Seymour Hersh Interview: New Book Disputes US Account of Bin Laden Killing

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36664-seymour-hersh-interview-new-book-disputes-us-account-of-bin-laden-killing

And anyway, so what the deal was, we were mad at Pasha and Kayani, and, my god, we gave them money. We gave this—Pakistan has been our ally forever. You know, remember the guy that was shot down in the U-2—what’s his name?—[Francis Gary] Powers, over Russia, that embarrassing episode when Eisenhower lied about it. He flew out of a secret base in Pakistan. It’s always been a home, a little home away from home. And it’s always been a lot of controversy inside Pakistan.

I would say, I don’t know—I can’t give you a number, but I would say in many areas of the country, many rural areas where there’s a lot of jihadism, fundamentalism, bin Laden is a hero. And so, when we learned that Pasha and Kayani, the two guys that we were giving toys to—you want a helicopter, you got a helicopter; you want a trip to America, you got a trip to America; you want an armored car, you got an armored car—along with stuff, under-the-table stuff and stuff also appropriated—a lot of money we spend on Pakistan, making them our buddies, because, as I say, among other things, they were. They were—they fought with us in Afghanistan. They joined the Afghan War. And Pakistan, one of the stories that was told—and this is just a product of good, old journalism sort of, you know, boots on the ground or whatever you want to call it, doing your job. So appalled at this. One of the things they did is they came in early in 1980 and helped fight us—helped us in Afghanistan. They supported the Taliban. It was very complicated, but they also fought against other area—other—the government regime for us. And once the Russians took over Pakistan—Afghanistan, rather, the Indians, of course, who were always—India and Pakistan, that’s a blood feud forever—the Indians moved in and set up eight consulates. Well, in the early '80s, ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, raided some of the consulates, hung some of the Indian diplomats from trees—everything I'm saying now was written and published in wire service stories at the time—and then got—were in a bind, because in the early '80s they were working on the nuke, but they hadn't made weapons. We know India, and Pakistan certainly knew it—India was weaponized by ’75, had a bomb. Panic city in Islamabad, the capital.

What do we do? We—they’re our allies, they’re our buddies. We spend—and you could find it in a NexisLexis search—maybe not in Google, but Nexis, you can find it. We begin giving contracts to Raytheon. When I last got—it was over $900 million when I stopped looking at it, for an incredible radar system. It’s a 3D audible system that we built for them, state of the art, no—among other things, every image could not be deleted. It was—you could not delete an image. It was that solid of a system, A-plus system. The only—I learned later that what they had to do, if they didn’t want to see our choppers coming—and remember the story, they came in without being seen, and the Pakistani government didn’t know it. I mean, it’s comical stuff, as I wrote, out of a Lewis Carroll story. They actually probably—I learned this later—probably shut down the system, because they just—they would have had to deploy the—they watched them all the way. Otherwise, they would have.

Anyway, the point being that the—it was an—when the president—the whole plan, once we got to Pasha and Kayani—we learned about the Saudi money. I learned about it initially from Americans. I learned more from ISI about the tankers. It’s very hard to trace that stuff. Once you get a tanker in high sea, you can change the ownership five times. It’s actually a great way to move money. The Saudis—if you remember, after the raid, he had wife and children in the—Abbottabad with him, and ISI took them out. And we never heard another thing about them. The stories were we’d get to debrief them. They were flown out of—in a Saudi plane back to Saudi Arabia, where his family—bin Laden came from a very eminent family in Saudi Arabia.

[postulater]

1. That is hard to follow.

It reads like 'Sara Palin talk'.

I hope the book is more readable.

[sharp_stick]

2. Something happened to Hersh

His stuff reads a lot more like a fever dream than any kind of journalism.