Some Guy TT posted:

so this suggests wikileaks was actually a cia op gone horribly wrong because any random wikileaks employee could leak whatever the gently caress they wanted and julian assange just became the convenient fall guy because he was the public face of the organization

spacemang_spliff posted:

hmm nothing at all problematic about a German bemoaning the existence of slavs in their genepool. nope, all pretty normal, nothing to see here

gradenko_2000 posted:

quote:

Hersh acknowledged he wasn’t writing—sort of. “It’s complicated. The critics say I’m not working on much. How would anybody know that?” he said, annoyed. “It’s also a very complicated time to write stories, because the media’s never been so fixed as it is now—fixated, it’s just fixed. We’ve got the people we hate, the people we like, la la la—there’s no middle ground, it seems to me. So it’s a tough time to do stuff.”

Unprompted, he brought up the President. “There’s no focal point for serious reporting. The New York Times is in an all-out war with Trump,” he said. “They’re playing in his little dirty box. It’s all tweet and counter-tweet. They’re not playing to the core issues.” He mentioned Trump’s latest tweet distraction—the President (again) calling on special counsel Robert Mueller to end his probe. “I mean, is it that hard to say, ‘Whew, let’s take a deep thought about this—maybe he wants us to jump on this story!’ ”

This seemed like a corkscrew argument. Besides, wasn’t it Hersh who, beginning with Robert McNamara—“A psychotic liar!” he interrupted—invented the art of calling our leaders, well, psychotic liars?

Shortly afterward, the phone rang. “Yeah. Uh-huh. What? Indicted?” Hersh chuckled. “What, are they all living in the USSR?” Earlier that morning, Mueller had charged 12 Russians with interference in the 2016 election. The indictment was detailed down to the keystroke, by far the clearest evidence yet that Putin had played us. But Hersh refused to buy the story. “Bullshit stuff,” he huffed, hanging up the phone. “This is the f—ing dumbest case you’ve ever made up in your life.” He went on, “I know a lot about Russia. I know a lot about this crazy story that’s going on—the whole notion that the Russians hacked and defeated Hillary. That’s part of something I’ve been working on, something like six or seven years.”

“I’ve got a truck I want to drive through it,” he added. “It’s a comedy act.”

Hersh then did something I’d never seen before: He left the interview to run some errands—asking me to stay put until he returned and leaving me alone in his office to ponder what had just transpired. Bullshit stuff? What if Sy Hersh, rather than giving Bob Woodward a run for his money, had cast his lot with the Watergate skeptics? To most people, earning the courtship of Infowars and RT might be a useful hint about who’s imbibing your ideas. But from whom was Hersh imbibing his ideas?

The office phone rang again. The caller ID blurted out a name—Larry Johnson—and a man left a message. Eventually, Hersh returned and glanced at the answering machine: “I got a phone call?” He cocked a parrot eye my way. “And you didn’t tell me that?” Before I could reply, he blurted, “That’s Larry Johnson. We’re golf buddies,” and added, “Thirty years in the intelligence community.”

I pressed again for a scrap of argument to substantiate Hersh’s RussiaGate theory. No time: He was off to his barber. “I always believe in truth,” he said, gathering up his briefcase. “Sometimes I know truth others don’t. That puts me in a little bit of jeopardy sometimes.”