couldn’t discern exactly what lies were being told. However, it was difficult not to sense that there were at least a few big ones. Yet, the potential biggest one of all — “We came, we saw, he died” — appears to be true.
A Sy Hersh tour de force: The Killing of Osama bin Laden. He connects all the dots and explains why all the seeming anomalies and inconsistencies didn’t add up. It was because they were lies and fabrications.
It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and 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. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.
…
There’s plenty to discuss from Hersh’s article, but it’s best first to read the whole thing.
What it doesn’t address was who had custody and where of bin Laden before 2006 in Abbottabad. Why six months after 9/11 and a year before the invasion of Iraq, Bush (likely off-script) was confident enough to speak like this of OBL:
Another question I have is what was the KSA response to the assassination? Any unintended blowback from that quarter?
I take it you don’t believe that OBL was protected by Talibani elements in the ISI?
As a westerner, I have some ability to evaluate claims made by other westerners about westerner activities. Have no reason to doubt or accept that Taliban-ISI hid and protected OBL 2002-2006.
Doubt that the Taliban-ISI faction is as much of a rogue operation as we are told to believe. With that and if forced to guess, I’d say that Musharraf and his ISI teams ran the OBL custody program as soon as they nabbed him and KSA paid the bills from then until 5/11.
Just curious. My take is largely based on conversations with an Indian-American friend who is hardly unbiased with regard to Pakistan.
Saudi King Salman has refused an invitation from President Obama to attend a landmark summit at Camp David
New king Salman has set aside the Saudi fatwa of the Muslim Brotherhood in order to gain strength in the region to take the fight to Iran and its proxy states … Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. Turkey already is a great assett to the Saudis and is doing its utmost to get Pakistan on board as well. There are rumors the Saudi Kingdom has bribed Israel with funds above $10bn to get rid of Hezbollah and Assad. Remember that Putin told Saudi envoy Prince Bandar to go to hell when bribes were offered …
○ GCC-US summit to push for missile defence
○ Kerry seeks to allay Gulf concerns over Iranian interference
Saudi Arabia and Israel have been working together on intelligence and foreign policy ever since the Lebanon civil war and closer since the Iraq invasion in 2003. Both states want to rid Hezbollah and Assad in the Levant. The United States has a disfunctional Middle East policy, fully biased to protect a racist and fascist Jewish state. The US corporations (military-industrial complex) profit from massive arms contracts to the GCC states, this trumps any and all political oriented foreign policy.
The Middle East has become a powder keg ready to explode. The United Nations has been side-stepped due to intransigence of parties believing their military position is a better option. As we have seen in Syria for 5 years, you can’t negotiate for a political solution while brandishing weaponry and upping intelligence and delivery of arms. A schizophrenic policy which has no credibility for all parties involved.
○ Turks and Sauds to Install Sunni Terror in Damascus, Syria
○ U.S. Will Be Ousted by Saudi Arabia in Middle-East
The entire official history of the U.S. since the JFK coup has been almost totally comprised of lies. This bin Laden assassination affair is just business as usual. No surprise. One lie breeds another in a geometric series. Eventually the lies go nearly infinite. That is where we stand now. Believe nothing that you are told by the Permanent Government.
Cicero had it right over 2000 years ago.
Believe nothing that you are told by a liar. Not even the truth.
AG
“Oh what a tangled web we weave…”
P.S. That smirking chimp George W, Bush looks like he is under some sort of demonic possession in that video.
Kurtz’s last words in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The first line of T. S. Eliot’s poem “the Hollow Men refers to Conrad’s Kurtz as well…a quote.
And here is the last stanza of that poem.
Hear that whimper behind George W. Bush’s simpering prevarications.
And be afraid.
The chickens are in flight already.
Karma is a bitch.
Bet on it.
AG
I respect Hersh but that article is a mess. Also, “we came, we saw, he died” refers to Gaddafi.
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden
And the official narrative isn’t a mess?
USG intel assets tracking an al Q “courier” across national boundaries to Abbottabad? Seriously — it would have been easier to track OBL’s several wives and children.
