Not NP: Re: "the story is fundamentally at odds with reality as we know it"

[Joseph Tracy]

Thanks. Nice body of relevant information. I tried some searches but basically did not know it was something said at a speaking engagement and got nowhere. I have read most of Hersh’s articles and heard him speak at Williams college post Abu Graibh. There is a difference in what you might say to a sympathetic audience and what you would write for the New Yorker. Anyway there seem to be a number of credible sources saying the same thing.
Is this he kind of thing which, even if it is widely known, is simply not reported by major media networks? It certainly doesn’t seem irrelevant to me.

My nephew is at the Air Force Academy and there are still significant pressures to conform to Christianity. 

As for the phrase conspiracy theorist, what about the unproven and widely discredited idea that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, what of Reagan’s laughable scenario of the US being attacked by Nicaraguan communists. Nobody in mainstream press called Netanyahu or Reagan a conspiracy nut or even just a lying shit-head.
What about the racist conspiracies of silence among cops? Power engenders conspiracies. Not all conspiracy theories are right, but many are reasonably accurate. It would seem to me better to use a different phrase to discredit bad journalism, and to advocate for vastly more transparency for the government, police and out of control security agencies. Instead many media people endorse secrecy for national security’s sake even when security state crimes are revealed, turning their venom on the whistleblowers rather than taking on the state crimes. 

The truth is that despite the bastards and the wars I am of oddly good cheer these days.The tilt of the earth means we are headed into the light, and so it is with the tilt of my heart.


> On Dec 23, 2015, at 4:46 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> 
> Am 23.12.2015 um 17:35 schrieb Joseph Tracy:
>> I would like a reference to the story where Hersh says US special
>> forces are run by “ancient Illuminati-style orders such as Opus Dei”.
>> That sure doesn’t sound like him.
> 
> Hersh's speech is here:
> 
> https://zulfahmed.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/seymour-hersh-talking-in-qatar-in-january-2011/
> 
> (I don't know anything about this site. It was the first transcript of the speech my search engine of choice spew up. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the transcript.)
> 
> 
> This got me interested. As Christmastide is threatening and I do not have much time on my hands, let me just forward without much ado a few excerpts from various texts that touch upon the topics at hand (this time including Pynchon).
> 
> 
> Seymour Hersh:
> 
> "(...) That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command and Stanley McChrystal, the one who got in trouble because of the article in Rolling Stone, and his follow-on, a Navy admiral named McRaven, Bill McRaven — all are members or at least supporters of Knights of Malta. McRaven attended, so I understand, the recent annual convention of the Knights of Malta they had in Cyprus a few months back in November. They’re all believers — many of them are members of Opus Dei. They do see what they are 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 in the 13th century. And this is their function. They have little insignias, they have coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins, and they have insignia that reflect that, the whole notion that this is a war, it’s culture war."
> 
> https://zulfahmed.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/seymour-hersh-talking-in-qatar-in-january-2011/
> 
> 
> Greg Grandin in "The Nation" defending Hersh against Fisher's criticism:
> 
> 'To accuse Hersh of falling under the thrall of “conspiracy theory” is to repudiate the whole enterprise of investigative journalism that Hersh helped pioneer. What has he written that wasn’t a conspiracy? But Fisher, and others, believe Hersh went too far when in a 2011 speech he made mention of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, tagging him as a Dan Brown fantasist. Here’s Fisher, in his debunking of Hersh’s recent essay: “The moment when a lot of journalists started to question whether Hersh had veered from investigative reporting into something else came in January 2011. That month, he spoke at Georgetown University’s branch campus in Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address alleging that top military and special forces leaders ‘are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.… many of them are members of Opus Dei.’”
> 
> http://www.thenation.com/article/its-conspiracy-how-discredit-seymour-hersh/
> 
> 
> And now it gets interesting for Pynchonites because Grandin ties Hersh's allegations to the FEMA and REX 84/CoG activities in the 80s that I also felt reminded of and which play an important role in VL. He quotes Steve Coll, the author of "Ghost Wars", a book we recently discussed:
> 
> 'But here’s Steve Coll, a reporter who remains within the acceptable margins, writing in Ghost Wars about Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey: “He was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion.… He attended Mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice…. He believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.” Oliver North, Casey’s Iran/Contra co-conspirator, worshiped at a “’charismatic’ Episcopalian church in Virginia called Church of the Apostles, which is organized into cell groups.”
> 
> Not too long ago, Ben Bradlee Jr. (son of no less an establishment figure than the editor of The Washington Post), could draw the connections between the shadowy national security state and right-wing Christianity: Iran/Contra was about many things, among them a right-wing Christian reaction against the growing influence of left-wing Liberation Theology in Latin America. Likewise, the US’s post-9/11 militarism was about many things, among them the reorganization of those right-wing Christians against what they identified as a greater existential threat than Liberation Theology: political Islam. Fisher should know this, as it was reported here, here, and here, among many other places.'
> 
> http://www.thenation.com/article/its-conspiracy-how-discredit-seymour-hersh/
> 
> 
> In my previous post I referred to David Thoreen's "The President's Emergency War Powers and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in Pynchons Vineland", an essay I keep coming back to. Here are some relevant quotes (like Grandin, Thoreen also quotes Ben Bradlee). The reference is to VL, 339:
> 
> 'The "red Christer pins" are another reference to FEMA and Rex-84. According to Ben Bradlee:
> 
> "There had been considerable anxiety within the agency about the legality of the Rex-84 exercise. [One FEMA] official said he had never seen such security around any other activity inside FEMA, and that agency General Counsel George Jett had ordered the installation of a special metal security door into the hallway of the fifth floor of the FEMA building in Washington where all planning for Rex-84 was conducted.... FEMA officials with the highest security clearances had been prevented from going into the restricted area.... only Giuffrida, Jett, and FEMA Deputy Director Frank Salcedo--all of whom were inexplicably reported to have been wearing red Christian crosses or crucifix pins on their lapels--were allowed in."'
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/20101116080155/http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm
> 
> 
> The subject here is indeed "connections between the shadowy national security state and right-wing Christianity", as Grandin puts it. Coll, Hersh and Bradlee provide evidence/claims for the existence of these links. Pynchon uses Bradlee's account of the "red Christian crosses" for his own purposes in VL.
> 
> Generally I believe that one would have to critizise Hersh on the basis of facts. Just saying that he has suddenly become a "conspiracy theorist" because he talks about things nobody else in the mainstream media wants to cover won't do.
> 
> Also, the Knights of Malta are very interesting indeed.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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