Tracking down and killing bin Laden has been something that just about everyone wanted to see done, but it’s been the particular wet dream of militaristic conservatives who love these sorts of action-movie heroics. Yet what they got in real life was a conservative chickenhawk who said that he “didn’t really give bin Laden much thought” followed by a liberal President who directed the CIA to give it their top priority, took a big risk, and got the job done. Wait, did I say “liberal President”? Make that black liberal President. The whole thing sticks in the Republican craw like a chicken bone in a dog’s gullet.
In short: I’m surprised it took this long for the moon-landing-hoaxers and 9/11-truthers to come up with “didn’t happen”.
UBL hasn’t come on the net to say I’m alive.
AQ confirmed in a statement that he was dead.
Nobody from Pakistan or the US has leaked anything that makes it look like he’s alive.
If he’s living and bagging groceries with Elivs in Kalamazoo nobody who’d know better wants to share.
There’s a big difference between Pakistan knowing where Bin Ladan was and Pakistan telling the U.S. about it. Even at the time, it seemed unlikely that Pakistan knew nothing, given that Bin Ladan was living in a compound in the shadow of a large Pakistani military base, and not, as we’d always assumed, a cave in the mountains somewhere. If that’s all Hersh was claiming, then his book probably wouldn’t be in the news, or even the topic of an SDMB thread.
Leaving aside the details of his narrative, which I agree are inconsistent, and make no sense—e.g., bullets don’t usually chop a body into bits—in his own words, Hersh’s points are the following:
As I see it, there are three main points here, as well as the bombshell not in the above quote that members of the Saudi ruling faction were bankrolling OBL’s stay in Abbottabad:
[ol]
[li]OBL had been under house arrest in Abbottabad, with the connivance of elements of Pakistan’s government;[/li][li]Elements of the ISI and Pakistani military knew about the raid in advance, and deconflicted it from other Pakistani military and police units. It’s unstated, but they also made sure that Pakistan did not treat this as a raid against either its command and control, or its strategic assets;[/li][li]Someone in the ISI sold OBL out for 25 million USD (and probably a bunch of spots in Witness Protection).[/li][/ol] I don’t find any of the above list particularly crazy to believe. Rather the opposite, actually.
The alternative is that one of the world’s most hunted men and his family lived right under the nose of Pakistan’s elite for several years. He was ferreted out not by a traitor, but by a combination of signals intelligence (that his circle had years of experience avoiding), and his family voluntarily getting injections from some random doctor.
When the US found this out, instead of demanding him, or just causing the villa to explode, sent multiple helicopters with commandos into an area where they’d done little reconnaissance and could have only limited backup. For all they knew, they were headed into a SAM/AAA trap, or through no fault of their own, another Black Hawk Down situation. And might have to shoot their way out through the Pakistani Army battalion, garrisoned a mile or so down the road. T
The phrase for that, incidentally, when one nation sends military men and helicopters into another, several hundred miles from the border between the two, is Act Of War, something the U.S. had cleverly avoided with Pakistan up until that point. Oh, and the villa is only 40 or so miles from a country that frequently engages in open hostilities with Pakistan. Did I mention that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons? Hey, maybe the Obama Administration’s foreign policy apparatus is dumb enough to potentially provoke two nuclear-armed countries into thinking either is out to get the other, and sending nearly two dozen commandos to go play Desert One, but I can’t see USSOCOM going along with it.
As full of shit as Seymour Hersh frequently is, has been, and despite some frankly bizarre things mentioned in the lengthy article—I can’t see the SEALs chumming the slopes of the Hindu Kush with pieces of OBL—I think his story is quite a bit more believable than the official cover story.
What I can’t figure out, and Hersh’s explanation on why they didn’t is unsatisfactory, is, when the ISI figured their cover was blown, why they didn’t cart OBL and his family’s corpses to some hut in the NWTA and dropped a 2000 pounder on it. Then pretend not to notice as a SOCOM long range surveillance team scooped up whatever bits they needed in order to call it good. The only thing I can think of off hand is that the bits of ISI that felt OBL’s usefulness were at an end, were not the same bits of ISI that could roam freely through Waziristan.
I should think if the Pakistani government was in league with the US government in specific incident, the SEALs would have taken bin Laden to Gitmo, alive.
To me there was one main point: Barack Obama ordered the “homicide” of an an “unarmed elderly civilian” under house arrest.
I’m six years older than bin Laden was when killed, and had been thinking I was middle aged. I guess now I know better.
