Why We Need to Take Sy Hersh’s bin Laden Bombshell Seriously [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/207785/why-we-need-take-sy-hershs-bin-laden-bombshell-seriously

Now, thanks to the indefatigable Seymour Hersh, the dean of American investigative journalists, we may have gotten a glimpse into just how complicated those relations are. In a 10,000-word blockbuster in the London Review of Books, Hersh unfurls an astounding counternarrative about the May 2, 2011, raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Hersh dismantles the official story, challenging virtually everything that’s been said about the attack on the Abbottabad compound by Special Operations commandos, including the fictionalized version in Kathryn Bigelow’s nail-biter Zero Dark Thirty and the avalanche of commentary from self-styled terrorism experts, including CNN’s Peter Bergen.

According to Hersh, the United States didn’t find bin Laden by diligently sifting intelligence data and tracking an alleged courier, but because a Pakistani defector walked into the US embassy in Islamabad and told the CIA that Al Qaeda’s chief was holed up in Abbottabad. Nor was bin Laden hiding—instead, says Hersh, he had been captured by the ISI in 2006 and was being held prisoner. Pakistan, called out on its deception, then opted to cooperate with Washington in a staged raid on bin Laden’s prison, withdrawing guards and clearing the airspace for US helicopters, Hersh writes. Nor was there a heroic firefight; instead, US forces executed bin Laden, an ailing invalid, in a hail of gunfire.

Hersh’s story, if true, explains two big mysteries about the 2011 operation: Why was bin Laden in a compound smack in the middle of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment, rather than in Waziristan or some village in Yemen? And given his location, is it really possible ISI didn’t know where he was? Back in 2009, during her first visit to Pakistan as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton stunned her hosts by saying, “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where [bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders] are.” (Yet, two years later, just weeks after the 2011 raid, Clinton reversed herself, insisting that Washington had “absolutely no evidence that anyone at the highest level of the Pakistani government” had known bin Laden’s whereabouts. If Hersh is right, Clinton’s second comment was part of an official cover story.