Not saying that Hersh has dotted all the “i’s” and crossed all the “t’s” correctly, but he had highlighted the most obvious issue that there were many hands involved in hiding/protecting/killing OBL for a decade. There’s always a much higher risk to assassinating a “rebel” at the peak of his power within a “rebel” community than later when his power has waned.
Nope, I’m fairly sure the official story is far from the truth. It’s just that Hersh’s story has its own flaws and inconsistencies. The biggest takeaway for me is that everyone is lying about something and one or more factions are upset that their preferred lie isn’t the official one.
Vox:
Not what Hersh said. He’s silent as who/when/where OBL was detained. Only that it’s not credible that powerful forces within the Pakistan government would have been ignorant of his presence at that compound. And by 2010 some of them were willing to deal with the US as to what should be done with OBL.
A “discrete handover or killing” that left no trace of Pakistani government, military, or ISI hands was impossible. The “we know nothing” and therefore, couldn’t possibly have even looked the other way as US did its own and independent thing stance probably didn’t pass the smell test with the Pakistani public.
I’ve never bought the official story on the raid for some very basic reasons, but if the stuff about Opus Dei controlling the military wasn’t enough, this should conclusively prove that Hersh has gone completely around the bend.
A few obvious questions came to mind reading it:
If the intelligence from the compound was fabricated, someone might want to let Ayman al-Zawahiri know. Or is Hersh’s contention that he was in on it?
Pakistan, he alleges, gave up bin Laden in exchange for more military aid and a “freer hand” in Afghanistan. If so, why did they get neither?
What’s more, Pakistan does not need our permission to operate openly in Afghanistan. They basically already do. And once we leave, there won’t even be a conceivable means of slowing them down.
Why do the raid at all? Seems unnecessarily risky, as evidenced by, y’know, the helicopter crashing. Why run the risk of looking foolish? And why build the compound model if the actual compound is unguarded and bin Laden unarmed?
Has Hersh ever seen a military rifle? Tearing up the body with rifles would take a lot of bullets and time. And, in any case, shooting up the body that badly is as likely to result in our soldiers getting hit by ricocheting bullets as it would tearing bin Laden’s limbs off.
And all of this and more leads to an obvious question: What’s the point of it? If Hersh is right (he’s not), this may be the most pointless and stupid conspiracy in history.
Next comment I’ll give my take.
Also, to add to this: Reporters who got inside the compound have testified to the bullet holes being consistent with a firefight. I believe CNN’s guy (Bergen?) covered this earlier today.
Anyway, so a follow-up. Here’s my long-standing rough guess as to what actually happened:
The Pakistani civilian leadership — the PM and so on — likely did not know bin Laden was there. Many higher-ups within the ISI and the military also likely did not know. Pakistani bureaucracy is a mess.
We figured out bin Laden was in Abbottabad, likely through traditional intelligence work (the courier and/or others). Not being complete imbeciles, we figured and then confirmed that he was being hidden by elements of the ISI and likely the military. (They’ve had ties to them for decades.) We staked out the compound to ensure they didn’t move him.
(On the ISI hiding him, Wikileaks covered this long ago. He was even sharing letters with other terrorists who were ISI assets, as I recall.)
We then confronted Pakistan, told them we were going to go and get bin Laden, and that they’d better stay out of the way or they would have a serious problem on their hands. They did so. We then went and killed bin Laden.
We then made up the official story to help the Pakistani government save face and avoid turning attention to them in the extremist world as collaborators in bin Laden’s death, because the last thing anybody wants is more instability in Pakistan.
No incoherent conspiracy theories needed. No raid that doesn’t pass the laugh test (we do not have magical silent Blackhawk helicopters, and Pakistan was plenty capable of seeing and hearing them coming).
Yes, it’s much more likely that a few ISI officials knew about Obama than that he was an open secret in a large and divided government.
Also, even if true, who cares? So Obama had to negotitiate OBL’s death with the Pakistani government and one of their conditions was getting a cover story. So? What the US government is accused of is more or less the right thing given the supposed situation.