Doesn’t Surprise Me One Bit
As Jonn’s previously noted, it seems that a guy named Seymour Hersh – a longtime investigative reporter well-known for his work regarding the US military and Intelligence Community – has looked into the bin Laden raid. His conclusion?
Well, Hersh says that the POTUS did order the raid. He also says that US Navy SEALs carried it out.
He also says damn near everything else the current gang of fools and tools running the show in DC Administration has said about the raid is . . . well, pretty much bull. From a very long (approx 10,000 word) article Hersh recently published in the London Review of Books:
This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.
“Kayani and Pasha” here were Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders at the time of the bin Laden raid.
Yeah, Hersh is a liberal; I don’t much care for his politics either. But he’s also quite good at what he does. He the guy in the press who first went bigtime public with the My Lai scandal. He beat Jack Anderson to the Glomar Explorer story (Anderson only gets credit for breaking that one because the CIA Director convinced the New York Times – who Hersh worked for at the time – to sit on Hersh’s story about same that was ready considerably earlier than Anderson’s). He’s also gone public with a number of other stories related to various national intel communities and/or governments blatantly lying to the public.
Jonn’s take on Hersh’s latest is quite different than mine. FWIW: best I can tell Hersh has been far closer to right over the years much more often than he’s been wrong when he’s writing about clandestine and/or intel matters. Believe him or not about this one as you like.
I’d not recommend dismissing out-of-hand his main points here, though. Hersh is one reporter who truly knows how to do his “homework” on this kind of subject – then actually does it before he publishes. Plus, he’s been raising questions about the “official” account of the bin Laden raid for approaching 2 years – and calling out the media for not raising more questions about that account.
Again: I don’t agree with Hersh’s politics, but the man knows his business. And when writing about the intel world, he’s got a pretty good track record.
As I said earlier, the article is quite long (about 10,000 words) – but if you have some time, IMO it’s damn well worth a read.
Yeah, IMO your leg was wet again, courtesy of the current Administration, circa mid-2011. And I’m pretty sure that wasn’t rain.
(PS: no taradiddles were utilized during the preparation of this article. [smile])
Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Military issues
So let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Our President orders a raid that wasn’t; a SEAL team plays taxi service and crashes a classified helicopter in the process; we have at least one former SEAL running around saying he killed someone he didn’t; and Osama bin Laden is cooling his heels somewhere on the tax payers’ dime. That about cover it?
One way or the other, there appears to be a whole lot of idiocy out there.
Um, you need to read what Hersh wrote, PH. As well as what I wrote above.
Hersh says the raid took out bin Laden, and that US Navy SEALs did him in. He also says that the rest of the story told by the current Administration about the raid was factually incorrect in major ways.
The initial stories claiming that Hersh doubted that bin Laden was dead about 18 months ago from our “good friends” at Infowars et al seem to have mischaracterized what Hersh actually said at the time.
My mouth — or in this case, fingers — are well ahead of my brain this morning, Hondo. Feel free to delete what I wrote.
No need. We’ve all misread things on any number of occasions.
It’s called, “Being human.” (smile)
Hersh may be out to lunch. But given his past track record in intel matters, I’m reluctant to dismiss what he says out-of-hand. And if we were able to get the Pakistanis to help us out and lessen the risk to those on our side during the operation – that’s A-OK with me.
As far as I am concerned, if the administration could not keep its collective mouths properly shut, the least it could do is lie its collective a$$ off.
There had to be intelligence assets (live people) who helped us with this raid. Publishing too much information too soon could well result in the deaths of those who helped us. It most certainly resulted in the imprisonment of a physician who may or may not have had anything at all to do with it.
This book will stir the pot, but settle nothing, and that is fine with me.
Confusion to our enemies!
Agreed, Valerie. This is pretty much where I’m at. The current administration is just… yeah.
But think of the poor defenseless taradiddles! Who will protect them?
That said, I agree with Pinto Nag. No matter where the truth rests, boy, nothing smells right anymore.
