Seymour Hersh Taints His Legacy With Ludicrous Claims Over Bin Laden Killing

[jimmy olsen]

This is conspiracy theory level bullshit that doesn't make any sense.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/seymour-hersh-bin-laden-raid-officials-criticism-117826.html

U.S. officials fuming over Hersh account of Osama bin Laden raid

The Obama administration is hotly disputing the investigative reporter's version of events.

By Bryan Bender and Philip Ewing
  | 5/11/15 3:34 PM EDT
  | Updated 5/12/15 12:09 AM EDT

   
One of America's most revered investigative journalists has questioned the veracity of one of the Obama administration's proudest achievements — and the firestorm of criticism has been immediate and unforgiving, from the White House to the Pentagon to the CIA.

The publication Sunday of a 10,000-word article questioning the official version of the 2011 raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden might have received scant attention had it it not been penned by Seymour Hersh.

The award-winning reporter, 78, who uncovered one of the worst war crimes by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War and disclosed the torture of inmates at the U.S military-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, is now questioning the entire national security bureaucracy in one fell swoop. And its members are taking it personally.

"If you were to believe Sy, you would have to believe this massive conspiracy that President Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Mike Morell were all lying to you," said Bill Harlow, the agency's former top spokesman, referring to two recent secretaries of defense and a former acting CIA director. "It makes absolutely no sense."

Harlow said the puzzlement, even anger, at the charges stemmed from the fact that the mission to kill the mastermind of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, which officials said was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, remains a crowning achievement of the war on terrorism.

"It was a source of national pride, not just the CIA but the entire country," Harlow said.

According to Hersh's article, top Pakistani officials initially did not inform the U.S. about bin Laden's whereabouts in the hope of using the late Al Qaeda leader as "leverage" in negotiations.

The report also states that Pakistani officials knew about the raid before it happened in May 2011 and instructed those monitoring bin Laden's compound to allow the SEALs to conduct the operation unobstructed.

Hersh's story relies heavily on the account of a single unnamed source, referred to as "a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad."

"The person obviously was not close to what actually happened," Morell said of Hersh's anonymous source in a CBS interview. "The Pakistanis did not know."

Morell, in a new book, "The Great War of Our Time," dedicates a whole chapter to his efforts to smooth the ruffled feathers of Pakistani leaders outraged that they were not made aware of the raid.


"Both the Pakistani military and Pakistani intelligence were embarrassed by this," Morell told POLITICO. "A much better outcome would have been if we did do this together. It would have cemented the relationship. Because we couldn't trust them, we couldn't tell them."

One former intelligence official knowledgeable about the bin Laden raid also called Hersh's report "a fictional account."

"This was indeed a unilateral American operation, one that involved months of painstaking intelligence analysis, and the Pakistanis were never read in on the raid before it happened."

American intelligence officials, including CIA Director John Brennan, have speculated openly that bin Laden may have had some help from within the Pakistani government or others inside Pakistan, but no connection has ever been made definitively. At the same time, about four years after the raid, nearly everything about it has been revealed either in authorized releases by the administration or unauthorized revelations, including by some of the SEALs who participated in it.

Given all the information that has materialized, the former intelligence official asked, how could it be that some details Hersh includes are only surfacing now?


"The portrayal that Hersh offers — if it were accurate, it's likely that it would have been exposed long ago," the former official said. "It defies logic the way this town operates."

(NBC, citing two unnamed U.S. officials, added some intrigue to the controversy late Monday. It reported that in addition to tracking Bin laden's couriers to his location, a "walk in" from Pakistani intelligence also tipped off the agency).

The pushback against the Hersh story from the White House and the military was also fierce.

"There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one," White House national security spokesman Ned Price said in a statement to reporters early Monday. Later, at the daily White House briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest chimed in, saying the report is full of "inaccuracies and outright falsehoods."

The criticism of the article was bipartisan.

"I simply have never heard of anything like this," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on MSNBC, adding that he is convinced the circumstances of the raid were as the administration described. "This is a great success on the part of the administration. We all admire the president's decision. ... The president and his team did the right thing here."

At the Pentagon, the article struck a particular nerve, especially among those with ties to the elite Special Operations Command.

They consider the raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to be a high point in the history of American special operations. The raid, Operation Neptune Spear, is often contrasted with a low point — Operation Eagle Claw, the botched 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran ordered by President Jimmy Carter that killed eight troops and freed no captured Americans.

