

 As regular readers may recall, Scalia specifically pointed to a convicted killer named Henry Lee McCollum as an obvious example of a man who deserved to be put to death. “For example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat,” Scalia wrote in a 1994 ruling. [Callins v. Collins, which involved Texas, not North Carolina] “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!”

 For Scalia, McCollum was the perfect example – a murderer whose actions were so heinous that his crimes stood as a testament to the merit of capital punishment itself.

 Yesterday, McCollum was pardoned. Scalia’s perfect example of a man who deserved to be killed by the state was innocent. North Carolina’s News & Observer reported:

Gov. Pat McCrory on Thursday pardoned two half-brothers who were exonerated of murder after spending three decades in prison.

The governor took nine months to make the decision, saying he thoroughly reviewed the pardons sought by Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. Both men are intellectually disabled.
If this story sounds at all familiar, it was last fall when a judge ordered the men released. The confessions appeared to have been coerced 30 years ago and new DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been overlooked at the time.

As recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party used a McCollum photo on campaign fliers to attack a Democratic candidate as “soft on crime.”

 McCollum hadn’t done anything wrong.

(emphasis mine)

Scalia’s habit of assuming facts not in evidence is really starting to wear thin.

This is something that judges, at least judges outside of Texas, should never do.

This Is the Best Parody of a Genre That I Have Seen in a Long Time

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I just saw Kung Fury on YouTube.

Doing a parody of a genre, in this case 80s Kung Foo movies, particularly if you are going a high cheese, is dancing on the knife edge.

If you are not cheesy enough, it doesn’t work.  If you are too cheesy, the audience loses the ability to suspend its disbelief.

The director and writer, David Sandberg gets the balance almost perfect.  (Laser Raptors and David Hasselhoff)

Francis Fixing What John Paul II Broke

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Over 30 years ago, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated at the orders of right wing politician Roberto D’Aubuisson.

It is almost certain that this was done with the active agreement of elements within the Reagan administration, and the passive acquiescence of the Holy See in Rome.

John Paul II was determined to extirpate what saw as left wing elements in the Church, and making noise about Romero’s murder was inconvenient when viewed through the lens of this agenda, (on edit) and so the silence on the assassination.

Well, Pope Francis just Beatified Archbishop Romero:

The Salvadorean archbishop Óscar Romero was beatified on Saturday, the final step before sainthood, 35 years after he was shot dead at the altar by a rightwing death squad for denouncing the oppression of the poor by the military dictatorship.

Roman Catholics from around the world mixed with former Marxist rebels from El Salvador’s brutal civil war as more than 250,000 people gathered in the capital to celebrate the country priest who confronted a US-backed government.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, sent by Pope Francis, officiated the ceremony that followed decades of debate over whether Romero had rejected Church doctrine by embracing radical, leftwing rebels.  [Actually the record shows that he was no fan of the rebels either, he opposed violence on both sides]

………

Born in 1917 in a mountain town near Honduras, Romero apprenticed as a carpenter as a boy before entering the church, where he rose through the ranks, appearing to be a quiet conservative.

But soon after being appointed archbishop in 1977, he became a staunch critic of the military government after it began killing, kidnapping and arresting priests who had been organising peasants and supporting workers’ rights.

His sermons, often broadcast on radio, riled rightwing extremists. But he ignored multiple death threats, remaining defiant up to his murder while giving mass in the chapel of a San Salvador hospital.

“In the name of this suffering people, whose cries to heaven become more deafening each day, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression,” he said in a speech to government soldiers the day before his death.

This, along with the sainthood for John XXIII, show a clean break for this Pontiff with his reactionary predecessors, though his longest term impact might be on cleaning up more mundane corruption in the finances of the Papal bureaucracy and the Vatican bank.

Time will tell.

Advertisement Octagon. Only One Shall Emerge Victorious!

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Coneheads


Brady Bunch

I really like these two ads that invoke classic TV, the Bradu Bunch and the the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live.

