Maybe Pakistan is right to want to put the kebosh on this story. They have lots of extremists, and established arms and funding channels. Maybe Hersh just royally screwed those generals.
I thought “Zero Dark Thirty” had already established that we found Bin Laden after waterboarding his whereabouts out of captured terrorists.
Yeah I found it hard to swallow the Pakistani government was not in on it just but do not blame them for wanting to be quiet about it as they still have more than enough extremists in the hard if not close to impossible to patrol boonies of the country and just over the border. So them saying yeah those guys did it, not us, look over there, really does not surprise me.
“Freedomboarding,” you mean.
His sources seem pretty tight… one named ISI officer who was in charge in the 1990s and an anonymous ex US intelligence officer. I’ll buy in.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go help protect Texas from a US takeover (again?)
Hasn’t Hersh gotten a reputation for making stuff up and basing conjectures entirely on the reporting of single anonymous witnesses, as well as a complete lack of actual journalistic responsibility? Basically the same bullshit Rolling Stone got burned over?
Not saying it’s not true, but this is the same guy that was insisting the syrian opposition was gassing themselves, right?
Well, it’s hard to know exactly what went down and how, but if this story is true it would obviously be a case of both governments trying to get what they wanted/needed out of the deal. The US gets to claim victory, the Pakistanis get to claim ignorance of bin Laden’s whereabouts and point the finger at aggressive US military intrusion (despite getting many millions of US Dollars in aid.)
The most interesting aspect of this in terms of US political discourse is that conservatives have 1.) been claiming torture was the deciding factor in finding bin Laden, and 2.) trying to take any credit away from the Obama administration (if this story is true, then clearly behind-the-scenes diplomacy was more important than torture or intelligence gathering.)
I believe Hersh is the one who in the late 80s first broke the French-Israeli nuclear cooperation in the 40s and 50s which benefited both programs, Israel able to provide scientists and France both scientists and a larger industrial economy with joint tests conducted in 1960 before walling Israel off from research. This turned out to be verified by American documents released in 2015.
He also broke the Mi Lai massacre during the Vietnam war.
I love the London Review of Books dearly, but I think they’ve been properly fooled by Hersh’s reputation; which has been undeserved for some years.
Here’s a refutation.
[edit: ooops, link cleaned up.]
The government is lying to us … shocking.
Didn’t journalist Christiane Amanpour know bin Laden’s location close to a decade ago? She was talking about on all the tv news programs.
When they shot him instead of detaining him for trial, I knew the story was bullshit.
Make sure special forces don’t get you. (As apparently they are members of Opus Dei.)
I think “denying Bin Laden a trial” was pretty much a foregone conclusion no matter how they found him. If he’d been standing on the front lawn in his underwear holding nothing but a giant sign reading “I SURRENDER UNCONDITIONALLY” in six languages they still would have put a bullet in his brain just to avoid the hassle.
I remember that episode of The Newsroom where the entire cast become gleeful at bin Ladens’ murder, and not one single character thinks to ask aloud how such an important criminal doesn’t get a trial. As phony baloney as Zero Dark Thirty.
Sure but he’s also got some pretty dodgy practices, has published a lot that’s questionable, a bit that’s been proven to be untrue. So while he’s broken some big stories he isn’t exactly reliable.
Oh and as @Marktech mentioned above. He done gone crazy rather recently.
He wouldn’t be the first reporter to have gone off the deep end of unreliability as he got older, though. I’m just saying it might be worth taking his claims here with a grain of salt, not that they are necessarily untrue.
I completely agree. It would have been a huge hassle to put him on the stand where he could talk about the CIA.
