Democracy Now: Seymour Hersh Details Explosive Story on Bin Laden Killing

[Tarheel_Dem]

4. Politico: Sy Hersh, Lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors

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


Not at all surprising that some of us would swallow Hersh's version of events, unquestioningly. But many of his colleagues are asking plenty of questions. There's a problem when your account is based, primarily, on the word of a single "unnamed" source. Remember the Rolling Stone UVA story that should never have been printed? I have a feeling this is going to end Hersh's career with any serious media outlet. There's a reason why he had to print this story abroad, it's because the New Yorker knew it didn't meet their journalistic standards. Hersh has become Infowars, and he doesn't even know it yet.