{"id":3831,"date":"2015-06-01T22:17:08","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T19:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/?p=3831"},"modified":"2017-11-14T21:27:49","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T19:27:49","slug":"seymour-hersh-in-wonderland-over-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/seymour-hersh-in-wonderland-over-the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden\/","title":{"rendered":"Seymour Hersh in wonderland over the killing of Osama bin Laden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hersh-Seymour\"<\/a>The revelations, assertions and accusations made by Seymour Hersh in his \u201cLondon Review of Books\u201d piece on \u201cThe Killing of Osama bin Laden\u201d are worthy of a Nobel Prize for fiction or, better yet, fantasy.\u00a0 For those who have neither read nor heard of this 10,000 word descent into wonderland, Hersh asserts that the raid that killed bin Laden four years ago was a set-up wonderfully play acted by President Barack Obama and his entire national security team from the Pentagon, State Department and CIA to Capitol Hill and the Pakistani Army and ISI who allegedly had been holding Osama prisoner as a means to control al Qaeda and the Taliban.\u00a0 What was that marvelous Hollywood tune with the key line that applies here: Sy,\u00a0 \u201cyou take my breath away?\u201d<\/p>\n

For a conspiracy driven nation like Pakistan, no doubt the Hersh narrative opened old wounds and provoked new ones.\u00a0 After all, that Osama was hiding barely a rifle shot away from the Pakistani equivalent of America\u2019s West Point in Abbottabad raised two profoundly and exquisitely contradictory conclusions.\u00a0 Either the Pakistani military and intelligence services were incompetent and did not know.\u00a0 Or Pakistan was complicit and had been sheltering bin Laden for years.\u00a0 Hersh clearly chooses the latter answer.<\/p>\n

It is a pity that Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum are dead because the Hersh piece would have made for a great movie with either James Bond or Jason Bourne in the lead.\u00a0 Imagine M, the venerable head of Britain\u2019s Secret Service summoning Bond with the word that Osama was indeed alive and to prevent a potential crisis between America and Pakistan, Bond had to kidnap or kill the architect of September 11th.\u00a0 And who would have played bin Laden?\u00a0 One wonders.<\/p>\n

It is hard to recall when such an over the top story was accorded this much attention and not immediately dismissed as absolute drivel.\u00a0 One needs to go back nearly eighty years when twenty-three year old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater Company broadcast H.G. Welles\u2019 \u201cWar of the Worlds\u201d and an invasion of earth by Mars.\u00a0 The radio broadcast was taken as real reporting.\u00a0 Over 1,000,000 Americans believed the attack was taking place and, for a few minutes, the country was at panic stations.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed with the bin Laden saga.\u00a0 But, still, some suspended disbelief.\u00a0 After all, conspiracy theories are often fun.\u00a0 And why not stand truth and fact on their respective heads?<\/p>\n

The most obvious antidote to such nonsensical but amusing prose is the absolute impossibility of the U.S. government keeping such a ruse secret.\u00a0 Suppose Generals Ashraf Pervez Kayani, Army Chief of Staff, and Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director General of ISI were in league with American counterparts Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA. How many hundreds or thousands of others would have had to be in on this fabricated tale?\u00a0 It is inconceivable that someone higher up or lower in the chain of command would not have blown the whistle or leaked to the press.\u00a0 Indeed, an abundance of disclosures on the actual raid subsequently flooded the media.<\/p>\n

Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell wrote a devastating critique in last week\u2019s Wall Street Journal destroying on a point-by-point factual basis Hersh\u2019s tale.\u00a0 And if President Obama had one nightmarish scenario in mind, it was not that such a staged attack would be found out.\u00a0 Rather, Obama did not want to repeat a second Desert One raid that failed to free fifty-four American hostages taken prisoners in Tehran in 1979 when the U.S. Embassy was overrun by Iranian \u201cstudents\u201d and held captive for 444 days.<\/p>\n

The larger question is why is such a palpable fairy tale taken seriously?\u00a0 One can argue that Hersh\u2019s journalistic coup in revealing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and subsequent scoops gave his reporting great credibility.\u00a0 Of course continued distrust of government plays to conspiracy reporting.\u00a0 And that bin Laden could have been hiding in plain sight for so many years in Abbottabad was very troubling.<\/p>\n

All that withstanding, the facts are irrefutable.\u00a0 Hersh made news—bad news.\u00a0 And before believing such inventive and intriguing fiction, as Ronald Reagan famously said, \u201ctrust but verify.\u201d\u00a0 In this case verification makes Hersh\u2019s article a nominee for best fantasy of 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The revelations, assertions and accusations made by Seymour Hersh in his \u201cLondon Review of Books\u201d piece on \u201cThe Killing of Osama bin Laden\u201d are worthy of a Nobel Prize for fiction or, better yet, fantasy.\u00a0 For those who have neither read nor heard of this 10,000 word descent into wonderland, Hersh asserts that the raid that killed bin Laden four years ago was a set-up wonderfully play acted by President Barack Obama and his entire national security team from the Pentagon, State Department and CIA to Capitol Hill and the Pakistani Army and ISI who allegedly had been holding Osama prisoner as a means to control al Qaeda and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,65,76,102,62,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-americas","category-blog-en","category-harlan-ullman-en","category-issues","category-regions","category-studies-and-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3832,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831\/revisions\/3832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cass-ro.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}