That bitter embarrassment led to decades of spending billions of dollars on new training, technology and intelligence-gathering capabilities that made possible the raid on Abbottabad, defense officials have argued.

"There are too many inaccuracies to even bother going through them line by line," Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters of the Hersh piece, which appeared in the London Review of Books. "But there should be no question that this was a unilateral action and it was conducted in accordance with all standing laws of armed conflict. The public record on the operation there is clear. The president announced it within 24 hours of completion of it, and there is nothing to add to what the president's already said. This article appears, from where I sit, to be largely a fabrication. I'm too busy to waste my time with it."

Hersh did not return calls to his Washington home seeking comment, though he appeared on CNN on Monday to defend his reporting.

"I've been around a long time," said Hersh, "and I understand the consequences of what I'm saying." He called Morell's account of what happened in Abbottabad, which is consistent with those of other officials in the Obama administration, a "Lewis Carroll fairy tale."

In 2012, New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute named Hersh among the top 100 American journalists of the past century, along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes and pioneering foreign correspondent Hannah Arendt. Among his stories that had stood out most were those about about the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. troops were implicated in the killing of Vietnamese civilians. Ultimately, Army Lt. William Calley was convicted of killing 22 villagers and sentenced to life in prison. Hersh, also then a freelance journalist, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1970. He recently published a retrospective on the story in The New Yorker after traveling back to My Lai.

Hersh received the National Magazine Award for Public Interest, among other prizes, for his disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

In recent years, however, Hersh's reporting has increasingly been called into question — and his almost exclusive reliance on anonymous sources widely criticized.

For example, a 2013 piece claiming that the Obama administration "cherry-picked" intelligence about the use of chemical weapons by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad was turned down by both The New York Times and The Washington Post.

But his reputation, at least in the halls of power in Washington, seems to have hit a low point.

"Have you ever spoken to him?" asked Harlow. "It is kind of a psychedelic experience. He talks to you and then says thanks and hangs up. You don't know what he could have got from you."

Another former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the bin Laden operation speculated that the Pakistanis, who were "furious" that U.S. troops entered the heart of the country without being detected, were behind the false story as a way to save face.

"They finally found somebody to bite."

Philip Ewing contributed to this report.

[Neil]

Reporters are supposed to question things.  Sure, his legacy might be a little bruised, but it's nowhere near as tainted as, say, Tom Brady's or Bill Belichick's.

[derspiess]

[Valmy]

So what is the big damning shit Hersh is exposing? That Pakistan may have cooperated with us? Hardly My Lai.

[Norgy]

That bin Laden was a cripple and didn't put up much resistance, and could've been captured alive, I guess.

[Valmy]

That bin Laden was a cripple and didn't put up much resistance, and could've been captured alive, I guess.

I blame the militarization of the military.

[Darth Wagtaros]

That bin Laden was a cripple and didn't put up much resistance, and could've been captured alive, I guess.

I blame the militarization of the military.

Yes.

[Norgy]

Gun control would solve it.

[derspiess]

So what is the big damning shit Hersh is exposing? That Pakistan may have cooperated with us? Hardly My Lai.

My Lai was a hoax.

[Ed Anger]

I got My laied last night

[derspiess]

That bin Laden was a cripple and didn't put up much resistance, and could've been captured alive, I guess.

That makes it more bad-ass that we capped him.  Like the Israelis targeting the Hellfire on that Palestinian terrorist's wheelchair.

[jimmy olsen]

So what is the big damning shit Hersh is exposing? That Pakistan may have cooperated with us? Hardly My Lai.

My Lai was a hoax.

Oh look, a conspiracy theory coming from the opposite direction

[Ed Anger]

That bin Laden was a cripple and didn't put up much resistance, and could've been captured alive, I guess.

That makes it more bad-ass that we capped him.  Like the Israelis targeting the Hellfire on that Palestinian terrorist's wheelchair.

The hellfire was ADA compliant.

[Admiral Yi]

IIRC Hersh also tried to peddle some wackiness during GWII (after Abu Graib), but no one paid it much attention.

[derspiess]

So what is the big damning shit Hersh is exposing? That Pakistan may have cooperated with us? Hardly My Lai.

My Lai was a hoax.

Oh look, a conspiracy theory coming from the opposite direction