Thread: INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST HERSH CLAIMS OBAMA LIED ABOUT BIN LADEN RAID

The President...
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST HERSH CLAIMS OBAMA LIED ABOUT BIN LADEN RAID



Reuters

by LEE STRANAHAN11 May 20153

Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning left-wing investigative journalist, is accusing Pres. Obama of lying about the raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in a 10,000 word piece on the London Review of Books.

The article, which was released Sunday, was so widely read that it crashed the LRoB’s website briefly.

Hersh’s story describes a politically obsessed President Obama rushing to get word out about the raid over the objections of key officials like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Hersh points out that the bin Laden raid “was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election.”

Hersh’s other main claim involves the knowledge of Pakistani officials. Hersh says the Obama administration claimed:

that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account.

Appearing on CNN Monday morning, Hersh strongly defended the story from attacks by host Chris Cuomo and CNN Security Analyst Peter Bergen, who wrote a lengthy rebuttalfor CNN.

Responding to the charge that his article was based primarily on just one single, anonymous source, veteran reporter Hersh told Cuomo he had “vet[ted] and verify[ied]” his reporting with other sources.

Bergen claims Hersh’s argument is essentially a massive conspiracy theory, calling it “farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.”

In his criticism, however, Bergen notes that the Obama administration made false statement right after the raid.

In his article, Hersh correctly points out that in the immediate aftermath of the bin Laden raid, White House officials initially made some false statements about the raid — for instance, that bin Laden was using his wives as human shields during the raid — but these were quickly corrected.

Hersh says the reason for the inaccuracies is that President Obama wanted to take immediate credit for the raid. Hersh said that the initial plan was to announce the death of bin Laden about a week later, but Hersh writes:

Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said, and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following.

Hersh quotes from Robert Gate’s book Duty about how upset Gates was that President Obama decided to push narrative in order to take credit.

That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say. Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts were often wrong… Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and at one point, told the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the **** up?’ To no avail.

Hersh reports others were also incensed by President Obama’s approach to organizing and delivering the speech:

Gates wasn’t the only official who was distressed by Obama’s decision to speak without clearing his remarks in advance, the retired official said, ‘but he was the only one protesting. Obama didn’t just double-cross Gates, he double-crossed everyone.

The White house has yet to comment on the report, but expect the Hersh piece to be the subject of discussion in the days to come.

http://www.breitbart.com/national-se...in-laden-raid/

I don't think they killed bin Laben, I think they killed someone else, and then dumped the body at sea to conceal the identity.

‘Utter nonsense': CIA and White House blast Seymour Hersh’s explosive Osama bin Laden raid story

By Dan Lamothe May 11 at 12:23 PM


This undated file photo shows al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. A new report questions the White House narrative of the 2011 U.S. military raid that killed him in Pakistan. (AP Photo, File)

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged in a long-rumored 10,000-word story published Sunday that the United States and Pakistan lied about major details about the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but the CIA and White House are both rejecting his account.

Hersh, writing for the London Review of Books, reported that Pakistan and the United States collaborated closely on the mission, and hatched a cover story afterward that held that Washington called for it unilaterally. Starting in 2006, bin Laden, Hersh alleged, was actually a prisoner of the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the compound in Abbottabad, where he was killed, and not hiding from authorities.

A CIA official told The Washington Post that Hersh’s story is “utter nonsense.” White House spokesman Ned Price said it had “too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions” to fact-check each one, and added that the premise that bin Laden was killed in “anything but a unilateral U.S. mission is patently false.”

“As we said at the time, knowledge of this operation was confined to a very small circle of senior U.S. officials,” Price said in a statement. “The President decided early on not to inform any other government, including the Pakistani Government, which was not notified until after the raid had occurred. We had been and continue to be partners with Pakistan in our joint effort to destroy al-Qa’ida, but this was a U.S. operation through and through.”


Pakistani boys play near demolition work on the compound where al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed May 2, 2011, in the town of Abbottabad. (Photo by AMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images)

Bin Laden was killed May 2, 2011, in a helicopter raid by Navy SEALs. The elite commandos flew in under cover of darkness from Afghanistan.

Hersh, citing American sources, alleged that two Pakistani generals knew about the raid in advance and made sure the American helicopters could cross into Pakistani airspace without triggering any retaliation. He added that the CIA did not learn about bin Laden’s location by tracking his couriers, as widely reported, but through a Pakistani intelligence official who betrayed his own government for reward money.

Hersh earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for exposing the mass killing of civilians in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1969, and later was credited with helping to expose the abuse of detainees by the U.S. military at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004.

But reporting by Hersh, who stood by his report on Monday, has come under scrutiny in recent years. Peter Bergen, an analyst for CNN and author of a book about the raid, wrote Monday that the new article is a “farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.”

Bergen and others, like Vox’s Max Fisher, noted that Hersh’s new story relies heavily on two sources: A retired Pakistani general, Asad Durrani, and a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.” It is not made clear how that American source learned about the raid.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/c...en-raid-story/

We all know what opinions are like and and we all have them. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Originally Posted by Newmexican

We all know what opinions are like and and we all have them. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

It will indeed.

It is a shame that we do not know who to trust from our press. It is a shame we do not know who to trust in our government. It is a shame that we nearly must mistrust our business leaders. It is a shame that what has been shared in the pervious statements are the truth.