They are both brilliant.

Casting Danny Trejo as Marsha and Steve Buscemi as Jan Brady is genius, and their seamless integration into an existing scene is magnificent.

Conversely, the Coneheads commercial splices seamlessly into the already well known “Jake, from State Farm” ad.

I cannot decide which is the better exemplar of the classic TV based advertisement form.

The Most Incompetent Member of the Bush Administration

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I think that we have a winner, and despite a spirited competition, Richard Bruce Cheney has won the “most incompetent” crown:

Dick Cheney would like you to believe that he knows more about protecting the nation from terrorism than anyone else. But he actually knows less.

When presented with an actual terror threat — the one that turned into the 9/11 attacks — Cheney thought al Qaeda was bluffing.

No kidding. This is from The Great War Of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism, a new book by former acting CIA director Mike Morell:

The threat reporting continued [in the spring and summer of 2001] — other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” — but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida — purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response.

UBL Threats Are Real. Take a minute and think about that. Think about what would have happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 if Americans had known that had been Cheney’s attitude just a few months before. Think about how, if he’d been a Democrat, that would have defined liberals as weak, cowardly children for the next 50 years.

So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil. He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went.

Dick Cheney initiated the privatization of key military functions as SecDef under Bush 1.

He ignored the threat of  al Qaeda.

His response to the attacks of September 11 was to gin up a war with Iraq, who was secular Arab enemy of Jihadists.

As White House Chief of Staff, he convinced Gerald Ford to dump Nelson Rockefeller as VP for his reelection bid, killing any chance at grabbing a portion of Black vote.  (In 1976, Jimmy Carter was viewed with some suspicion by elements of the Black community)

This is a guy who has failed upward throughout his career.

No wonder that  Harry Whittington who was shot in the face by Cheney, ended up apologizing to Cheney for his being shot in the face. 

It appears to be some sort of twisted Republican imperative.

Some Other Folks Feel the Same Way about the Media’s Response as I Do

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There have been two cogent and well written critiques of the generally dismissive response of the mainstream media to Seymour Hersh’s story which claims to show that the official narrative of the Osama bin Laden killing was largely untrue.

The first, from the Columbia Journalism Review is likely to gain the most currency. It’s a fairly conventional analysis, and notes that Hersh’s critics have been lazy and knee jerk in their dismissal of his latest story:

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

………

Largely ignored in this is debate is the opinion of longtime New York Times Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has more knowledge of the region in one finger than most of Hersh’s critics put together. She wrote in the Times this week that she “would not necessarily dismiss [Hersh’s] claims immediately” and that “he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of.” Of his claim that an informant, rather than a courier, led the CIA to bin Laden, Gall wrote that “my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s.”

………

Within months, of course, Hersh’s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it. They questioned his sourcing while calling the story “exaggerated” and “overwritten and under-researched.” A year later, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.

Over at Pando, the redoubtable Mark Ames focuses more tightly on the 1970s CIA spying revalations, which to my mind makes for a more compelling critique of the recent press wank-fest, if just because the reaction seems identical to the last time:

………

Hersh has pissed off some very powerful people and institutions with this story, and that means the inevitable media pushback to discredit his reporting is already underway, with the attacks on Hersh led by Vox Media’s Max Fisher, CNN’s Peter Bergen, and even some on the left like Nation Institute reporter Matthieu Aikins. Yesterday Slate joined the pile-on, running a wildly entertaining, hostile interview with Hersh.

Such attacks by fellow journalists on a Sy Hersh bombshell are nothing new—in fact, he used to relish them, and probably still does. He got the same hostile reaction from his media colleagues when he broke his biggest story of his career: The 1974 exposé of the CIA’s massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents.

Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh’s exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House, which I wrote about in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.

