Sy Hersh Stunner: The Killing of Osama bin Laden
Hersch exposes a series of self-serving lies, as well as double crossings, on the part of the President regarding the killing of bin Laden. Bin Laden's location was not discovered by our crack CIA, but by a walk-in tip from a Pakistani official, he wasn't 'hiding out' in Abbottabad, but had been held in custody by Pakistan since 2006, the Pakistani intelligence services were fully aware of the raid in advance, and even made sure the Seal helicopters would be able to fly in over Pakistani airspace without triggering an alert, bin Laden was not armed and there was no firefight with the Seals, the story about removing garbage bags full of computers and Al Qaeda operational materials was a fiction concocted to justify killing bin Laden rather than taking him into custody, since he was no longer operationally relevant -- it was a premeditated hit. And the President, in making an immediate public announcement of the killing over the objections of Secretary Gates, violated an agreement that had been made with two Pakistani intelligence officials who had cooperated with the raid and without whose efforts the raid would not have been possible. And there's more. From the London Review of Books:
Seymour M. Hersh
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Five days after the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as many as 15 computers. Snippets from one of the videos showed a solitary bin Laden looking wan and wrapped in a blanket, watching what appeared to be a video of himself on television. An unnamed official told reporters that the raid produced a ‘treasure trove … the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever’, which would provide vital insights into al-Qaida’s plans. The official said the material showed that bin Laden ‘remained an active leader in al-Qaida, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group … He was far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was described as a command-and-control centre in Abbottabad. ‘He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security,’ the official said. The information was so vital, he added, that the administration was setting up an inter-agency task force to process it: ‘He was not simply someone who was penning al-Qaida strategy. He was throwing operational ideas out there and he was also specifically directing other al-Qaida members.’
These claims were fabrications: there wasn’t much activity for bin Laden to exercise command and control over. The retired intelligence official said that the CIA’s internal reporting shows that since bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006 only a handful of terrorist attacks could be linked to the remnants of bin Laden’s al-Qaida. ‘We were told at first,’ the retired official said, ‘that the Seals produced garbage bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence reports out of this stuff. And then we were told that the community is gathering everything together and needs to translate it. But nothing has come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.’ The retired official said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the US by the Pakistanis, who later razed the building. The ISI took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was made available to the US for questioning.
‘Why create the treasure trove story?’ the retired official said. ‘The White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him? A cover story was created – that there was a network of couriers coming and going with memory sticks and instructions. All to show that bin Laden remained important.’
In July 2011, the Washington Post published what purported to be a summary of some of these materials. The story’s contradictions were glaring. It said the documents had resulted in more than four hundred intelligence reports within six weeks; it warned of unspecified al-Qaida plots; and it mentioned arrests of suspects ‘who are named or described in emails that bin Laden received’. The Post didn’t identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet connection. Despite their claims that the documents had produced hundreds of reports, the Post also quoted officials saying that their main value wasn’t the actionable intelligence they contained, but that they enabled ‘analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait of al-Qaida’.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Alex, meet Sy. 
Scary that some on this board are taking this story seriously.
We truly have entered the twilight zone. 
