Posted on 05/18/2015 3:33:35 PM PDT by rickmichaels
This week, Seymour Hersh, America’s most famous and controversial investigative journalist, caused an uproar with his allegations that the U.S. government account of the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan was a lie. According to his version of events, published in the London Review of Books, bin Laden was not only living under the protection of the Pakistani military but the raid that nabbed him was planned and executed with Pakistani consent.
Critics, White House officials in particular, have strongly condemned the allegations, accusing Hersh of conspiratorial excess. Hersh relies on anonymous sources and unnamed insiders, they say, and builds a narrative of events that are impossible to verify. Nonetheless, based on my own experiences reporting in Pakistan, his story does ring true.
And here’s why:
In November 2009, one and half years before the Navy SEAL operation that killed him, I was told by a Pakistani militant that Osama bin Laden was in a safehouse in Abbottabad, a garrison city 100 km north of the Pakistani capital Islamabad. The militant, a former member of the Lashkar e Taiba (LeT), one of Pakistan’s most powerful jihadi groups with close ties to the Pakistani military, was absolutely certain.
“Osama bin Laden is here,” he told me while we were driving through the town on our way to the capital. “The ISI are protecting him. The senior LeT commanders are close with the ISI. They all know he’s here.”
I didn’t believe him. Abbottabad is one of Pakistan’s most important military cities, home to the Pakistan Military Academy, the equivalent of West Point. Much of its population is made up of retired military officers.
But nine months later, according to Hersh’s account, a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer would walk into the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and tell the CIA station chief more or less the same thing: Osama bin Laden was in Abbottabad.
I’ve kept that bit of information to myself these past few years. Even while I was back in Abbottabad covering the killing of bin Laden in May 2011, I said nothing about it, partly because by then my source, the former LeT fighter, had disappeared.
So why am I revealing this now?
I think it’s important, after Seymour Hersh’s revelations, to revisit what happened in the lead-up to an event that possibly changed the course of history.
At the time, the event certainly felt like theatre. There was a great deal of circumstantial evidence that clashed with the official narrative being put forth. The Pakistani military denied they had any knowledge of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad; the Americans denied they had carried out the raid with Pakistani consent. According to President Barack Obama’s version of events, detailed in a press conference hours after the operation, this was a monumental act of derring-do, carried out by the world’s premier military using elite soldiers and top-secret technology. It was a Hollywood script (and would later become one, the 2013 Academy Award-nominated Zero Dark Thirty) complete with easily identifiable heroes and villains. None of it sat very well with me.
This is what I knew: a mid-level militant from a group with known ties to Pakistan’s intelligence services knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad. If he knew, it’s fair to say the Pakistani military knew. Locals I spoke to in the neighbourhood of the compound where bin Laden was staying all told me it was an ISI facility. The white Potohar jeeps they saw almost daily were a dead giveaway: “The ISI bought thousands of those cars in the late 1990s for its officers,” an ISI insider told me at the time. “It’s a running joke in Pakistan: if you see a white Potohar in your rearview mirror, be careful, the ISI is on your tail.”
Other ISI contacts were dumbfounded: how could a U.S. Navy Seal team manage to fly into one of the most heavily guarded garrison cities in Pakistan, carry out an assault lasting nearly an hour—in a quiet residential neighbourhood two kilometres from an elite military college—and then fly out without any response from the Pakistani military?
Someone had to have known, I was told repeatedly, and that someone had to be at the highest level of the military command. The U.S. had to have had Pakistani blessing for the operation.
What Hersh provides is more detail. More importantly, he offers us the opportunity to question the widening gap between what our leaders are doing and what they tell us they are doing. According to his view, we are living through an era of scripted events, engineered realities designed to achieve political goals. If his view is true – and there is mounting evidence that it is – then it deserves our attention.
I’d have to say too that it has the ring of truth.
If it is true, then the Pakistan ISI had to have had a faction within it that viewed OBL as a liability. The ISI, from what I understand, is full of Islamists, so that had to be a rather select group that were disaffected with the most famous Islamist of them all.
Somehow, this is George Bush’s fault. I haven’t figured out that part yet.
That Bin Ladin was under ISI protection and by extention Pakistani military protection is only obvious to me.
That does not equate to Pak military acquiescence in his killing.
I’m not even sure Obama was on board until too late to stop it.
“I’d have to say too that it has the ring of truth.”
I’m pretty sure all of this obviousness was remarked upon by freepers in real time. Esp all that war college half a mile away stuff.
Seymour Hersh I don’t know, but this I do know, obama and it’s ilk, it’s fellow slaves to the father of all sodomites, is a filthy aids infected rotten liar.
Obola and Valarie Jarrett opposed the raid, opposed the capture, opposed the planning of it ever since it was first proposed. Always wanting more information, more confirmation, bringing up more problems and more requirements of success before approving it.
Somebody - Panetta maybe? - finally realized they’d been played long enough and started it - THEN told Oboma and pried back from the golf course to sit it as it was going on. And Obola never forgave him.
Was bin Laden actually killed? I don’t think so - Too damn convenient to have no body, an emergency dunking overboard after dark with only Muslims in attendance and no witnesses, and no SEAL Team witnesses left after the next helo went down. Too damn convenient.
There was no need to kill Bin-Laden. Hersh claims they met zero resistance. Plus there was no computers. 2/3 of Barry’s narrative a fig newton of someones imagination.The story is well worth reading.
With the Seal Team 6 participants, as we know, no longer around we will never know the truth.
They would be the only ones we could count on to tell the truth.
The worthless Kenyan and his Iranian puppet mistress will never tell the truth.
Such dreaming....
Hersh hasn’t published a solid story since My Lai, and that was handed to him. Any time he can accuse the US of lying, he does. Why, Sy, no story on Russians in Ukraine, Chinese in Peru or Project TIABSD?
According to the author of this story, he, Kahn, knew where Bin Laden was but did nothing.
Doesn’t pass the smell test.
bin laden ran out of CASH hence usefulness
besides we know where Zawahiri is and let him slide
and mullah Omar
They have all been insulated
REMEMBER THE USSA CREATED AL QUEDA AND ISI CREATED TALIBAN FOR THE DRUG TRADE.... BILLIONS PER YEAR... we never did go after the poppy fields did we...??? considering 90% of the heroin is afghan derived its kind of obvious isn’t it...and now with iran who gave safe haven to the bn laden sons and family , what about that?? well we are giving them nukes to play with and pakistan is giving saudi nukes.... WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENS NEXT??? i think iran will use a few on wash dc and nyc launched from a ship off the coast.
1) Any Pakistani officer hearing about a helicopter raid there would immediately know it was a US operation.
2) Who in the Pak military wants to take responsibility for opening fire on a US military operation? By the time the news of the raid percolated up the hierarchy to the top people, the US had left.
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