………

And it was the Washington Post that led the attacks on Hersh’s reporting. In early January 1975, the WaPo ran an editorial, “The CIA’s ‘Illegal Domestic Spying,’” attacking Hersh for relying on anonymous sources—this from the same paper that relied on the most famous anonymous source in history, Deep Throat. The WaPo editorial went on:

“While almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the heading of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’”

………

A common line of attack was to call Hersh’s series “overwritten and under-researched.” Gossip in the Washington press corps at the time claimed that WaPo’s famous editor Ben Bradlee denounced Hersh’s stories as “overwritten and under-researched”; and when Hersh was passed over for the Pulitzer that year, to everyone’s surprise, one columnist wrote Hersh didn’t deserve it anyway, calling his MH-CHAOS exposes “overwritten, overplayed, under-researched and under-proven.”

………

Hersh might’ve been buried by his own press colleagues, who were only interested in discrediting his reporting, if not for CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Senate in mid-January, 1975. Hersh himself reported it for the Times, which led:

“William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged at a Senate hearing today that his agency had infiltrated undercover agents into antiwar and dissident political groups inside the United States as part of a counterintelligence program that led to the accumulation of files on 10,000 American citizens.”

After the CIA chief’s confirmation of Hersh’s story, his media detractors had no choice but to grudgingly walk back their criticism. Quoting again from Kathryn Olmsted’s book, after Colby’s admission,

“The Washington Post reported that Colby’s disclosure had ‘confirmed major elements’ of Hersh’s stories, and Newsweek agreed that Colby’s testimony had substantiated ‘many basic elements of the original story if not all the adjectives.’”

Today we’re seeing some of the same grudging, qualified acceptance of Hersh’s Bin Laden bombshell from the establishment press.

Later in 1975, the great Bill Greider—who was then an editor at the WaPo—summed up the attitude of the press to Hersh’s revelations:

“the press especially tugs back and forth at itself, alternately pursuing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.”

My how we’ve grown so much in the 40 years since.

I don’t know how much of Hersh’s story is true, but the press response at this point seems to exquisitely lame.

Background, and underlying story here.

Sy Hersh’s Bin Laden Story Is Looking a Bit Less Fantastical

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I mentioned yesterday that Seymour Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden, which is at siginficant variance with the official “Zero Dark Thirty” version was a potential bomb shell, but (at least initially) it was a bit light on sourcing.

Well, today, we have some more data points that seem to point to his story being accurate, at least in part.

First, we have a report from NBC saying that there was a Pakistani source inside the country’s state security apparatus:

Intelligence sources tell NBC News that in the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a retired Pakistani military intelligence officer helped the CIA track him down.

 While the Pakistani intelligence asset provided vital information in the hunt for bin Laden, he did not provide the location of the al Qaeda leader’s Abottabad, Pakistan compound, sources said.

 Three sources also said that some officials in the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.

 The asset was evacuated from Pakistan and paid reward money by the CIA, sources said. U.S. officials took pains to note he was one of many sources who provided help along the way, and said that the al Qaeda courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, remained the linchpin of the operation.

 The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking the courier.

 The new revelations do not cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission.

NBC qualifies as a reputable source, and this appears to be confirmation of a part of Hirsh’s story.

It should be noted though, that this omission from the official story might very well be an issue of “Sources and Methods” as well as diplomatic reality, both of which would mitigate against revealing the complicity of Pakistani security.

What’s more, this is precisely the sort of stuff that Hersh would uncover.

It’s significant, and embarrassing, and makes authorities look far less heroic, which history shows to be Hersh’s favorite kind of reporting.

Another interesting data point is that another reporter,  R. J. Hillhouse, is claiming that he took her story without attribution:

Seymour Hersh’s story, “The Killing of Bin Laden,” in the London Review of Books has a fundamental problem: it’s either plagiarism or unoriginal.

If it’s fiction–as some have implied, it’s plagiarism. If it’s true, it’s not original. The story was broken here on The Spy Who Billed Me four years ago, in August 2011:

“Bin Laden Turned in by Informant — Courier Was Cover Story”

“Questions Raised by Real Story of How US Found Bin Laden”

On August 7, 2011, I wrote, among other things:

………

I have had great respect for Seymour Hersh, arguably one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time. I do not believe his story is fiction. I trust my sources–which were clearly different than his. I am, however, profoundly disappointed that he has not given credit to the one who originally broke the story.

