Sy Hersh and the Spy Who Billed Me

Seymour Hersh's blockbuster story The Killing of Osama bin Laden, got a lot of attention for a very short period of time. That media attention was mostly in the form of character assassination such as “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank,” and general "kill the messenger" attacks.

Slate published 5 smear pieces on Hersh in just 36 hours.
A good example of this was Politico, who used a former CIA spokesman who years earlier openly lied to the media about Iraq's WMDs.
Critics argued that this was all conspiracy theory because “hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years.” However, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg pointed out that this is exactly what happened during the Vietnam War.
How many people knew about the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence before the Iraq war? How many knew about the NSA’s mass phone metadata program before Edward Snowden?

What is missing is an actual effort to either substantiate or disprove the questions that Hersh raises.

It's not like the Obama Administration hadn't changed the official story of Osama bin Laden's killing before. So it would be silly to just take the Obama Administration's word for what happened.

US officials have given the clearest version yet of the killing of Osama bin Laden in an account that directly contradicts previous assertions by the director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, and White House chief security adviser, John Brennan, that he died in a firefight.

Seantor Kerry literally told reporters to "shut up and move on about, you know, the realities of what happened in that building.”
Ten days after Hersh's story the the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) did a data dump of 100 documents taken from the Osama bin Laden raid.

If readers got the impression that the new material refuted Hersh’s exposure of US government lies, so much the better.
Actually, the new material does nothing to undermine Hersh’s account...

What is missing from this document dump was anything that actually contradicted Hersh's report. This is especially telling since the government had ten days to formulate a reply. There has been no official response since then.

That being said, there are other sources for this story that generally get ignored.
The day after Hersh's story, longtime Middle East correspondent, Carlotta Gall, said publicly that “my own reporting [on the death of Bin Laden] tracks with Hersh’s.”

Two years later, when I was researching my book, I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset. After the book came out, I learned more: that it was indeed a Pakistani Army brigadier — all the senior officers of the ISI are in the military — who told the C.I.A. where Bin Laden was hiding, and that Bin Laden was living there with the knowledge and protection of the ISI.

For some reason, Hersh was a "crank" for saying this exact thing, while Gall was simply ignored.
NBC News also officially confirmed Hersh's story, but then quickly and loudly retracted the claim. However, if you look at the retraction, it was only a partial retraction, not a full retraction.

The original version of this story said that a Pakistani asset told the U.S. where bin Laden was hiding. Sources say that while the asset provided information vital to the hunt for bin Laden, he was not the source of his whereabouts.

Quite possibly the most important confirmation of Hersh's report came not in recent days, but nearly two years before Hersh ever wrote his story.
Meet US national security journalist Dr. Raelynn Hillhouse.

Sources in the intelligence community tell me that after years of trying and one bureaucratically insane near-miss in Yemen, the US government killed OBL because a Pakistani intelligence officer came forward to collect the approximately $25 million reward from the State Department's Rewards for Justice program.
The informant was a walk-in.

Hillhouse goes beyond Gall and confirms another part of Hersh's story.

Next they approached the chiefs of the Pakistani military and the ISI. The US was going to come in with or without them. The CIA offered them a deal they couldn't refuse: they would double what the Saudis were paying them to keep bin Laden if they cooperated with the US. Or they could refuse the deal and live with the consequences: the Saudis would stop paying and there would be the international embarassment...
The ISI and Pakistani military were cooperating with the US on the raid.
The cooperation was why there were no troops in Abottabad. They were all pulled out.

Hillhouse's account was completely ignored by almost everyone, even today. Her revelations were not addressed until Hersh revived them. Hillhouse has confirmed that her sources were different from Hersh's. Her sources also confirmed one Hersh claim that she never reported, that bin Laden's body was disposed of over the Hindu Kush.

And yet it wasn't Hillhouse that can be credited with breaking open this story. That honor goes to former CIA and State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson who said just days after the raid in 2011:

Here is what really happened. The U.S. Government learned of Bin Laden’s whereabouts last August when a person walked into a U.S. Embassy and claimed that Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) had Bin Laden under control in Abottabad, Pakistan.… The claim that we found bin Laden because of a courier and the use of enhanced interrogation is simply a cover story.”

Johnson also confirmed that US intelligence had “learned that key people in Saudi Arabia were sending Pakistan money to keep Osama out of sight and out of trouble.”

Some of Edward Snowden's leaked documents from 2007 also shed light on the situation. ABC News' Christiane Amanpour was told where Osama bin Laden was hiding in 2008.
A CNN report from 2010 says that NATO was aware of his location and “… al Qaeda’s top leadership is believed to be living in relative comfort, protected by locals and some members of the Pakistani intelligence services, the official said.”
There is simply no shortage of documents that cast doubt on the official story of Osama bin Laden's death.

What we've seen in the case of Hersh's story is a complete breakdown in news media accountability.

Ultimately, the bipartisan attack on Hersh shows the complete media conformity on US foreign policy, where Republicans, Democrats, and even “progressive” media have come to accept a governmental policy of never-ending war and mass surveillance. No questions asked.

The uniformity of the attacks from across the political spectrum, combined with the lack of effort to prove Hersh wrong, is interesting because Hersh doesn't accuse anyone of obviously breaking a law. His accusations are simply about lies and covering up those lies. You would think that someone would be interested in getting to the bottom of this, but that is not the case, and that speaks volumes about our current political system.
Meanwhile, every member of the Seal team and everyone involved in the bin Laden killing has been made to sign a nondisclosure agreement to not talk about what happened.

