Everything you know about Osama bin Laden’s killing is wrong.
That’s the short version of a very long Seymour Hersh story, just published in the London Review of Books, which offers an alternative narrative of the killing of Bin Laden in 2011.
The slightly longer version is that two key Pakistani officials, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the Pakistan’s intelligence service, were in on the operation to kill Bin Laden and ensured U.S. helicopters could travel safely across the border from Afghanistan into airspace over key Pakistani security facilities. They did so, Hersh’s story goes, in exchange for both personal bribes and a resumption of US military funding to Pakistan.
a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer actually approached the CIA station chief in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, to offer up Bin Laden in exchange for part of the $25 million reward the U.S. offered. That source told the CIA that Bin Laden had been held captive by Pakistan’s intelligence service since 2006 as a kind of insurance policy against the Taliban. After that source went to the CIA, they did a series of checks, including obtaining DNA from a Pakistani doctor who was caring for the aging Bin Laden. It checked out. The U.S. decided to pursue Bin Laden, which is when they started bribing the Pakistanis to make it possible.
The plan called for a stealth raid of the Abottabad compound, conducted with the assistance of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, which would assure that the Pakistani military did not interfere with the two Black Hawk helicopters after they crossed the border from Afghanistan. The raid would be conducted in secret, and remain a secret; the official story would be that Bin Laden was killed in a drone strike in tribal lands. However, on the night of the raid, things started to go haywire when the Navy SEALs crashed their helicopter, making it impossible to later tell the pre-arranged cover story. Rather than keeping the operation secret for some time until telling that cover story, the Obama administration immediately began spinning the raid to its political benefit. Subsequently, according to Hersh, the government had to come up with one story after another to cover holes in the previous ones. The foregrounding of torture in the pursuit in Bin Laden, according to this version of events, came when CIA old-timers were brought in to help craft yet more cover stories — and they decided to give it a spin that would help CIA avoid accountability for its torture program.
In short, as Hersh tells it, we’ve been told cover story after cover story after cover story.
More...http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/everything_we_know_about_the_death_of_osama_bin_laden_is_wrong/
I am just dense? This except for the bolded part all looked transparently obvious. That’s the short version of a very long Seymour Hersh story, just published in the London Review of Books, which offers an alternative narrative of the killing of Bin Laden in 2011.
The slightly longer version is that two key Pakistani officials, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the Pakistan’s intelligence service, were in on the operation to kill Bin Laden and ensured U.S. helicopters could travel safely across the border from Afghanistan into airspace over key Pakistani security facilities. They did so, Hersh’s story goes, in exchange for both personal bribes and a resumption of US military funding to Pakistan.
a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer actually approached the CIA station chief in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, to offer up Bin Laden in exchange for part of the $25 million reward the U.S. offered. That source told the CIA that Bin Laden had been held captive by Pakistan’s intelligence service since 2006 as a kind of insurance policy against the Taliban. After that source went to the CIA, they did a series of checks, including obtaining DNA from a Pakistani doctor who was caring for the aging Bin Laden. It checked out. The U.S. decided to pursue Bin Laden, which is when they started bribing the Pakistanis to make it possible.
The plan called for a stealth raid of the Abottabad compound, conducted with the assistance of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, which would assure that the Pakistani military did not interfere with the two Black Hawk helicopters after they crossed the border from Afghanistan. The raid would be conducted in secret, and remain a secret; the official story would be that Bin Laden was killed in a drone strike in tribal lands. However, on the night of the raid, things started to go haywire when the Navy SEALs crashed their helicopter, making it impossible to later tell the pre-arranged cover story. Rather than keeping the operation secret for some time until telling that cover story, the Obama administration immediately began spinning the raid to its political benefit. Subsequently, according to Hersh, the government had to come up with one story after another to cover holes in the previous ones. The foregrounding of torture in the pursuit in Bin Laden, according to this version of events, came when CIA old-timers were brought in to help craft yet more cover stories — and they decided to give it a spin that would help CIA avoid accountability for its torture program.
In short, as Hersh tells it, we’ve been told cover story after cover story after cover story.
More...http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/everything_we_know_about_the_death_of_osama_bin_laden_is_wrong/
