ultimately it is two people appealing to authority to a large degree.
this is not accurate. hersh details an account that is entirely sourced (he claims) from an anonymous informant. a reader is entirely reliant on hersh to have exercised some judgement as to how reliable the source is. there is no effort presented to corroborate any detail with publicly available evidence.
but the other author does not appeal to authority. instead they present publicly available evidence that conflicts with hersh's account. a reader is only asked to trust that the author is not intentionally falsifying the evidence presented (which an unusually motivated reader could independently check). this is not an appeal to authority.
I think it is more likely he got some details wrong or partially wrong but has the overall story right or somewhat right...I think this is the part that was most specific and convincing about a detail Hersh got wrong.
this is important. hersh's account is full of specific details. he does not present a hypothesis about who may have blown up the pipelines. he presents an account that claims to tell exactly how this happened. but when many of the details presented prove false, what reason remains to consider any of the information allegedly obtained from the same source as reliable? the believability of the story hinges on the details presented.
I think part of what gives the Hersh story more credibility for me is the total lack of reasonable alternatives that have been offered and the circumstantial case that the US did in fact do this between the very public pronouncements of motive, and the unique opportunity that the US military has.
so here, i think it is important to be clear about what falsifying hersh's story means and doesn't mean. it means that (assuming the information presented by the other guy is true) the pipelines were not blown up in the manner claimed by hersh. it means his story is nonsense (much like most of the other crap he's claimed in the last decade or so).
it doesn't mean that it is any more or any less likely that the united states was involved in blowing up the pipelines. it doesn't mean that any other hypothesized explanation is any more or less likely to be accurate. it just means that hersh is full of crap.
and the opposite is also true. you can make the judgement that you think the united states was involved, but this does not mean that hersh's account is any more likely to be accurate. because we have evidence that it is not accurate.
Second things first, I got a bit long winded but was going to make the point that you made here. I don’t think I have hid from the beginning that my priors make me pretty likely to believe the US had a hand in it. I didn’t really know how, but suspected it before the Hersh article and said as much here. That really hasn’t changed and I still am interested in how the third party investigations turn out and what results/evidence is shared and will take that much more seriously than this OSINT guy.
Hersh has a single source story, that offers up specific things that his source (and Hersh because he wrote it) are saying happened. What I am saying is I don’t think from my reading of the debunking that I have a good way to measure some of the things that the OSINT guy claims substantively disprove Hersh’s claims. Again, I know it is self serving, but Hersh said intelligence would manipulate publicly available info to cover tracks. Is that what can explain the discrepancies? Is it really blowing a huge hole in Hersh’s case that the divers/minesweeping cover story was already included in the exercises? Is this a distinction without a difference? Again, I too would like more reporting on the subject but I have seen very minimal mainstream reporting on the Hersh article even work on debunking it so we are left with two sub stacks arguing with each other!
So the appeal to authority I am talking about is the relative weight we should give the details that the OSINT guy picks out, and his analysis of them. One example off the top of my head is “I could write a whole article about” how wrong it was when Hersh says a remote delayed fuse. Does this matter? I don’t know, but OSINT guy says trust him he knows.
Scahill speaks to some of this in the article and I just don’t know if it is very important at all that the cover story about divers and mine sweeping was like clumsily inserted in to the exercise or was already there but it just does not seem all that relevant to me when evaluating if this happened or not. I have no idea, I must trust that this is very important according to OSINT guy.
Like you said, it is possible Hersh is totally full of crap but the US did it a different way. I take Hersh seriously as a journalist and took the Osama article seriously too whereas you dismiss both so it is very understandable we would give Hersh different amounts of deference as a reputable source. Scahill goes through some possibilities here including that maybe someone fed Hersh some bad info or partially bad info to muddle the whole thing up. We just can’t really know or evaluate that because it is a single anonymous source. I’m just saying Hersh has a long track record that we can look to, although we might reach different conclusions on what that record indicates.
When someone on here posts a picture of a snake and you identify it for everyone, we could of course attempt to second guess and verify ourselves but there is at least some skill in identifying the parts and classifying them. The same is true of the publicly available info the OSINT guy uses to debunk Hersh. You have presented this as though Hersh was saying that the score of the kstate game was 79-78 and kstate won where as ESPN and anyone watching the game knows that isn’t true. I don’t think it is that cut and dry.
