But a known shitbag shouldn’t have been let anywhere near your wallet…
I didn’t suggest giving the guy our credit cards and PINs.
-Joe
As ever, it is worth remembering many people in the US live within a bunker of GOP branded media. Nothing else gets in, nothing else comes out,“Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons” “Every country in the world believed Iraq had WMD” “George Bush did not lie” “Bill Clinton is a criminal,” &etc. Starving Artist, Clothahump, Shodan; 3 of this board’s endemic examples, but there are many others. It’s a way to win elections.
He used to be. Until he went off the deep about the US invading Iran several years ago. How long has it been now that Hersh has been predicting this invasion? You should know-- you start up another one of these threads every time he publishes something about it. 
Mr Hersh would be thrilled to be wrong. Mr Hersh probably hopes that his reporting might actually decrease the liklihood of war. And unless you think he’s just making shit up, he has good reason.
Yeah, when Bush leaves office and we haven’t gone to war with Iran, that will be the ultimate proof that Hersh was right, and that his reporting prevented the war. Of course if we do go to war, then Hersh will also have been right. Nice little gig he’s got!
Yeah, always got that from his writing, that sense of a happy go lucky guy, got it made.
Here’s a more encouraging analysis.
Which makes him the best kind of journalist, in the sense that the fire inspector saves more lives than the firefighter, though we can never know how many.
Not necessarily operable nuclear weapons, but Colin Powell’s UN speech pretty clearly laid out the Administration’s belief:
It was all part of a speech that emphasised four points: existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities, “any day now” nuclear capability, and existing delivery systems (ie. ballistic missiles)
Of course, the Administration’s other key officials put on a much harder sell for US public consumption:
If you poke around you’ll find a million similar quotes, with the oft-repeated gibberish of “what if the smoking gun is a mushroom cloud?”
In other words, yes and no- the Administration didn’t explicitly say, “Iraq has a nuke”, but they spent a lot of time saying, “Iraq is about to have a nuke”… and that’s more or less “what we were looking for” - a new or reconstituted nuclear weapons program.
We were also officially looking for chemical and biological agents, but that’s not what the public cared about, obviously, and the Administration played on nuclear fear very well.
C’est true. 9/11 was about as surgical as a strike can get. The only thing missing was the iodine.
I think, by definition, a “surgical strike” is one that only hits the intended military targets, with minimal splash/collateral damage.
So 9/11 would best be described as an extremely accurate strike, but probably not a surgical one.