Obama vs Hersh

[MBS]

42. Reinforcing your point is this:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/05/the-new-yorker-passed-on-seymour-hershs-bin-laden-206933.html

Seymour Hersh's alternative history about the killing of Osama bin Laden was offered to and declined by The New Yorker, where Hersh is a regular contributor, years before its publication in the London Review of Books, the On Media blog has confirmed.
Hersh's 10,000-word article, which was published Sunday, alleges that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and sold him to the U.S. in 2010 for military aid. It also alleges that the Pakistanis insisted on staging the Abbottabad raid that took place in 2011. The article immediately drew criticism from U.S. officials and journalists alike. At Vox, Max Fisher noted that Hersh's allegations "are largely supported only by two sources, neither of whom has direct knowledge of what happened" and says the story "is riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies."

Sources with knowledge of the matter said Monday that Hersh began pitching the magazine on the story years ago and that The New Yorker declined it on the grounds that it didn't hold up to scrutiny. The New Yorker similarly declined Hersh's 2013 article, also published in the London Review of Books, alleging that the Obama administration "cherry-picked intelligence” from the chemical attack in Syria in order to make the case for attacking President Bashar Assad. The discrepancy between Hersh's landmark reporting -- he is responsible for uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in Iraq -- are difficult to square with the tenuous, poorly sourced Syria and bin Laden reports. Hersh is at once a Pulitzer Prize-winning, George Polk-winning, National Magazine Award-winning reporter and, in the words of Vox's Fisher, a man who "has appeared increasingly to have gone off the rails." . .

And this: http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden (worth reading, and worth reading, but already posted and discussed elsewhere on this site. )

And this: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/seymour-hersh-bin-laden-story-117830.html#.VVIzXqa1jkN

Knowing, perhaps, that his critics would denounce his revisionist take on the killing of Osama bin Laden as fantasy, Seymour M. Hersh sought to pre-empt such disparagement in the first paragraph of his piece published yesterday in the London Review of Books. The accepted version of the 2011 operation put forward by the White House, Hersh charged, “might have been written by Lewis Carroll.”
And with that intro, Hersh leads the reader into a Wonderland of his own, thinly sourced retelling of the raid on Bin Laden’s complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan. According to Hersh, who cites American sources, “bin Laden had been a prisoner of the [Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency] at the Abbottabad compound since 2006” and his ISI captors eased the way for the American SEAL team to skip into Pakistan on their helicopters, kill the al Qaeda leader, and then skip out. 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.
. . .

Where was bin Laden shot and how many times? Much disagreement in the first reports. . . Almost immediately after the raid, the government made substantial changes in its telling of the story. “Even I’m getting confused,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney when attempting to sort out fact from fancy. These dueling accounts suggest that if U.S. government officials did attempt to orchestrate the hoax Hersh alleges, they were wildly incompetent in those efforts—unable to keep the press chasing a unified narrative, as I demonstrate above. Or, they were brilliant beyond the greatest Hollywood scenarist—spewing warring plotlines that completely fogged the true story from view until Hersh discovered it for the London Review of Books. What’s more likely is that a combination of U.S. spin, secrecy, diplomacy, politics and the usual confusion keep all the joints from dovetailing perfectly.
Hersh may very well be onto something—what did the Pakistanis know, when did they know it, and how much did they help? And that debate appears to be starting in earnest already, with NBC News quickly building off Hersh’s article. But Hersh’s potentially valid question on that subject is almost lost in the broad sweep of rolling back so many other stories and quibbling with effectively every known detail of one of the most thoroughly leaked secret operations in history. . .

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/seymour-hersh-bin-laden-story-117830.html#ixzz3ZwfDv9xZ