I see someone liked the joke. (smile)
No, I think he’s saying that the raid occurred and that Osama is dead, just not the circumstances surrounding how he was located or the lack of Pakistani involvement.
Bingo.
How could anyone possibly believe the current administration could possibly lie to us?
Yep. It’s entirely believable that somebody somewhere lied. ‘Cause it’s what they do pretty much any time they open their pie holes. Proving it doesn’t seem to matter either.
Oh, well.
The ALIENS are responsible – dang-it.
From Jade Helm to bumping off bad guys we are being set up for a fall.
Let us face the truth folks. Every one of these near bizzaro events is gonna have us so immunized to facts that when they finally land in numbers and begin moving among us no one will believe it is actually happening.
Just a heads up.
Okay, everybody just STOP RIGHT NOW.
I’m the one who sent out the ‘WOW’ signal in 1977. I sent it to a reflecting dish 15 light years away in the Teapot section of Sagittarius in 1947, so that it would arrive back at Earth in 1977.
I was 1 year old and I was playing with my neighbor’s shortwave radio.
That’s all I have to say about that.
Something to consider, Hondo. If the raid was primarily a sham, a setup in which Obama was shot much like a lion in a canned hunt, would a member of the SEAL team be so eager to publish an account of the operation which could then be so easily disproved by any other team member?
On the other hand, one could argue that was part of the cover operation, letting the SEAL write the book then have the feds threatening him with all sorts of dire punishments to make it appear that his book was a factual account revealing tactical secrets.
And here I was a couple of days ago dissing the Jade Helm critics as tinfoil hatted fools.
Skippy, you better send me a box of those copper foil hats. The check’s in the mail.
And SFC D, regarding the proper grounding of Skippy’s Kopper Kookie Kaps (there, Skip, a name for your product which should get me a free box) just how is that accomplished? And please, do not tell me to wrap the grounding wire around my crank. I am not a liberal Democrat, you know.
Make sure Skippy includes lightning rod and grounding wire with the hat, Poetrooper. I think you can hook up the grounding to your car battery to recharge it, if I recall correctly.
just wrap the ground wire around any convenient cold water pipe. Oughta be sufficient. Just watch out for lightning.
>a setup in which Obama was shot
Oh, goodness! Then who is the imposter in the White House?
Aliens, maybe. But there are also Time Travelers, and they aren’t mentioned much these days. You see, they land after we made first contact sometime in the future, and they merely time travel to our day, Maybe, JUST MAYBE they’ve altered someone’s past a few times, but the person’s memory doesn’t change along with the altered timeline, yeah, DEFINITELY MAYBE!
“I know where I came from – but what about all of you zombies?”
Single, unnamed source. Yep, that convinced me that Mr. Hersheysquirt was dead on the money…
Considering that since 2009 up to last week, we’ve seen bodaprez talk out of both sides of his mouth, who should we believe, anyway?
The guy who says ‘If I had a son, he’d be Trayvon Martin’ and more recently, ‘It’ my policy to not comment on legal matters’?
Or the guy who says the administration lies its ass off whenEVER?
Did the reporter interview Jesse V?
Although I have no particular axe to grind with Seymour Hersh, his version of the bin Laden mission fails the sniff check on multiple levels.
First of all, he’s using very limited sourcing with sources apparently related to each other. There’s a general rule in journalism that if you use unidentified sources, those sources should be double blind to the extent they have no influence over each other. It can make you wonder if Hersh is following a query track that is telling him what he wants to hear.
The lack of source bonafides also leads to a cui bono question that needs to be answered in order for the Hersh narrative to be considered true. You start asking yourself: who benefited from the false narrative, if any, presented as the official original, and who benefits by the alternative narrative presented by Hersh. The notion that a complex story was constructed simply to make the President appear a tough guy borders on the absurd.