This isn't the first time that no one wanted to believe Hersh.
When he tried to sell his My Lai scoop to Life they turned him down, along with 20 other news outlets.
In 1974 he was ridiculed by the news media for reporting that the CIA was spying on Americans. They said the story “exaggerated” and “overwritten and under-researched.” It turned out to be true, of course.
When Hersh broke the Abu Ghraid torture story in 2004, the Department of Defense immediately called Hersh's report as "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture".
Hersh is a big boy and doesn't need me to defend him, but he certainly deserves more respect by the news media.

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gulfgal98's picture

It is getting harder and harder for the MSM and the PTB fo discount Seymour Hersh. He has been right over and over. Great diary!

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Big Al's picture

extension, his source. But there's another group out there besides the Slate's and Politico's that don't believe Hersh's
story for a different reason from them. It goes along the same lines as we see with 9/11. Those that believe the official story,
or those that believe it was 19 Terrorists and Bin Laden, just that the government lied about a lot of the details, or those that
believe it was a false flag event, i.e., the Truthers.
Part of the Truther movement focuses on Bin Laden and a common refrain is that he died in 2001 and had nothing to do with
the planning and carrying out of 9/11. Some believe he died from kidney disease of which there is evidence he had it and was
being treated for it in 2001. An article is pointed out from 2001 that stated just that.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2001/12/26/report-bin-laden-already-dead.html

Some beliieve he was killed by Pakistani intelligence (ISI) as indicated by the video of Benizir Bhutto
where she states just that.

Regardless how he died, his existence up until the supposed killing of him by the Seal Team doesn't add up. There were numerous
clearly fake videos over the years trotted out by the Bush admin to keep their War OF Terror going. No other evidence of him
being alive except these anonymous sources.
Hersh's story corroborate the broad narrative about bin Laden that the CIA would want to have secured. The rationale about what
happened to bin Laden's body is absurd.
Then there's what happened to Seal Team 6.
What camp am I in? 9/11 was a false flag, bin Laden was dead in 2001 and Hersh was duped.

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lotlizard's picture

I'm sure they would relish a chance to lure him into a setup to discredit him as they did with Dan Rather.

Favorites of the intelligence community, on the other hand, can do things like publish a faked Nikita Khrushchev memoir as Strobe Talbott did, and suffer no consequences even when it's exposed. On the contrary, seeing the way the secret-government boys close ranks to protect such figures, one can easily come to the conclusion that the whole hoax was attempted at their behest.

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It's strange how the media went ballistic about the bin Laden story, but completely ignored his story about WMDs in Syria.

I just found another good source for this essay and I've updated it. It makes the news media response look all that more rediculous.

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Big Al's picture

I'd have been run out of there.
Ok, for those that believe Hersh, provide some proof that bin Laden was alive all these years, something other than
some anonymous sources saying so.
It's not a thing against Hersh. I direct people all the time to his article from 2007 called "The Redirection". Anyone who
wants to know what's happening in Syria and with ISIS should read that one.
But no, bin Laden died years before this manufactured incident.

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snoopydawg's picture

How convenient it was for the passport to have made it thru all the fires and explosions to be found in the wreckage.
Yep, she was hred.
"There's no CT allowed Here"!

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Big Al's picture

the reality the ruling class rulers who rule us want us to believe. Follow the script.

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Big Al's picture

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Shahryar's picture

am I reading that right?

If so, and if this info is now available, how can we not be either bombing Saudi Arabia or ending the whole fraud? It seems inconsistent.

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LapsedLawyer's picture

with the Saudi's very likely deeply involved in funding ISIS.

As for why the bombing hasn't started, and isn't likely to, it's a three letter answer, first one "o" and the last one "l" and I think you know the one in between.

"Realpolitik" and "national interest" are not just vague terms, but messy as well.

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"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon

lotlizard's picture

The official government OBL account is just another one of those government stories full of "extraordinary claims."

But of course the anti-conspiracy-theory hall monitors never demand that the government provide extraordinary evidence to back up its extraordinary claims. Or any evidence whatsoever, other than (often anonymous) officials mumbling the mantra nashunal securitee nashunal securitee nashunal securitee.

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shaharazade's picture

was the perfect Goldstien. God knows when he died. I sure never believed the videos the the Bushies pumped that had faked up Osama's that were laughable and really scary terrorist training camps in Afghanistan that featured a loop of masked dudes probably CIA assholes going though their paces. Same with the Goldsein OBL, man the evil one lived in caves despite his medical problems and his fake bearded self was pumped endlessly via our crude propoganda machine. Anyway lets just say I'm a CT loonie but personally I believe the evil Saudi black sheep, turncoat CIA dude was long gone before this farce that Obama and co. staged. Obama got real nasty on his last debate with McCain and said I will kill Osama. Then at the most opportune time they found him and he was killed by our 'special forces' Seals? Cowboys? who the fuck knows? No body, no nothing just a cowboy mission that killed the most likely long dead or gone daddy gone #1 scary terrorist ever. Yeah right. Seymour may be senile or desperate if he sadly picks over the bones of such a dubious story.

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lotlizard's picture

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/05/kafkaesque-life-of-terror...

If they are willing to mock the whole concept of law in this way, of course they would threaten—and not only threaten—to kill people or their families to prevent them from talking, whether it's about 7/7, 9/11, or who knows what else.

Also from England: police spies will even lure you into a relationship and sire your children.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/24/undercover-police-spy-girlfrie...

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