Nearly four years since the US
Special Forces raid that resulted in the murder of Osama bin Laden, an
extraordinary political exposure by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh published Sunday in the London Review of Books has
torn the mask off the official narrative by the US government.
The wealth of
details laid out in Hersh’s article calls attention to the reality that nothing
that any government official says on the record can be taken as the truth, and
that the mainstream media operates as an echo chamber for official lies. Hersh
asserts that the accounts given by President Barack Obama and members of his
administration “might have been written by Lewis Carroll,” author of Alice in Wonderland.
Among
the claims exposed as fabrications are that the CIA torture program contributed
to the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout; that the raid was carried out without
the knowledge of the Pakistani government; that the Special Operations team
intended to take bin Laden alive, and only killed him after he resisted; and
that bin Laden was given an Islamic burial at sea from the carrier USS Carl
Vinson.
Hersh
writes that the 2011 operation to kill bin Laden was initiated in August 2010
after a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer walked into the US embassy
in Islamabad. He offered to give the CIA bin Laden’s location in return for the
$25 million bounty the US government had placed on the Al Qaeda leader’s head
in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In
its broadcast Monday night, NBC News said that it had independently confirmed
that Pakistani intelligence sources had given bin Laden’s location to the CIA
in 2010—perhaps the most important claim made in Hersh’s report, and a devastating
refutation of the official Obama administration cover story.
The Al Qaeda
leader’s location was not discovered via the CIA’s torture program, as depicted
in the propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty. This claim and the film were used to bolster public support
for the CIA’s illegal operations and further reinforce the Obama
administration’s concocted narrative about the killings.
The
walk-in told the CIA that bin Laden had lived with several of his wives and
children undetected in the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan from 2001 until
2006 when his location was betrayed by local tribesman bribed by the Pakistani
Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).
Bin
Laden was then transferred to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he
was held as a prisoner of the ISI. The residence was less than two miles from
the Pakistan Military Academy and a 15-minute helicopter ride from Tarbela
Ghazi, an ISI covert operations base.
Bin
Laden’s location in a headquarters town of the Pakistani military, crawling
with security agents, has always been the weakest link in the official US
narrative of the operation that killed the Al Qaeda leader. Hersh’s account
provides a far more convincing explanation of why bin Laden was in
Abbottabad—he was being held under house arrest by the Pakistani authorities
while they discussed his fate with their American paymasters.
According
to the retired US official interviewed by Hersh, Saudi Arabia was financing bin
Laden’s upkeep in Abbottabad and worried that if the American government discovered
that he was being held by the ISI they would force him to give up the details
of the Saudi monarchy’s support for Al Qaeda. The Pakistanis in turn worried
that the Saudis might provide the US with information on his location, sparking
a conflict with the US. These relationships demonstrate the fraud of the “war
on terror,” since bin Laden was being housed and financed by two of the leading
US allies in the alleged struggle against Al Qaeda.
In
fact, Saudi Arabia has longstanding ties with Al Qaeda, and members of the
Saudi monarchy—likely with the knowledge of sections of the US state—financed
and supported the hijackers who participated in the September 11 attacks.
Hersh’s
source makes absolutely clear that it was the intention of the Obama administration
from the outset to kill bin Laden, and that this was enthusiastically supported
by all concerned, the Pakistanis and the Saudis, for the time-honored reason
that “dead men tell no tales.” The raid against bin Laden’s compound, blessed
by the ISI, was nothing less than a hit ordered by Obama, the
executioner-in-chief. The informant had told the CIA that bin Laden was in poor
health and would not put up any resistance.
The
retired official stated that the operation against bin Laden “was clearly and absolutely
a premeditated murder.” A former Seal commander told Hersh, “We were not going
to keep bin Laden alive—to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what
we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each
one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, ‘Let’s face it. We’re
going to commit a murder.’”
The
Obama administration has maintained since the assassination that killing bin
Laden was seen only as a last resort, and that the primary mission was to capture
him alive.
According
to Hersh, the US commandos moved into the compound unopposed. There was no
firefight as claimed by US officials. Using explosives to blow open steel
security doors, the Special Forces operatives methodically made their way to
the third-floor rooms where bin Laden was living. The Al Qaeda leader retreated
to his bedroom where two of the Navy Seals opened fire with their automatic
rifles, cutting his body to pieces. The commandos did not shoot in
self-defense, the gravely ill bin Laden never reached for an AK-47, and he
never tried to use one of his wives as a human shield.
Hersh
writes that “a carefully constructed cover story would be issued” following the
killing of bin Laden, in part to avoid revealing the role of the Pakistani
state in providing the US with information about his location. A week after the
killing, “Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had
been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the
border…. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known,
there would be violent protests….”
The
White House decided to announce bin Laden’s assassination on the night that it
happened, however, in part due to the fact that a US helicopter had crashed in
bin Laden’s compound, making the operation impossible to hide. The
announcement—which Hersh describes as a “series of self-serving and inaccurate
statements”—also provided the White House with an opportunity to rally support
for the expansion of militarism abroad and the assault on democratic rights
within the US.
The
claim that bin Laden’s body was subsequently given a proper Islamic burial at
sea from the USS Carl Vinson is also exposed as a lie. Instead, what remained
of bin Laden’s bullet-riddled body, including his head, which is described as
having “only a few bullet holes in it,” was unceremoniously tossed into a body
bag. On the commandos’ helicopter trip back to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, pieces
of the body were dropped over the Hindu Kush mountains.
Hersh
has come under immediate attack from the mainstream media for his reliance on
anonymous sources. Such criticism means little coming from a media that relies
consistently on anonymous government and intelligence sources to push the
official line in the “war on terror” and in support of US provocations from
Ukraine to the South China Sea. In the eyes of the government stenographers in
the corporate-controlled media, Hersh’s main sin is that he uses anonymous
sources to challenge the official narrative rather than regurgitate it.
Based
on the historical record, Hersh is a far more reliable witness than the
innumerable millionaire anchor-persons and pundits who serve as apologists for
American imperialism. He was the first journalist to expose the abuse of Iraqi
prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. In 2013-2014, he published two
devastating exposures of the US claims that the Syrian government had used
chemical weapons, demonstrating that it was far more likely that the US-backed
“rebels” were responsible.
It
is far from certain that Hersh has provided the final accounting of the events
that led to bin Laden’s death. While it relies chiefly on the account of a
single anonymous retired senior intelligence official corroborated by other
unnamed intelligence officials in the US and Pakistan, his narrative is a far
more robust and believable story than the account spun by the propaganda of the
Obama administration and the corporate media.
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