Hersh defends bin Laden story

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Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday defended his 10,000-plus word expose alleging the Obama administration mischaracterized many details surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden.

“I’ve been around a long time,” Hersh said on CNN’s “New Day,” adding, “I understand the consequences of saying what I’m saying.”

“I’m waiting for the White House to deny the story,” he added later.

Hersh’s piece, published Sunday in the London Review of Books, alleges that the narrative pushed by the Obama administration following the 2011 death of bin Laden was mainly false.

The article alleged that Pakistan knew the whereabouts of the former al Qaeda mastermind and that U.S. leaders mischaracterized the raid leading to bin Laden’s death as including a “firefight.”

It also paints President Obama as rushing to take credit for the death of bin Laden a year before reelection, forcing the military and intelligence communities to offer complementing details to form the narrative.

Hersh based much of his account on a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.”

“I don’t think that’s correct to say one anonymous source,” Hersh said on CNN. “The story says clearly that I was able to vet and verify information with others in the community. It’s very tough for guys still inside to get quoted extensively.”

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“Every sentence I was reading was wrong,” Mike Morell, the former, two-time acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said Monday on “CBS This Morning.”

“The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he’s talking about,” Morell said. “The person obviously was not close to what happened. The Pakistanis did not know.”

Hersh may be right in some or all of his investigative critique; or he may be wrong. I’d take anything he has to say with a grain of salt. He’s the same doofus who wrote about abu Ghraib.

See more Seymour…

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Daniel Greenfield in 2013:

Seymour Hersh, a compulsive liar, who makes things up while quoting anonymous sources and has been allowed to get away with this for longer than any journalist should have been able to, is an expert at lying. Not at exposing lies. But at making up crazy lies.

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Ask yourself, why right now?
Hersh is pro-Clinton.
Hersh is also anti-Obama.
Hillary has been silent for 29 days in a row now.
She simply refuses to take any questions at all.
Is Hersh trying to help Hillary by hurting Obama?
Hersh cannot prove his version of events any more now than he could when he was forced to write a 3,000 word front-page NYTimes retraction some years back.
He has a strong pattern of lying while saying he has ”a source,” who is never named.
He has been caught in his lies many times before.
But WHY now is the question.

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It requires no absolutely effort to accept that Obama lying.

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If Obama lied about the UBL mission, it would not be a great revelation to find out after the fact.

If Hersh is right, I would wonder, though, how Obama would have been able to convince an elite unit to “off” UBL. They pretty much know the CINC is a tool, and a petty one to boot.

For me, Hersh is full of it, much like Obama and Hillary.

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How can one assess and determine what is truth, when you have two different accounts from two congenital liars? Which are you to believe?

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As many have already pointed out, Hersh’s version offers a combination of the inconsistent and the inexplicable. Why, for instance, would the Pakistanis help plan an elaborate raid, complete with a recall of Bin Laden’s Pakistani guards—rather than just hand Bin Laden over directly—if they always intended to claim he’d been killed in a drone strike hundreds of miles away? Worse, the key contentions rely on the exclusive word of one unnamed source who was a) retired, and b) on Hersh’s own account, only “knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.”

To be sure, there are scraps of Hersh’s hodgepodge narrative that may turn out to be true. That a CIA “walk-in” may have contributed to the intel leading to Bin Laden’s whereabouts, for instance, matches a tidbit that NBC has confirmed recently. And Hersh’s insistence that someone highly placed in the Pakistani intelligence services knew of Bin Laden’s presence has been pretty widely believed for a while. But leaping from these plausible and relatively minor details to the rest of the fantastic tale Hersh spins simply boggles the mind.

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2015/05/hershs-account-of-the-bin-laden-raid-is-journalistic-malpractice/

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Revealed: the British Pakistani general at the centre of new Bin Laden death conspiracy

A UK-based former senior officer in the Pakistan Army has been accused of being a supergrass who sold the secret location of Osama bin Laden to the CIA.

Retired Brigadier Usman Khalid, a British citizen, has been named as the informant whose tip-off led to the assassination of the world’s most wanted man in 2011.

His family have told The Telegraph of their anger that their father – who died a year ago after living in London for 35 years – has been publicly identified as the source of the leak.

And they have denied that Brigadier Khalid was the man responsible.

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Some say the reports are a ‘smokescreen’ for the real Bin Laden informant

to his family, the ISI – Pakistan’s intelligence agency – have named Mr Khalid as a “smokescreen”, a practice it also resorted to in the wake of the killing of Benazir Bhutto, when near-random names of retired army officials were outed as possible suspects.

Not that that explanation is much comfort for Mr Khalid’s family who are keen to point out the anomalies in this explanation.

For one thing, Mr Khalid had not been granted a new identity and US citizenship, as Mr Hersh contended. Nor is he now working as a consultant to the CIA. At the time he was supposed to have met the CIA’s station chiefs in Islamabad, he was in fact in London, where he moved to in 1979, living in a suburban house with his family and spending his spare time following his beloved cricket. Far from living it up to this day on his informant’s bounty, he passed away last year.

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However, even by the standards of the White House rapid-rebuttal machine, the denials of Mr Hersh’s claims have been vehement. “I got a third of the way through and I stopped, because every sentence I was reading was wrong,” said Michael Morrell, the then deputy CIA director, who took the unusual step of penning a Wall Street Journal article debunking Mr Hersh’s findings.

He said that much as the US would have liked to have enlisted Pakistan’s co-operation in the raid, the chances of the country’s leak-prone intelligence service tipping off bin Laden was far too great. Were Mr Hersh’s claims true, it would involve a cover-up not just by shadowy CIA agents, but everyone from President Obama and Robert Gates, the defence secretary, down to the Navy Seals who gave TV interviews about the raid. “Either Mr Hersh’s version of the truth was bogus or we all had participated in one of the most successful and complex conspiracies in modern history,” he said.

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