https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n10/seymour-m.-hersh/the...
> The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed.
> There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.
> The truth, Hersh says, is that Pakistani intelligence services captured bin Laden in 2006 and kept him locked up with support from Saudi Arabia, using him as leverage against al-Qaeda. In 2010, Pakistan agreed to sell bin Laden to the US for increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." Rather than kill him or hand him over discreetly, Hersh says the Pakistanis insisted on staging an elaborate American "raid" with Pakistani support.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...
> And there are more contradictions. Why, for example, would the Pakistanis insist on a fake raid that would humiliate their country and the very military and intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it?
> A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?
> Why not just kill bin Laden, drive his body across the border into Afghanistan, and drop him off with the Americans? Or why not put him in a hut somewhere in Waziristan, blow it up with an F-16, pretend it was a US drone strike, and tell the Americans to go collect the body?
Neither were some giant secrets, and were previously dismissed as unsubstantiated rumour. Hersh collected enough factoids together to substantiate them enough to become a news story, rather than a military legend.
Most notably the AP in 2003, a year prior to Hersh's reporting. 60 minutes covered the Taguba report before Hersh's article was published online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
Yes, but critically, also not the last. Other journalists corroborated, more sources came forward, evidence, hearings, photographs, convictions.
He deserves credit for his excellent, Pulitzer Prize-winning work covering My Lai. But to my knowledge he has never once been the first to report on a scandal and been right about it.