Truthdig: Seymour Hersh Stands by His bin Laden Story, and His Sources

[Tarheel_Dem]

2. What did you expect? He may stand by it, but his colleagues think he's lost it.

There's a reason the story didn't run in his usual column. Journalistically, the piece may as well have been published at infowars, or WorldNutDaily.

Sy Hersh, Lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors
By JACK SHAFER

May 11, 2015


It’s a messy omelet of a piece that offers little of substance for readers or journalists who may want to verify its many claims. The Hersh piece can’t be refuted because there’s not enough solid material to refute. Like the government officials who spun the original flawed Abbottabad stories, he simply wants the reader to trust him.

Hersh’s piece quarrels with almost every aspect of the official story, asserting that much of it is cover designed to protect the Pakistanis who sold bin Laden out to the United States for military aid. The official account that the U.S. located bin Laden by tracking his couriers? A “cover story” to mask the former Pakistani intelligence officer who walked in with information to collect the reward. The official account of a firefight at bin Laden’s compound. Also a cover story, according to an unnamed source who says the SEALs killed bin Laden “totally unopposed.” The disposal of bin Laden’s corpse into the ocean from the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson? No evidence it happened, states Hersh. What really happened, according to an unnamed retired official who spoke to Hersh, is that the SEALs claimed to have tossed some of bin Laden’s body parts “over the Hindu Kush mountains” on the flight back to their Jalalabad, Afghanistan, base. The treasure trove of intelligence reaped by the SEALs from the shot-up Abbottabad compound? The collection of bin Laden DNA evidence? Another cover story.

In his detailed critique of the piece, Vox’s Max Fisher accuses Hersh of “internal contradictions” and “troubling inconsistencies.” Why bother to build a duplicate of the Abbottabad residence in Nevada for SEAL training purposes when the Pakistanis were going to allow a cakewalk all the way to bin Laden’s doorstep? If the intelligence materials harvested by the SEALs were fake, then why did al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri endorse them as genuine? No supporting documents, Fisher kvetches, no proof, several anonymous sources, and one named Pakistani who ran ISI in the early 1990s, amounting to “worryingly little evidence for a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years,” Fisher writes.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/seymour-hersh-bin-laden-story-117830.html#ixzz3aX2rjmFn

Seymour Hersh has produced amazing investigative journalism. But his newest bombshell reads like bad fiction.

By Phillip Carter

When Seymour Hersh is right, he’s really right. His incredible reporting unearthed the My Lai massacre in 1969, causing seismic tremors for the U.S. military that would reverberate for decades. Thirty-five years later, Hersh’s patient detective work uncovered the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, changing not just how U.S. forces treated detainees in the field but also how the U.S. military managed detention operations at Guantánamo Bay. These meticulously researched and reported pieces altered the course of American policy during two major wars, and set a gold standard for what investigative national security journalism can (and should) be.

Unfortunately, Hersh’s latest dispatch in the London Review of Books falls far short of this mark. In a piece published Sunday, Hersh asserts that the official story of how U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden in May 2011 was one, big, bright shining lie, shielded up until now by the hyperclassification surrounding the mission and a desire to protect America’s secret partners in Pakistan. To make these fantastic allegations, Hersh relies on a coterie of Pakistani sources, mostly retired from that country’s military or intelligence agencies, as well as a handful of anonymous U.S. officials or consultants. The shallow sourcing alone makes Hersh’s article suspicious. The convenient overlap between certain Pakistani interests and the truths revealed by Hersh cast doubt on the piece too, especially in the absence of more solid sourcing. Many of the actual details in the piece, such as the reported obliteration of Bin Laden’s corpse by gunfire, shred any remaining credibility the article might have. Little wonder the CIA told the Washington Post the report was “utter nonsense,” and a White House official said it had “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions” to respond to each one.

If the facts were as Hersh reported, they probably would have come out by now. Not surprisingly given his Pakistani sources, Hersh’s version of truth aligns conveniently with Pakistani interests, particularly those of Pakistani generals anxious to make themselves look less impotent after the U.S. raid. In the U.S. version that has been told many times since 2011, Pakistan’s military fell asleep at the switch multiple times, allowing Bin Laden to live near Pakistan’s version of West Point, and allowing U.S. forces to conduct a lethal raid on their territory. In Hersh’s telling, Pakistani leaders look calculating, wise, and gifted at manipulating their American patrons.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/05/seymour_hersh_s_london_review_of_books_investigation_of_the_osama_bin_laden.html