Good morning 99percenters!

Spin, Spin, Spin. The War for your Mind wages on. The only one who can slog through the bullshit is you yourself. Here I present different perspectives for your judgement. Make sure to read the first article, thanks Big Al.

Seymour Hersh’s “Zero Truth Thirty” Article Fixes the Narrative of the BS “bin Laden Raid” Story

H/T Big Al
Seymour Hersh was once one of the good guys. Today, he’s joined the ranks of the has-beens and the sell-outs.

Anyone can get something wrong. That’s not what Seymour Hersh did here. The last “clarifying statement” to fix the narrative

“Within days, some of the early exaggerations and distortions had become obvious and the Pentagon issued a series of clarifying statements.” Seymour Hersh

He penned a propaganda article about how ‘Obama lied” about the early morning hour Seal Team 6 raid in Pakistan that supposedly killed Osama bin Laden. That’s click-bait. Seymour claims Obama’s lies are nothing more than his refusal to admit how intimately involved the Pakistani intelligence services (ISI) were in the “raid” and of course the official story they came out with in the days right after the raid.

That’s bullshit.

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Also see this.

Hersh: Obama lied. Obama: No, I didn’t. NBC: Yep, you did. And again just now.

Obama and his regime are on the defensive as Hersh reveals the many, many lies (some of which led to the deaths of innocent people) that Obama told about his assassination of bin Laden.

Hersh’s report details those lies, and concludes: ““High-level lying … remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.”

Seemingly unable to help himself, and as if trying to offer immediate confirmation of Hersh’s analysis, Obama announced that “Pakistanis did not know” about the US raid.

NBC then confirmed that very aspect of Hersh’s report, saying yes, a “Pakistani official helped the US find bin Laden”.

Seymour Hersh vs. Judy Miller: The truth about Bin Laden’s death — and the anonymous government sources The New York Times is delighted to print as “truth”

Desperate rush to discredit Osama bin Laden bombshell perfectly sums up the media's slavish relationship with power

Well, well. Another grand American narrative, brimming with the triumphalist heroism of people we put into uniforms, melts like ice cream in the summer sun. No more credit to the commander-in-chief for the stealthy, nerves-of-steel manhunt and point-blank murder of Osama bin Laden back in 2011. It turns out to have been a matter of bribes, intelligence feeds, a stage-set raid, American betrayals—but of course—and last-minute chaos in Washington as to which concocted tale of derring-do would shine brightest in the light.

Let us console ourselves with the thought that the operation was a crime under international law anyway.

News of this latest myth-spinning chicanery comes to us from the inimitable Seymour Hersh, whose intricately detailed and carefully reasoned account was published Sunday in the London Review of Books. It is first-rate craft, one of Hersh’s better explorations into the reality that is like our air: We breathe it but cannot see it. Read Hersh’s piece here. Remarkable stuff—which is why our most powerful media will aim to discredit it.

It seems that square-jawed Navy SEALs with those high-tech night goggles that practically starred in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Hollywood’s post-event propaganda film, were more or less led to bin Laden’s door. All they had to do was kick it down and negotiate with extreme prejudice, as the CIA used to describe these things.

Author Reported Essentials of Hersh’s bin Laden Story in 2011 — With Seemingly Different Sources

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh.

Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about bin Laden’s location from tracking an al Qaeda courier, but from a member of the Pakistani intelligence service who wanted to collect the $25 million reward the U.S. had offered for bin Laden; (2) Saudi Arabia was paying Pakistan to keep bin Laden under the equivalent of house arrest; (3) Pakistan was pressured by the U.S. to stand down its military to allow the U.S. raid to proceed unhindered; and (4) the U.S. had planned to claim that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but was forced to abandon this when one of the Navy SEAL helicopters crashed.

Hersh’s article makes the same key claims about the bin Laden raid, with this description of his sources:

The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports. Two other US sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command.

Seymour Hersh Accuses Obama of ‘High-Level Lying’ About Bin Laden Raid

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has put forth a series of explosive allegations about the Obama administration’s role in the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. In a long essay in the London Review of Books, Hersh accuses the administration of “high-level lying” in describing the al-Qaida founder’s death and what preceded and followed it. The essay cites a source who claims that bin Laden’s presence in the Abbottabad compound was known to senior Pakistani intelligence officials all along, as they were holding him prisoner there. Hersh also claims that bin Laden’s whereabouts were divulged to the CIA by a former Pakistani intelligence officer in exchange for a large reward.

The White House and the CIA have blasted the allegations, dismissing them as “utter nonsense.” But if Hersh is correct, then almost everything we know about bin Laden’s death is false, especially the events sensationally depicted in the blockbuster movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”

Each of the major allegations made by Hersh against the Obama administration is listed here, courtesy of The Stranger’s Christopher Frizzelle.

Seymour Hersh: Obama's Entire Account Of bin Laden's Death Is One Big Lie; This Is What Really Happened

The last time famed US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made news in the global media was with his massive, 5000-word expose from December of 2013 "Whose sarin?" revealing the true motives behind the Syrian near-war of 2013 including what we had said from the very beginning: the very professionally created YouTube clips showing the consequences of what was said to have been an Assad poison gas attack, were nothing but a fake (subsequent reports identified the propaganda source as Rami Abdul Rahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose entire operation has been funded by an unidentified European country.)

Fast forward to today when in a report whose word count doubles his previous record for the London Review of Books, Hersh targets a topic near and dear to the hearts of many Americans: the story of the capture and death of Osama bin Laden. Or rather the completely false and, according to Hersh, fabricated story, one made up entirely by the US president and spoon fed for popular consumption with the aid of a Hollywood blockbuster whose entire plot line is, if Hersh is correct, one big lie as well.

In a nutshell, and one really needs to read Hersh's magnum opus as no amount of abbreviation will do it justice, Hersh accuses Obama of not only taking credit for the al Qaeda leader's death, but fabricating the story that resulted from what has been widely reported to have been a Navy seal incursion into bin Laden's Abbottabad compound in Pakistan. As a result the military and intelligence communities were forced to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

Hersh uses several sources for his refutation of the official narrative, including Asad Durrani, who was head of the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency in the early 1990s, as well as various American sources, of which the major source "is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports."