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nationalize the fed

(2,169 posts)
Wed May 20, 2015, 06:47 PM May 2015

Truthdig: Seymour Hersh Stands by His bin Laden Story, and His Sources

Truthdig May 18, 2015 By Bill Boyarsky

With the Obama administration having prosecuted more national security leakers than any other, anonymous sources are the only way Americans can find out how their government is waging its secret war on terror. That’s why journalist Seymour Hersh deserves congratulations rather than condemnation for his story on the killing of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden.


President Barack Obama acknowledges the crowd as he arrives to speak to CIA employees at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., on May 20, 2011. In his speech, Obama congratulated the country’s intelligence workers for the effort that led to the killing of the terrorist Osama bin Laden. (AP / Carolyn Kaster)

There’s been criticism of Hersh, much of it centering on his use of anonymous sources. But if you read Hersh’s story closely and check what others have written, you’ll see that his account holds up. The report was published in the May 21 edition of the London Review of Books.

I talked to Hersh by telephone Monday morning. He told me he began working on the story immediately after the U.S. raid on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan. He said he doubted, from the beginning, the administration’s account of the death of bin Laden on May 2, 2011, at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs. The administration said the SEALs shot their way into the compound, near two Pakistani military installations in Abbottabad, and killed the terrorist leader.

“I knew after the raid there was a problem,” Hersh said. He said he was tipped off by someone in the administration that the problem was in the accounts of the raid given by President Barack Obama and some of his aides...
Complete article: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/seymour_hersh_on_bin_laden_story_anonymous_sources_20150518

From the comments:

Ellen Hanson • a day ago

The original story of the raid was preposterous from the start, including the burial at sea, the in flight DNA testing, and the 'face recognition software' ID. The fully controlled media reported all as fact however, without any verification whatever. There should have been an immediate congressional investigation. There should be a congressional investigation now. Let's take the govt.'s version as fact, then it should be prosecuted as a war crime by an international court.


Democracy Now: Seymour Hersh Details Explosive Story on Bin Laden Killing & Responds to White House, Media Backlash

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Thinkingabout

(30,058 posts)
1. It may be the story he was told, but when the story is wrong it is wrong. He is trying
Wed May 20, 2015, 06:56 PM
May 2015

to maintain a reputation which was already in doubt but it will not make his story true just because he wants it to be. Too many have disputed his story, he needs to return to his sources and tell them it was a lie.

Tarheel_Dem

(31,207 posts)
2. What did you expect? He may stand by it, but his colleagues think he's lost it.
Wed May 20, 2015, 07:21 PM
May 2015

There's a reason the story didn't run in his usual column. Journalistically, the piece may as well have been published at infowars, or WorldNutDaily.

Sy Hersh, Lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors
By JACK SHAFER

May 11, 2015


It’s a messy omelet of a piece that offers little of substance for readers or journalists who may want to verify its many claims. The Hersh piece can’t be refuted because there’s not enough solid material to refute. Like the government officials who spun the original flawed Abbottabad stories, he simply wants the reader to trust him.

Hersh’s piece quarrels with almost every aspect of the official story, asserting that much of it is cover designed to protect the Pakistanis who sold bin Laden out to the United States for military aid. The official account that the U.S. located bin Laden by tracking his couriers? A “cover story” to mask the former Pakistani intelligence officer who walked in with information to collect the reward. The official account of a firefight at bin Laden’s compound. Also a cover story, according to an unnamed source who says the SEALs killed bin Laden “totally unopposed.” The disposal of bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean from the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson? No evidence it happened, states Hersh. What really happened, according to an unnamed retired official who spoke to Hersh, is that the SEALs claimed to have tossed some of bin Laden’s body parts “over the Hindu Kush mountains” on the flight back to their Jalalabad, Afghanistan, base. The treasure trove of intelligence reaped by the SEALs from the shot-up Abbottabad compound? The collection of bin Laden DNA evidence? Another cover story.

In his detailed critique of the piece, Vox’s Max Fisher accuses Hersh of “internal contradictions” and “troubling inconsistencies.” Why bother to build a duplicate of the Abbottabad residence in Nevada for SEAL training purposes when the Pakistanis were going to allow a cakewalk all the way to bin Laden’s doorstep? If the intelligence materials harvested by the SEALs were fake, then why did al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri endorse them as genuine? No supporting documents, Fisher kvetches, no proof, several anonymous sources, and one named Pakistani who ran ISI in the early 1990s, amounting to “worryingly little evidence for a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years,” Fisher writes.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/seymour-hersh-bin-laden-story-117830.html#ixzz3aX2rjmFn

Seymour Hersh has produced amazing investigative journalism. But his newest bombshell reads like bad fiction.

By Phillip Carter

When Seymour Hersh is right, he’s really right. His incredible reporting unearthed the My Lai massacre in 1969, causing seismic tremors for the U.S. military that would reverberate for decades. Thirty-five years later, Hersh’s patient detective work uncovered the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, changing not just how U.S. forces treated detainees in the field but also how the U.S. military managed detention operations at Guantánamo Bay. These meticulously researched and reported pieces altered the course of American policy during two major wars, and set a gold standard for what investigative national security journalism can (and should) be.

Unfortunately, Hersh’s latest dispatch in the London Review of Books falls far short of this mark. In a piece published Sunday, Hersh asserts that the official story of how U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden in May 2011 was one, big, bright shining lie, shielded up until now by the hyperclassification surrounding the mission and a desire to protect America’s secret partners in Pakistan. To make these fantastic allegations, Hersh relies on a coterie of Pakistani sources, mostly retired from that country’s military or intelligence agencies, as well as a handful of anonymous U.S. officials or consultants. The shallow sourcing alone makes Hersh’s article suspicious. The convenient overlap between certain Pakistani interests and the truths revealed by Hersh cast doubt on the piece too, especially in the absence of more solid sourcing. Many of the actual details in the piece, such as the reported obliteration of Bin Laden’s corpse by gunfire, shred any remaining credibility the article might have. Little wonder the CIA told the Washington Post the report was “utter nonsense,” and a White House official said it had “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions” to respond to each one.

If the facts were as Hersh reported, they probably would have come out by now. Not surprisingly given his Pakistani sources, Hersh’s version of truth aligns conveniently with Pakistani interests, particularly those of Pakistani generals anxious to make themselves look less impotent after the U.S. raid. In the U.S. version that has been told many times since 2011, Pakistan’s military fell asleep at the switch multiple times, allowing Bin Laden to live near Pakistan’s version of West Point, and allowing U.S. forces to conduct a lethal raid on their territory. In Hersh’s telling, Pakistani leaders look calculating, wise, and gifted at manipulating their American patrons.


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/05/seymour_hersh_s_london_review_of_books_investigation_of_the_osama_bin_laden.html

 

Rex

(65,616 posts)
5. Maybe he should tell his sources to go public and make a statement.
Wed May 20, 2015, 07:23 PM
May 2015

Otherwise he still ends up looking like Alex Jones at the end of the day.

pnwmom

(108,925 posts)
6. Hardly anyone cares about his story, true or not.
Wed May 20, 2015, 07:27 PM
May 2015

All most Americans care about is that Obama -- unlike Bush -- got Bin Laden.

Bush obviously preferred to keep Bin Laden around as a kind of boogeyman, justifying never-ending war.

Whether Obama did this behind Pakistan's back or with Pakistan's help matters to very few people. Maybe Pakistan wanted Obama to take all the credit. Fine. No big deal.

And I'm among the majority of Americans who don't regret the fact that we didn't have to go through years of a protracted show trial. Bin Laden publicly took responsibility for the deaths of almost 4,000 people. There is no reason to think he was lying.

 

Tierra_y_Libertad

(50,414 posts)
8. He also stood by his sources when he exposed the My Lai massacre.
Wed May 20, 2015, 07:33 PM
May 2015

And, the government and military stood by theirs.


How did that work out?

reorg

(3,317 posts)
9. Fun fact:
Wed May 20, 2015, 08:20 PM
May 2015

Last edited Wed May 20, 2015, 09:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Among the 'treasure trove of documents' found at the scene which is now going to be released - after Hersh had complained that 'we haven't seen much of that' - is not only the official 9/11 report but also several 'books on illuminati and 9/11 conspiracy theories', e.g. 'The New Pearl Harbor' by David Ray Griffin.

Looks like Bin Laden had taken a keen interest in who might have been behind the 9/11 attacks!

http://rt.com/usa/260429-declassified-documents-laden-compound/

Seymour Hersh on ‘fantasy’ of White House’s bin Laden assassination tale (FULL INTERVIEW)




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