The debate about Hersh’s revelations reveals more than his article

Summary: The Hersh affair continues to pay rich dividends of insights about our past and present. Today we look at the best analysis to date of Hersh’s revelations, and what it tells us about America’s politics.  {1st of 2 posts today.}

 

Contents

1. The first good analysis of Hersh.
2. Our tribalism.
3. How do we get out of this box?
4. Other posts in this series.
5. For More Information.

(1)  The first good analysis of Hersh’s article

The first two days after publication of Hersh’s “The Killing of Osama bin Laden” brought forth considerable supporting evidence — some new, some reminders of stories from 2011 and 2012. There has been little useful analysis so far, until Elspeth Reeve published “The Loneliness of Sy Hersh” at The New Republic. She opens with the reaction to the story from the Left and Right…

CNN’s Peter Bergen debunks Hersh’s “Allegations of massive cover-up.” Vox’s Max Fisher scoffs at “a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years.” Daily Telegraph Pakistan correspondent Rob Crilly calls it a “conspiracy theory” that will fool “the soft minded.”

… You might expect conservatives to run with the dark comedy of the Obama White House scrambling to make up lies to take advantage of the death of America’s No. 1 foe in an election year — only to watch those lies spiral out of control and create more foreign policy problems.

You might expect conservatives to use this story, but they haven’t. Some light mockery from the Right, but so far they’ve given little attention to the story. As for the Left, they’ve deployed the generic government fanboy’s defense — describing government lies as a “conspiracy”. And large groups of people cannot keep a secret! Excerpt that history shows that they can. Here are a few examples.

 

The secret of ULTRA (description of the NAZI’s Enigma cyphers) was kept for 29 years after WWII, despite being known by thousands of people (12,000 people worked just at Bletchley Park).

Thousands knew elements of the truth about the Tonkin Gulf incident; it emerged in dribs and drabs over the following 30 years, with definitive evidence coming to public attention in 1995-2005.

The USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 on 3 July 1988. The official story shifted much of the responsibility to Iran. The US public learned the truth from the 1992 House hearings. Details here.

(2)  Our tribalism

Elspeth Reeve raises a more serious issue — the tribal nature of truth in America. The Left saw Hersh as a great journalists when he criticized Bush Jr; when he criticizes Obama they say he has “gone off the rails” and is “lost in a wilderness of mirrors.” Similarly the IPCC was the “gold standard” of climate research. Now that they advocate for catastrophic forecasts with little support in the IPCC’s work, it has largely disappeared from their writings.

As usual, the Right does it better and bigger. They’ve created their own faux economics and faux history.

It’s difficult to see the effects of each side of the political spectrum setting up their own systems of truth. Debates about values and perspectives are the nature of normal politics. Debates about facts turn our political space into a tower of Babel. I’ve seen this in the 38,000 comments on the FM website, and it is not pretty to watch.

While we bicker the 1% move to dominate both of America’s political parties.

(3)  How do we get out of this box?

We run in circles, chasing each other, unable to find common ground, with no exit in sight. How do we break out to a path leading to a better America? We need creative solutions. We need the equivalent of a solution to the 9 dot problem (connect the dots with only 4 lines). The video gives the solution.

(4)  Other posts in this series.

1. The most useful news story of 2015: the truth about the bin Laden hit.
2. The day after Hersh: rebuttals & more evidence about the bin Laden hit.
3. The first rule of American war is not to believe what we’re told.
4. The debate about Hersh’s revelations reveals more than his article.
5. Should we use our special operations troops as assassins? Is it right, or even smart?

(5)  For More Information

Valuable context when reading Hersh’s critics: “Lapdogs, redux: How the press tried to discredit Seymour Hersh’s bombshell reporting on CIA domestic spying“, Mark Ames, Pando, 14 May 2015.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more about the issues discussed in this post see About the quiet coup in America and Reforming America: steps to new politics. I have no useful ideas about solutions, so here are a few inspirational posts…

1. Can we reignite the spirit of America?
2. Should we despair, giving up on America?
3. Is this the dawn of a new age? Two journalists see the first step to reforming America.
4. Pirate Bay points the way to a new political reform movement.
5. Lessons from the New Eden galaxy about reforming America.