Besides this being a blatant appeal to authority can you blame people for thinking he is drifting into conspiracy theorist territory when he has claimed that US Special Forces have been infiltrated by Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta?
The narrative he was trying to create was that the military literally considers our presence in the Middle East as a crusade, in the historical sense. And frankly, I don't think this is too far off.
George Bush used "crusade/holy war" rhetoric both publicly and (reportedly) in private. Religious indoctrination in the army is rampant. Eric Prince of Blackwater has been accused by former employees of trying to start a Crusade.
So what's your counter narrative? The higher-ups in JSOC and the military are all reasonable secular humanists?
The Pope is a member of the Jesuit order. This doesn't mean that the Jesuits have "infiltrated Catholicism", it just means the Pope is a Jesuit. If you think that Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta are "shadowy conspiracy groups", you need to stop reading Dan Brown books, and start embracing the fact that other people have different ideologies.
As far as your "appeal to authority" is concerned, yes, that's exactly what it is. That's how journalism works. Anonymous sources get quoted all the time for pro-military stories. Deal with it. Would you have criticized Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for using "anonymous sources"? Part of good investigative journalism is relying on the reputation of established journalists. And while you're right that this is an appeal to authority, your argument is nothing more than an ad hominem designed to discredit the narrative Hersh has created.
[0] - http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Rise-Worlds-Powerful-Mercen...
He also claimed that JSOC was passing around "crusade coins" as part of their religious "crusade".
I don't know how he got 'crusade coins' from something completely benign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin) but that's the kind of "journalism" we've been receiving from Hersh in the past few years.
Besides which, if your interpretation of Hersh's comments were true then they simply wouldn't be news at all. "Some members of a typically-conservative organization are also members of a separate typically-conservative organization" is hardly worth a mention at all.
On the other hand the implied story "Opus Dei secretly in control of (or heavily influencing) America's special operations arm" would be news, Sy Hersh-winning-a-Pulitzer kind of news... if it were true.
The comment you replied to wasn't claiming anything sinister about Opus Dei, that honor goes to Hersh himself.
I don't know if your obsession with Catholic or military trinkets is simple misinterpretation or deliberate obfuscation. Hersh never made the claim which you put "in quotes". And it's disingenuous to claim he did.
If top generals believe they are fighting a Crusade, that's newsworthy.
If you want to address that narrative, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say. But as it stands, the strawman you're arguing against has no basis in Hersh's words or viewpoint.
Please keep criticism civil and substantive on HN, even when responding to a straw man.
Edit: Actually, for an intensely political thread, the discussion here is doing relatively well.
As a matter of honesty, my post originally said:
> If you want to keep making up strawmen to argue against Hersh, maybe try reddit or something.
I do apologize to mpyne, and want to thank him and everyone involved for maintaining one of the best discussion forums on the internet.
From http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/18/seymour-hersh-unleashed/ (which, while paywalled, is only one of many sources you could easily Google), they quote Hersh as saying, among other things:
“They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins,” he continued. “They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.”
I'll note that when I mentioned Hersh's alarm about 'crusade coins' (I'm sorry I missed the 'r'), you said that not only was it my obsession, but that it could have been a deliberate obfuscation attempt on my part, along with being disingenuous.
Disingenuous to claim something that's actually true! What a world!
> If top generals believe they are fighting a Crusade, that's newsworthy.
Religious people will often perceive the world they live in through the perspective of their religion. When top generals start taking the nation into harm's way for their own pet religious principles then by all means, sound the alarm. Until then, as long as they're doing the 'right' thing by the country to the best of their professional (as opposed to religious) judgment and don't try to force their religion on subordinates (as the Air Force Academy has been actually accused of doing) then I don't give a shit what God they pray to or how they make that relationship work.
> strawman
Please, by all means, go talk to Seymour about his own words, which are apparently a figment of my spotty imagination.
But unless these coins were actually evidence of some sort of JSOC conspiracy to loop in Pope Benedict on U.S. counter-terror operations then why were they worth the attention of the Great Man who popularized My Lai and Abu Ghraib?
I'll leave open for now the question of why a group of people who certainly know better would procure hard physical evidence of their nefarious misdeeds instead of executing the professional conspiracy that any snake-eater should be able to handle if they really wanted to. Since this is Seymour's world now we needn't concern ourselves with trying to find contrary evidence that would disprove Hersh's assertions, and then demonstrating why that evidence isn't actually problematic. Why, Seymour has told us this must be true, and that's all we need to know.
> "Opus Dei secretly in control of (or heavily influencing) America's special operations arm"
This is the claim I was referring to. And it is a strawman.
“Many of them are members of Opus Dei,” Hersh continued. “They do see what they’re doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.”
My understanding of that statement is that he meant that they were deeply religious and were members op Opus Dei, not that there's a secretive organization that's controlling USSOCOM.
Please stop propagating things you read in that horrible VOX article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Boykin#Religious.2FP...
This isn't really an appeal to authority. The claim "has broken more major stories than almost anyone alive" is suggesting that the probability of the current story being true is higher, given the unusually large number of successful stories previously published by the reporter.
The claim isn't that we should listen to the reporter because he is some sort of expert or that is he occupies a position of authority. Any problem with inferring the probability of a new event from a record of past events would would be an error in the inductive inference. (i.e. the black swan problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Inductive_catego... )
_The Nation_'s Greg Grandin thinks the discreditors have more egg on their faces than Hersh does: http://www.thenation.com/blog/207001/its-conspiracy-how-disc...