zlacker

SOCOM does actually get a brief mention, but in a way that makes the whole story even less plausible. At the beginning, Hersh claims that the divers used were chosen because they were just "Navy only" and not part of SOCOM, which is allegedly a legal loophole to avoid having to report the activity to the Gang of Eight in Congress, apparently done because of concerns about leaks.

Setting aside how legally questionable that premise sounds, especially because the entire rest of the article is full of references to the involvement of clandestine organizations beyond "Navy only", Hersh then goes on to describe an operation apparently involving an absolute clown car full of a bunch of other people including 3 foreign countries, at least some people running a major NATO exercise, and what sounds like half the Norwegian Navy. Operations so secret you can't tell 8 Congressional leaders (as required by law) but you can tell Norway, Denmark, and Sweden about do not sound like a thing.

>>rainsf+(OP)
Here's the rub, SOCOM via JSOC is the only command that POTUS has any sway over (Thanks Obama.). The more you read the less plausible any of this is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joint_Special_Ope....

> Operations so secret you can't tell 8 Congressional leaders (as required by law) but you can tell Norway, Denmark, and Sweden about do not sound like a thing.

Exactly!

>>weathe+x1
I'd like to preface everything that Ive written thus far with the following.

Yes, I'm former military.

The United States does shady things and has a long history of doing so. The United States is a capitalist imperialist hell-scape for a lot of people. Counties/states do not have friends, they have interests.

That being said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What was written in that piece does not mesh at all with what my mental model of how the US military work, How pipelines work, etc.

>>weathe+x1
The President sets the strategy for all of the combatant commands through the National Security Strategy and ultimately every military action has a line drawn to the President through the SecDef. Saying POTUS doesn't have away over the other COCOMs is misleading at best. (To be clear, this article is still bs, having "Navy only" divers doesn't make any sense in the way operations are done in the US military.)

>>enkid+7p
What I'm trying to illustrate is that POTUS isn't sitting in on OPORDs, The Joint Chiefs of Staff advise the president on all military matters, the president goes through them, the Secretary of Defense, etc.

>>weathe+X2
As not ex military, the article sounds plausible. Likely, even.

My main objection is, who would be the source? It sounds like there are maybe 20 people in the world who would have this level of information. Each of those individuals would presumably have been selected largely on the basis of commitment to national security. That's why people sign up for these roles in the first place. None of these individuals have anything in particular to gain by leaking this information. All of them have _a lot_ to lose by the same.

I can't imagine any of these individuals as the source, which throws the rest of the story out the window. Even if it ends up being true in the end.