Free Republic

What Pakistan Knew About the Bin Laden Raid Husain Haqqani With a litany of unproved claims, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has revived discussion about the circumstances in which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was discovered and killed in May 2011 in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad. Some of Hersh’s assertions in a 10,000-word London Review of Books article border on fantasy. He claims that bin Laden lived under the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was given up for reward money by one of the agency’s officers, and was eventually eliminated in a U.S. raid covertly backed...

The 2016 presidential election is attracting an unusually large number of hopefuls. The Republicans will probably field more than a dozen candidates and the Democrats, as many as five. Presently, very few of these supposed contenders have a real chance of becoming president. Republicans Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are long shots. On the Democratic side, that term applies to everyone but Hillary Rodham Clinton.. ~snip~ If you tell them in private, "You do not have a chance to be president," they will point to underdogs who won, such as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, or front-runners who...

President Obama lied to Americans about the role of Pakistan special forces in the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden so he could take credit for the mission, an expose published on Sunday has claimed. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has accused the the Commander-In-Chief of rushing to receive plaudits just hours after the Navy SEAL operation which killed the head of Al Qaeda and 9/11 mastermind four years ago.

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh. Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about...

Much of Seymour Hersh’s extensive London Review of Books exposé of the attack that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 merely reiterates what common sense had argued all along. Pakistani intelligence could not have been unaware that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. Pakistani intelligence could not have been kept entirely in the dark about the plot to kill Osama bin Laden. Despite all the public breast beating and name calling, US and Pakistan were very much working together. The “treasure trove” of materials recovered from the compound actually yielded little. There were no garbage bags filled with computers...

This weekend, a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the South Carolina Freedom Summit. They were there to court primary voters who will winnow the presidential field next February. Judging from the speeches, it’s going to be an ugly race. What the candidates are selling, and primary voters are buying, is vituperation against people who don’t look, talk, or pray like the Republican base.............. [SNIP of stuff that sounds good to me - Santorum was on fire] ...............Mexicans, Muslims, gays, rats, roaches. Christian superiority, military contempt for the president, and gauntlets thrown down to queer-loving CEOs. It’s going to...

One of America’s most revered investigative journalists has questioned the veracity of one of the Obama administration’s proudest achievements — and the firestorm of criticism has been immediate and unforgiving, from the White House to the Pentagon to the CIA. The publication Sunday of a 10,000-word article questioning the official version of the 2011 raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden might have received scant attention had it it not been penned by Seymour Hersh. The award-winning reporter, 78, who uncovered one of the worst war crimes by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War and disclosed the torture...

By Ben Kamisar - The former Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden is slamming a new report that challenges the White House’s account of the mission, calling it “garbage.” “The story that I read, the part from [Seymour] Hersh, was full of lies,” Rob O’Neill said on Fox News's "Shepard Smith Reporting." “It took me a long time to read it because I had to put it down — I couldn’t read the nonsense.” Hersh on Sunday published in story in the London Review of Books that says Pakistani intelligence officers played a significant role in the...

In an interview with The Guardian (U.K.) published Friday, the left-leaning Seymour Hersh, best known for his Pulitzer-winning reporting that exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, unloaded on the American news media for its underwhelming coverage of the Obama White House. Hersh told The Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll that the ABC and NBC news bureaus ought to be shut down and 90 percent of the editors fired for sake of fixing journalism. “I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90 percent of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control,” Hersh said....

Citing interviews with “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad” and American sources who “had access to corroborating information,” Hersh writes that the American government did not act alone in locating and killing Bin Laden, as it has consistently claimed. On the contrary, Hersh’s sources say that senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI)—Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA—knew as early as 2006 that Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and cooperated with the U.S. in the assassination. Specifically, the story says that top Pakistani Army Gen. Ashfaq...

Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a "walk in" asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding - and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along. The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The...

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is vigorously defending a controversial new story that claims the White House lied about crucial details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.Hersh's story, published in the London Review of Books on May 10, alleges that the US government misled the public about many of the details surrounding the 2011 raid on bin Laden's compound in Abottabad, Pakistan.Relying largely on a single anonymous source, described only as a retired senior US intelligence official, Hersh claims that Pakistani intelligence officials were aware of and actively hiding bin Laden.He claims that the intelligence tip that led...

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll:...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist says that raid which killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 is ‘one big lie'. He says the US media is too 'afraid' to pick on Obama. Hersh, 76, says the solution is to shut down news networks like NBC and ABC. He also suggested the firing of 90 per cent of mainstream editors.

The official story of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden reflects American derring-do. US forces snuck deep into Pakistan to conduct a commando raid on the world’s most-wanted terrorist less than two miles away from Pakistan’s premier military academy. The Pakistani government vehemently protested the action afterward, but America finally got the top terrorist of the network that conducted the 9/11 attacks. Barack Obama took credit for making the call on the dangerous incursion, and reminded voters repeatedly during the 2012 election that he was the man who got bin Laden.Four years after the raid, a new version...

An expose published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with his narrative of the 2011 assassination of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Author Seymour M. Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take credit for bin Laden’s death. This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then collaborate the president’s version of events. “High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,” Hersh...

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.​＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s...

Matt Damon and George Clooney come back together for political thriller Matt Damon and George Clooney, who are currently working together on Steven Soder-bergh's Ocean's Eleven sequel - Ocean's Twelve, will reteam for the Stephen Gaghan-helmed political thriller Syriana. In addition, Amanda Peet is in final negotiations to join the project. Set up at Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh's studio-based Section Eight will produce the project with shooting slated to begin during the summer. Gaghan adapted the script, which is loosely based on the Robert Baer non-fiction novel See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the...

Seymour M. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter now writing for The New Yorker magazine, was asked Tuesday at the University of Michigan why Sen. John Kerry isn't easily leading the presidential race over George W. Bush when the war in Iraq is going so badly. "I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution - and those are Bush supporters," said Hersh, who is up front about his support for Kerry. Hersh's observations about the presidential campaign, the war in Iraq...

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 5 Report says Israeli unit cracked Iranian code A secret intelligence unit, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code enabling Israel to monitor communications, including contacts with Pakistan regarding the development of Iranian nuclear weapons, The New Yorker reported on Tuesday. "On a trip to the Middle East last month, I was told that a number of years ago the Israeli signals-intelligence agency, known as Unit 8200, broke a sophisticated Iranian code and began monitoring communications that included talk between Iran and Pakistan about Iran's burgeoning nuclear weapons program," investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh wrote....