As to whether the President did that, I hope not.
As for the truth of Hersh’s article, I’m thinking that the periodical he placed it in (London Review of Books) isn’t known for fact-checking. Did the New Yorker turn this down?
Here’s one reason I’m not ruling out the general picture Hersh presents:
Looking at it from 50,000 feet, the United States has been fighting what amount to a war against Al-Qaeda and affiliates for many years. Truth is not only the first casualty of war, but a continual casualty.
Looking at it from ground level, if Hersh is right (a very big if), then bin Laden was living in house arrest for five years during which the American people were led to believe he was on the run. Admitting this at the first point where US intelligence became aware of it would have created big problems for both the US and Pakistan government, with Pakistan facing great internal pressure to stand up to America and free the man, and great external pressure to extradite him. Lying would have solved those problems. Once you lie about it at the start, then you are forced to keep on lying to prevent even bigger public relations difficulties.
Personally, I make life just a little less frustrating by accepting that lying is part of human nature. Compared to waging war, it’s an extremely minor sin.
The story is a crock, but this is the easiest to answer; if the tale is true then they are in deep trouble irregardless of what they do to Bin Laden. If they kill him, many personnel could well face a murder charge down the line (rightly), he was a prisoner who was killed, while under arrest. Putting him on trial is a no no
This way they do not face possible criminal charges down the line.
In that vein, whatever became of the allegations that the Pakistani Army had committed over 280 extrajudicial killings in the Swat Valley during the Summer of 2009? For example, see the Al Jazeera link above your quote, mentioning the Human Rights Watch report, and videos showing a massacre. I wouldn’t be surprised if the arrests and trials of those responsible had smaller headlines than the bad acts themselves, but I hadn’t heard of how it all turned out.
I’d think OBL’s alleged minders’d be in a lot more trouble if they’d let him be taken alive. Jeez, you think the Tsarnaev trial’s a circus…
A few years ago, Hersh gave a speech in which he claimed that many high-level people in the U.S. military were secretly members of Opus Dei. Yes! Just like in The Da Vinci Code!
I don’t think that either Obama or any of his staff would risk running a lie this big, especially that involves so many people who could fuck up any number of years down the line. The alleged plan would have the following people lie and keep on lying for years: Obama, secretaries of state and defense, many other people in the White House and Pentagon, all the Marines that supposedly participated in the fake operation, all the Pakistani counterparts on the other side of this and all the Saudi officials involved. Does this sound like a plausible - or even possible - process to you?
Seymour Hersh hasn’t been a decent journalist for a long time. And no, he didn’t stop being a good one on Jan. 20, 2009.
But it’s well established that the administration’s account was not totally factual from the beginning and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if more lies have been told. Which means little to me, since lying about foreign policy events is what they are supposed to do to protect secrets. What they revealed was already too much, as Robert Gates points out in his memoir. But as with any issue, they wanted the political credit, so they embellished some things and glossed over some others.
One thing Hersh is right about in all likelihood: bin Laden was not going to be taken alive. This administration doesn’t capture terrorists, because capturing terrorists creates political problems. They kill them. Which is probably the better policy and the better politics, but the adminstration isn’t just going to come out and say that straight up.
Well, *candidate *Obama, in the 2008 debates, pretty much announced the policy would be to go kill bin Laden if he was found in Pakistan, if the locals could not or would not take care of the issue themselves. So that was not really “news”.
Hersh seems to have gone into a Fred Hoyle-style crazy old man phase. Maybe he’ll call out the administration for hiding evidence of canals on Mars next.
I’m not doubting you, but do you have an exact quote?
ISTM that if Hersch’s story is true (and that is a pretty big If) the “lie” would come in because the locals had bin Laden under house arrest, and neutralized. But Obama killed him anyway.
As mentioned, this hardly matters since I fully support Obama in killing bin Laden. This is pretty much the only thing I can think to argue in retrospect that I should have voted for Obama over McCain, because Obama said he would go into Pakistan to get bin Laden and McCain said he wouldn’t (IIRC).
And as mentioned, suppose Obama lied about everything - bin Laden was killed deliberately, the Pakistanis tipped them off, bin Laden was neutralized, they bribed someone instead of following a courier, the Pakistanis knew all about it in advance, etc.
I still don’t care. bin Laden sleeps with the fishes. Good. A loud thumbs up to Obama and the SEALs and all the folks who made it happen.