The Detail in Seymour Hersh’s Bin Laden Story That Rings True

[Jesus Malverde]

From the moment it was announced to the public, the tale of how Osama bin Laden met his death in a Pakistani hill town in May 2011 has been a changeable feast. In the immediate aftermath of the Navy SEAL team’s assault on his Abbottabad compound, American and Pakistani government accounts contradicted themselves and each other. In his speech announcing the operation’s success, President Obama said that “our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to Bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.”

But others, including top Pakistani generals, insisted that this was not the case. American officials at first said Bin Laden resisted the SEALs; the Pakistanis promptly leaked that he wasn’t armed. Then came differing stories from the SEALs who carried out the raid, followed by a widening stream of new details from government reports — including the 336-page Abbottabad Commission report requested by the Pakistani Parliament — and from books and interviews. All of the accounts were incomplete in some way.

The latest contribution is the journalist Seymour Hersh’s 10,000-word article in The London Review of Books, which attempts to punch yet more holes — very big ones — in both the Obama administration’s narrative and the Pakistani government’s narrative. Among other things, Hersh contends that the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s military-intelligence agency, held Bin Laden prisoner in the Abbottabad compound since 2006, and that “the C.I.A. did not learn of Bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the U.S.”

On this count, my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s. Beginning in 2001, I spent nearly 12 years covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Times. (In his article, Hersh cites an article I wrote for The Times Magazine last year, an excerpt from a book drawn from this reporting.) The story of the Pakistani informer was circulating in the rumor mill within days of the Abbottabad raid, but at the time, no one could or would corroborate the claim. Such is the difficulty of reporting on covert operations and intelligence matters; there are no official documents to draw on, few officials who will talk and few ways to check the details they give you when they do.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/magazine/the-detail-in-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-story-that-rings-true.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&referrer=

Suck it up, haters.

[nationalize the fed]

1. Interesting videos

Someone in the neighbourhood named Jahangir Khan

Bhutto before assassination- interesting that the BBC did a little deleting

CCTV

There was a video of a Pakistani that lived next door telling the story with a translation but it has been deleted. Surely just a coincidence.

[Jesus Malverde]

3. The most obvious clue.

Is knowing that his "hide out" was 100 yards from the Pakistani West Point.

The house was 100 yards from the gate of the Kakul Military Academy, an army run institution where top officers train. A Pakistan intelligence official said the property where bin Laden was staying was 3,000 square feet.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2011/05/02/bin-ladens-hideout-located-near-pakistans-military-academy.html

[MisterP]

5. one inkling I had is that Bhutto may've known OBL was disappeared in '07--easy to assume

"dead" but "ex-collaborator now being interrogated for years under house arrest" also matches Pakistan's MO

[noise]

2. What's really sad

is that Hersh is being smeared by a bunch of assholes who want the public to believe that putting detainees in coffin like boxes led to Bin Laden's whereabouts.

[Mojorabbit]

4. + a kabillion. nt

[Jesus Malverde]

6. He's being smeared because this alternative narrative calls into question

The official story from the very beginning.

[truebluegreen]

7. According to this, Hersh was not the first to report on this story....

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh.

Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about bin Laden’s location from tracking an al Qaeda courier, but from a member of the Pakistani intelligence service who wanted to collect the $25 million reward the U.S. had offered for bin Laden; (2) Saudi Arabia was paying Pakistan to keep bin Laden under the equivalent of house arrest; (3) Pakistan was pressured by the U.S. to stand down its military to allow the U.S. raid to proceed unhindered; and (4) the U.S. had planned to claim that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but was forced to abandon this when one of the Navy SEAL helicopters crashed. ...


https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/former-professor-reported-basics-hershs-bin-laden-story-2011-seemingly-different-sources/

[grasswire]

9. interesting, thanks.. nt

[JDPriestly]

10. Now that makes sense. That Saudi Arabia was paying Pakistan to harbor Bin Laden in that

safe house is the key that makes that version hang together.

Because why in the world would Pakistan capture Bin Laden in 2006 or 2007 and, knowing it would receive 25 million dollars for giving him up, hold him captive in a "safe" house? Because they were being paid more than that to keep him.

Makes sense.

Keeping Bin Laden would have cost money. And Pakistan does a lot of things when it is paid large sums of money as we know.

Bhutto's claim may have had more truth to it than we know because we do not know how Bin Laden was living, whether he was very ill, what his condition was, how he was held. This puts the entire US intelligence's version in question. But it does not put in question why the US would have made up a story for public consumption.

Not only would some elements in Pakistan and other Arab countries who were enamored of the in -you-face hateful Bin Laden have possibly sough revenge for the 2007 capture and imprisonment or possibly death or near-death of Bin Laden but Saudi Arabia would not have continued to pay the Pakistani government for sequestering/protecting/imprisoning (who knows what it really was?) of Bin Laden.

This is a fascinating story of intrigue, diplomacy and war. Just fascinating. I can see why a novelist would be captivated by the complexity of the situation. Just fascinating.

And then there is the possibility that we do not really know much about what happened to Bin Laden at all, but that this story puts to rest our desire to see the end to his life story because he was such a villain and such a hateful person beneath his pious demeanor. If (and life is often not as we think it is) he really was responsible for 9/11 and most believe he was, then it was important in terms of that part of our lives that we live in stories and myths that his existence be removed at least from our minds.

Sometimes things do not happens we believe, but we seek closure and the need to end a nightmare is more important to us than the truth which may be very uncertain. In other words we want to know things that cannot be known, so we make up stories that satisfy our need to know so that we can continue our lies. I do not fault the Obama administration whether they or some part of the intelligence community made up part of this story because the end of Osama Bin Laden, how his life ended or even whether he continues to subsist somewhere is not very important in reality but very important to our national psyche.

In other words, Osama Bin Laden was a creep and a heel but our nation needed him out of our minds so that we can go on and improve and live our lives. He was an impediment to our sense of national security. But it was the idea of him and not his reality that was the big block. So the story the Obama administration told was probably healing.

I'm glad that we are beginning to face the fact that we demand a lot of lies from our government because those lies make us feel good and in some instances righteous or powerful as it may be.

But still, it would be great if we were a country that could hear the truth without needing so many myths. But that is a fault in us, the people, and not just in our government. We demand these lies. The truth would be hard for us to bear.

Oh, another thing on edit. It also makes sense that this story which has been out there for a while in certain elite circles apparently would be made known to the general public at this time. Saudi Arabia has a new leadership at least at the top. Maybe the myth about Bin Laden's death (and we still may not know the truth) was withheld because of the money being paid by the Saudi Arabians. And here is where we have to understand that Bhutto's statement that Bin Laden was already dead in 2007 could have been true. Because the Pakistanis could have taken Saudi money to harbor a criminal who was already dead. Why not? It would be a horrible thing to do on one level, but . . . . then the Saudis are themselves not saints.

[Ford_Prefect]

8. And they have the nerve to call it the Intelligence Community.