Hillhouse has writeen extensively on the US state security apparatus, including stories on outsourcing of intelligence activities that have drawn responses from the Director of National intelligence.

So, we have confirmation from NBC that someone inside Pakistan’s intelligence establishment came to the administration at least a year before the raid, and two very similar accounts of the events of May 2, 2011 which appear to have been derived from different sources.

What’s more, according to what appears to be an interview with Hillhouse in The Intercept, the account of SEALS throwing bin Laden’s body, or body parts, out of a helicopter because they believed that the official story was going to be a drone strike, was something that she had been told by one source, but could not confirm, which provides some additional credibility to both accounts:

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.

Hillhouse believes that “Everything that [Hersh] has said has been spot on” but “You can’t help but notice that everything he is saying in the story, which is true, was first broken by me.”

So this account is definitely plausible.

The journalist “debunking” at this point seems to be loosely sourced accusations that Hersh has gone off the deep end.

The lesson here is that blithely dismissing reporting from Seymour Hersh is not a good idea.

His reporting, at the very least, merits serious due diligence by anyone following that event.

I Really Don’t Know What to Make of This

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But if Sy Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is even ¼ true, this is the biggest story that he’s ever broken:*

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

 The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

 This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

The cliff notes version of this, courtesy of The Stranger, is:

  • Pakistani officials knew about the raid and even helped the US pull it off.
  • There never was a firefight, neither in the yard outside the house nor once the SEALs got inside.
  • The story of the courier whom the reportedly CIA traced, leading them to bin Laden, was a fabrication.
  • The story of the courier dying in the firefight was a cover-up “because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him,” a retired senior intelligence official told Hersh.
  • The way the CIA actually found out where bin Laden was is that a “Pakistani walk-in” who wanted the $25 million reward came in and told the CIA about it.
  • Osama bin Laden was not armed, contrary to reports that he had a machine gun and was killed in a firefight, and he was not killed with just one or two bullets but “obliterated.”
  • “Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen,” that same retired senior intelligence official said.
  • “Despite all the talk” about what the SEALs collected on-site, the retired official said there were “no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks.”
  • The story about bin Laden’s sea burial may be a fabrication.
  • The retired official told Hersh that bin Laden’s “remains, including his head… 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.”
  • Obama was going to wait until a week after bin Laden’s death to announce it, and he was going to tell the American people that bin Laden had been killed by a drone, but after the SEALs had to blow up their malfunctioning helicopter on-site, attracting attention locally, everything changed.
  • The story about the vaccination program carried out locally in an attempt to get bin Laden’s DNA—a story that “led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying”—wasn’t true.
  • Retired official again: “It’s a great hoax.”

(emphasis original)

The American press has been completely dismissive of Hersh’s report, and, it’s fair to say that the sourcing is not as solid as I would have liked.

Then again, when you look at the biggest supporter of the “Zero Dark Thirty” narrative, the CIA, we know that they are still lying about torture, that they still nave not come clean about spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and basically wrote the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”.

I know that the movie version is false, at least as to whether torture worked, the Senate Intelligence Committee report proved that.

I’m not sure where the truth lies, and any dealing with the machinations of the “war on terror” in general, and the Pakistani state security apparatus in particular. is a bag full of cats.

At this point, I’ll go with Charlie Pierce’s:

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 spellcraft. And Osama bin Laden is still dead, and his body is still at the bottom of the sea. Maybe.

I’m not clear what the truth is, except (of course) for the fact that the CIA tortured, that it did not work, and that Langley lies about everything.

I is confuzzled.

*And yes, I mean that statement. If is just ¼ true, this is the biggest story that Seymour f%$#ing Hersh has ever broken. Think about that for a moment.