http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-...
The London Review Of Books is not a conventional outlet for Hersh's investigative journalism (he's a regular at The New Yorker, which has one of the more notoriously elaborate fact checking apparatuses in the industry) and not Hersh's first choice for publishing that story.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
This amounts to two serious, if heterodox, journalists coming to the same story about the Bin Laden raid independently. I'm convinced, personally, but I was already deeply jaded by the many retractions in the official story issued early on regarding the vital intelligence being arrived at by use of torture and mass surveillance, and what they cynically implied about State Department attitudes towards shaping public discourse.
[0] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...
[1] http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/the_spy_who_billed_me/2015/...
(a) confirm no sources
(b) never have been fact-checked
(c) received no editorial scrutiny
Its author is offended that Hersh didn't give credit for the following claims, which the blogger claims to have broken herself:
* The US cover story of how they found bin Laden was fiction
* OBL was turned in by a walk-in informant, a mid-level ISI officer seeking to claim $25 million under the "Rewards for Justice" program.
* The Pakistani Intelligence Service -- ISI -- was sheltering bin Laden
* Saudi cash was financing the ISI operation keeping bin Laden captive
* The US presented an ultimatum to Pakistan that they would lose US funding if they did not cooperate with a US operation against bin Laden
* Pakistani generals Kiyani and Pasha were involved in the US operation that killed OBL
* Pakistan pulled out its troops from the area of Abottabad to facilitate the American raid
* The Obama administration betrayed the cooperating Pakistani officials
* The Obama administration scrambled to explain the crashed helicopter when their original drone strike cover story collapsed
But if you look carefully at these claims, you'll see that they're not particularly specific (the closest they get to "specific" is "knowing the names of two Pakistani generals who are so well-known they have Wikipedia pages"), have been corroborated nowhere, and, most importantly, are all predictable points in any narrative about Pakistan deliberately sheltering Bin Laden.
I think there's a reason nobody reported on Hillhouse originally.
Second: because the implication is that the New Yorker was unwilling to publish a piece that didn't fact-check out, and the London Review of Books was.
Hersh claims to have sold the story to LRB for the "politics" of it, the meaning of which is uncertain. But as he hopes to have a book published on the "war on terror", it is not out of the question that he selected them to establish rapport. And that he chose them, instead of resorting to them out of some kind of desperation owing to defects in the work itself, seems pretty clear.
[*] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/sy-hersh-bin-la...
[.] http://fpif.org/seymour-hersh-draws-even-criticism-lrb-new-y...
- edit -
The Obama administration is widely claimed by non-partisan journalists and journalist groups as being openly hostile toward the press and has used espionage provisions to prosecute officials deemed to have "leaked" inside information via the types of conversations that would previously have been considered business-as-usual. (Despite opening his presidency with rhetoric about being the most "open" and "transparent" administration in history.) This has resulted in administration staffers & officials being paralyzed and fearful of speaking with the press at all, stymieing journalists' attempts at effectively covering the government and acting as the fourth estate. While it is unfortunate that we cannot quantify whether one administration has experienced more or less scrutiny than others, blithely asserting to the contrary is not a reasonable position in this context.
[:] https://cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701813
The most important takeaway is that the sample size on leak prosecutions is very, very low, so happenstance alone can make a President look unusually hostile. Here, it's a combination of happenstance, a shift in media norms, and cases begun under the previous President.