Peter Bergen at CNN has chimed in with his thoughts on Hersh’s piece.
I largely agree with his analysis. I think Seymour has lost his marbles.
I’m surprised the author’s last name isn’t Butz.
Sounds like Seymour may have “Queeg’s syndrome”, trying to relive a past success in his life by discovering another great government cover-up.
Not sure where I saw this now but apparently he’s relying on a single source for all of this information. That alone makes the story suspicious, then on top of that there’s not much logic to his claims. I wouldn’t have considered him an unreliable reporter in the past but apparently he’s had some trouble with his stories in the past as well.
Once upon a time a story this poorly sourced, conceived and written would have not made the pages of any reputable news publication. We are, sadly, not in those days anymore.
Is the LRB a reputable news publication?
Investigative journalism isn’t really their thing, no.
FWIW the headline I saw this morning immediately pegged my bullshit meter, and nothing I’ve seen since makes me think there’s even a smidgen of truth to the article. Strange Loop theory applies: if the conspiracy is capable of manufacturing the tremendous amount of evidence that indicates the official story is true, surely they’re capable of finding two schmucks to speak to a has-been reporter to feed him a lie. Hoax-style conspiracies are only likely where it’d be harder to manufacture the evidence that indicates a conspiracy than it would be to manufacture the evidence supposedly involved in the hoax itself.
This part is very telling:
Well, for one thing his claim isn’t just that the Pakistani intelligence services knew Bin Laden was there, it’s that they actually captured him back in 2006 and were keeping him basically under house arrest while deciding what concessions to extract out of the US for handling him over.
That’s right. He says that the U.S. was invited in. There was no raid. No one else killed. Just an execution.
Which all sounds very self serving. There was a lot of talk about how could Pakistani intelligence not know he was there. Or that they did and they were harboring a mass murderer. Now some unnamed Pakistani operative is saying “No really, we captured him long before you killed him.” As Peter Bergen stated he was the only Western journalist allowed into the compound before it was demolished. He saw plenty of evidence of a fight.
This, pretty much.
I will confess to a small amount of regret that he gets to RIP, though.
Now when it’s phrased like that, Hersh’s version sounds even less convincing. If you had a valuable asset that you wanted to trade for concessions, why would you let it sit on the shelf for five years? At least according to rumor, Bin Laden was in poor health – you’d think they’d want to move the inventory before its sell-by date had expired.
My first thought was that the concession was that AQ did not think of mounting operations against Pakistani government, military, or intelligence figures: no suicide bombs against Musharraf or anyone else insufficiently Muslim, in the same way Benazir Bhutto vacationed over a small chunk of Rawalpindi. Then again, there was that whole Islamabad Marriott hotel exploding thing, that nearly decapitated a good chunk of Zardari’s new cabinet.
So I dunno. If OBL was supposed to be a hostage against that sort of thing from 2006 to 2011, well, it didn’t work.
Hilarious part of a Politico story about the controversy:
'Minds me of a t-shirt I always liked (but didn’t have the abrasiveness to wear).
Black, with a Very Official Looking OSHA-style warning label in the center, maybe three inches across, danger-stripe edges, the whole bit.
DON’T FUCK WITH ME.
I FUCK BACK.
For certain induhviduals I interpret RIP as standing for “Rot in Perdition.” ObL certainly seems a likely candidate.
This story is (mostly) BS, but Bergen is the most gullible and stupidest journo around. They could have told him that Bin Laden was actually one of the Apollo Astronauts in disguise and he would have seen evidence of that.
[QUOTE=Grey Ghost]
My first thought was that the concession was that AQ did not think of mounting operations against Pakistani government, military, or intelligence figures: no suicide bombs against Musharraf or anyone else insufficiently Muslim, in the same way Benazir Bhutto vacationed over a small chunk of Rawalpindi. Then again, there was that whole Islamabad Marriott hotel exploding thing, that nearly decapitated a good chunk of Zardari’s new cabinet.
So I dunno. If OBL was supposed to be a hostage against that sort of thing from 2006 to 2011, well, it didn’t work.
[/QUOTE]
Those were Pakistani Taliban, not AQ, a distinction which is important to make.
Thank you for this thread. When I saw this as BREAKING NEWS last nite, I wondered if it was something I should give some thought to. Now I know it’s not.
At least he had something concrete to point to. To call Hersh’s assertions rumors would be too kind.
There are perhaps parts of the story I could buy.
Like, maybe bin Laden was living there with the knowledge of the Pakistanis. Eventually, there was a power shift, someone went “What the hell are we doing protecting this guy?” Or maybe they had a deal with bin Laden that was no longer working out, or realized no concessions would be forthcoming. So maybe they thought it might be a good idea to just let the US come in, kill bin Laden and take the credit in a way that minimized any exposure to Pakistan.
But the only versions I can believe would still leave the US story virtually 100% correct. There was still a raid and a firefight, etc. It just adds a preamble that has not been made public. At most, it changes who the informant was and how we discovered the final location.
The problem, as most people here are pointing out, is that Hersh is basically relying on gut feelings and not evidence. To him, the location of the safe house seems impossibly close to the Pakistani military and therefore everything else must be a lie.