One example is citing the Carl Vinson burial as false. What would be the point of such a falsity? Why would the CIA want to claim one thing, and then actually shuffle bin Laden’s remains off to parts unknown in Afghanistan? Unless Hersh provides an answer to such details, he risks having the rest of his web of circumstances fall apart.
Purely as a matter of speculation, my own guess is that Hersh was manipulated either directly by the “retired senior intelligence official” or indirectly by a group of Pakistanis using the retired official as a conduit. The purpose may have been for two reasons: either to restore Pakistani prestige over their own failures, and violation of airspace on the night of the mission, or to smooth the ruffled feathers created for the same reasons.
But I could be wrong…
Entirely possible Hersh is being manipulated. He is approaching 80, and his internal BS detector – which was IMO exceptional for much of his career – may be less sensitive today.
In that particular arena (clandestine activities), the complete “ground truth” isn’t often known (or acknowledged) for decades. What can be found prior to then is often some combination of truth, error, and deliberate disinformation.
If the Pakis were complicit, why did they lock up the Doctor? He is still imprisoned as far as I know….
At least two plausible explanations come to mind, GDContractor. One, both, or neither may be somewhere close to the truth.
1. Factionalism within the Pakistani govt. Double-dealing among factions is quite common in that part of the world; national unity is pretty much a rarity.
2. Support for the public cover story. The govt of Pakistan may have cooperated, but felt that disclosing that fact would bring an unacceptable level of “blowback” from dissident factions sympathetic to al Qaeda. They could have imprisoned the doctor as “show” to cover their involvement.
Or Hersh may be full of it. I’m guessing there’s a fair chance that the public may not get the full and complete truth here in my lifetime.
You know, OBL is, depending on the species, anywhere from 2nd to 10th generation fish food long about now. So, whatever happened happened and that’s about it for him. Now, if his aim is to reveal that Obama sucks and isn’t to be trusted, that, too, is old news. So, if he would like to be useful, he might try offering his services to someone as a paperweight. Frankly, I don’t care what the truth of OBL’s demise is. Now, Benghazi, that’s a different matter entirely for reasons that still matter.
s
Is there any point to believing anything anymore? Is there any point to living?
I’m starting to doubt it very, very much.
Every day I wake up it seems that the world is filled with nothing but corruption and lies.
Why should I stay in this world? Anybody have an answer for that?
Dude, if the last two sentences in your comment were a joke . . . it wasn’t a good one.
If they weren’t – they’re disturbing. If you’re seriously thinking of doing anything rash, please find someone you can talk to.
“If it bleeds, it leads; if it smells, it sells.”
Mark, don’t let the news be your gauge where life is concerned. Nothing good ends up in the news. When reading the daily rags starts to make you feel like this, get away from it for awhile. There are plenty of good people out there, and you’re one of them. I’m not a vet, but if you need an ear, send me an email through Jonn. I’d be glad to talk with you…anyone you picked on here would be glad to talk with you. Don’t pursue a permanent solution to a temporary problem, okay? Get in touch with someone, talk with someone.
My comment got pulled? What the fuck?
WHAT THE HOLY FUCK!?
Seymour Hersh=a more erudite version of Alex Jones with a better tailor.
I think poor Mr. Hersh’s cheese done slipped off his cracker finally…he was once something to behold but he’s the guy who recently ad a lot of odd things to say…
He’s claimed that much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei, that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training, and that the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a “false flag” staged by the government of Turkey. Those reports have had little proof and, rather than being borne out by subsequent investigations, have been either unsubstantiated or outright debunked.
Speaking at a campus operated by Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Hersh said he was working on a new book that details “how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government.”
http://www.rawstory.com/2011/01/highranking-members-military-part-knights-malta-opus-dei-reporter-claims/
I’m thinking he might have have not sourced his OBL story much more thoroughly than these claims..4 years ago I thought he was a nut, not certain I’ve changed my thoughts a great deal today.
Have to agree that that bit about Opus Dei wasn’t exactly one of Hersh’s better moments . . . .