{"id":1883,"date":"2015-05-17T23:10:46","date_gmt":"2015-05-17T21:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=1883"},"modified":"2015-05-24T02:46:50","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T00:46:50","slug":"what-really-happened-to-bin-laden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/what-really-happened-to-bin-laden\/","title":{"rendered":"What really happened to bin Laden?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pentagon announced yesterday<\/a> that its special forces had killed Abu Sayyaf, a top Islamic State commander in Syria. There’d been a firefight at his compound. The special forces seized a substantial amount of useful information.<\/p>\n

\"Bin<\/a>Four years and two weeks ago, we were told the same things about Osama bin Laden. There were some serious holes in that story<\/a>, which changed daily, and as we’re learning now, that story may not even have been true.<\/p>\n

According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, yes, the special forces did kill bin Laden. But no, there was no firefight. No, bin Laden was not armed. No, he did not use one of his wives as a shield. No, bin Laden was not running a command center, and no useful information was recovered. No, he was not buried at sea. Most importantly, the CIA had not found him. Pakistan not only knew that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad; it had kept him there since 2006. The raid was of course coordinated with Pakistan.<\/p>\n

“The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll<\/a>,” Hersh concludes. His 10,356-word article<\/a> in the London Review of Books<\/em> offers a much more logical sequence of events than the often-changed official story, as well as plausible reasons for why the truth could not be told.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The White House national security team monitors the bin Laden raid in real time, May 1, 2011. Photo: Pete Souza\/The White House<\/p><\/div>\n

A different version of events<\/h2>\n

Hersh’s article claims:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Bin Laden lived in the Hindu Kush mountains from 2001 to 2006. Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, found him by bribing local people and brought him to Abbottabad.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Pakistan has had to walk a fine line in terms of working with the US, which most of its citizens mistrust, and appeasing the radicals within its own borders. Pakistan could not simply hand over bin Laden, whom many Pakistanis considered a hero, without getting something in return.<\/p>\n

\u2022 A senior ISI officer, acting alone, revealed bin Laden’s whereabouts to the US in 2010 in order to collect the $25 million reward the US was offering.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Barack Obama wanted the raid for political reasons. Pakistan reluctantly agreed to it, on the condition that its cooperation would not be revealed. A cover story \u2014 that bin Laden was killed by a drone across the border in Afghanistan \u2014 would be put out a week after the fact, so as to be difficult to confirm.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Top Pakistani military officials made sure that their military did not track or engage the US helicopters used in the raid. The ISI turned off electricity to bin Laden’s neighborhood and told the guards at his compound to leave as soon as they heard the helicopters. An ISI liaison officer guided the special forces into bin Laden’s house.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Bin Laden was alone in the room, unarmed and cowering. The special forces came in and shot him to pieces. Accounts differ as to whether the pieces of bin Laden’s corpse were brought back to Afghanistan or dumped out of a helicopter on the way there, but the consensus is that there was no burial at sea.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Because the special forces’ helicopter had crashed in bin Laden’s compound, attracting attention, Obama decided to ditch the story agreed to with Pakistan and announce right away that the raid had happened in Abbottabad. His speech had to be written in a hurry, and its inaccuracies \u2014 along with the need to protect those involved in organizing the raid \u2014 required more and more elaborate cover stories.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The ISI held on to bin Laden’s wives and children, and did not allow the US to question them.<\/p>\n

Not just any reporter<\/h2>\n

As soon as Hersh’s article came out, a former deputy director of the CIA and various other officials went onto every television network to disavow it. Repeatedly, viewers were told \u2014 even by some of the networks’ own correspondents \u2014 not to believe a respected journalist. That was to be expected.<\/p>\n

Hersh is not just any reporter. He was the one who broke the story, in 1969, about US war crimes in Vietnam<\/a> and the one who told the world, in 2004, about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib<\/a> in Iraq. In the latter case, his work was fiercely denounced by military and government leaders before official investigations proved him correct. Hersh also reported on the Bush-Cheney administration’s 2002 determination to invade Iraq<\/a> and the NSA’s program<\/a> of monitoring domestic phone calls.<\/p>\n

Hersh’s latest article, if true, negates most of the film Zero Dark Thirty<\/em><\/a>, which was based on the official story of the raid on bin Laden, much of it fed to the scriptwriters by the CIA. Among other things, the film pretends that useful information about bin Laden’s whereabouts was acquired through torture, when this was not the case at all.<\/p>\n