The Killing of Osama Bin Laden
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
If they had used the lie to get support for "enhanced interrogations" (like people quoted in the article recommended), I'd be mad. If the US government had been holding bin Laden and waiting for the right time, I'd be mad, too. If Obama blatantly lied about the story for political points, I'd be mad.
But, basically, it seems the story happened mostly like it was told to us, and the changes were mainly to not implicate Pakistan or the informants. I wish we had a more transparent government, but hey, we flew into another country and murdered an elderly man... The story we got could have been worse. The gist seems to be true.
The claim is that Obama used it for political points, and he certainly did benefit. However the story he told was much closer to the truth than the story the CIA/people quoted wanted to tell. They wanted to say it happened via drone attacks. So, we're mad that Obama didn't lie enough?
The only "lie" from Obama was that it was a courier (rather than a deflector who probably has family in Pakistan), and that they were met with resistance (which would have implicated Pakistan and upset the Saudis/etc if the truth came out).
(Note that similar stories came out after we captured Saddam Hussein, saying that he wasn't found in a hole: http://nation.com.pk/international/14-Apr-2015/saddam-was-no...)
2. Setting aside the morality of assassination, it suggests that the reason we killed him wasn't out of necessity or even expedience - but rather to prevent him from talking about these so-called allies.
3. Rather than implicating Pakistan and its corrupt ISI services, we implicated a humanitarian medical mission and its lead doctor. I fail to see that as the lesser of evils.
There are a lot of reasons to be disturbed by this story if it turns out to be factual.
This was already the world's worst kept secret. Anybody with more than a passing involvement in A-stan knows the Pakistanis, in particular, were working both sides of the street.
Some other things, assuming for the sake of discussion that this writeup is accurate:
1. It damages the relationship of the jackboot community and the administration: the SEALs were deployed to hit Bin Laden, and were told that this would be done without fanfare. Instead, within hours, the White House and company are bragging about the whole operation. This is not how proper clandestine things are done, one imagines.
2. It damages the relationship of the jackboots in particular and the administration: having to suffer the indignity of signing what is a effectively an NDA for premeditated murder--and then watching two folks get away with breaching it because it supports the new, official story--cannot have been easy for the folks involved in the raid.
3. It damages the State department's credibility (hah) with Pakistan. We agreed that steps would be taken to reinforce the government's position with its people, and that we wouldn't implicate them--they would save face. Instead, we put up a flimsy half-baked cover story, and decide not to go with one that leads to lots of easy questions, which will never have answers that are either convenient or satisfying. Look how Gates reacted during the thing--was not happy.
4. It damages the relation of the government and its people. As seen through the FOIA requests, it's pretty obvious that several parts of the story don't really jive. So, it's obvious that there is either bad record keeping in place, or a coverup of some sort. Not in the dramatic sense, mind you, but just minor misalignments of documented reality with official story.
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The problem isn't that they had the guy whacked--it's that they perhaps did such a thoroughly and unneeded job of lying about it afterwards.
If you want to see how this sort of thing should be done, look at the Israelis.
http://americanenglishdoctor.com/wordpress/jive-and-jibe
Still considered an "error" in the US, but, give it time. I've already started pronouncing aluminium like Jony.
That's because the helicopter crash threw the old plans out the window. Once there's physical evidence of the Americans' raid, you've got to get ahead of the story. Obama simply had no choice.
This is Osama bin Laden. The US had been hunting him for years. There was no way that the president wasn't going to announce his death from the rooftops, and I have a hard time believing that any senior member of special ops thought otherwise. At those levels even the military officers are canny political operatives, they don't get their stars otherwise, and they would have known that this raid was going to be publicised.
So yeah, the fact that the White House was talking about this mission mere hours after its completion is a total non-surprise, and it would have been obvious to anyone involved that this would be the case, helicopter crash or not.
Story A: The CIA does brilliant investigative work. The commander-in-chief makes a gutsy call. The SEALs storm in and kill the bad guy in a firefight. He is buried at sea with full rituals. The 2012 presidential campaign starts a few days afterwards.
Story B: Pakistan secretly captures Bin Laden by bribing tribesmen. The US finds out by bribing Pakistani officials. Further bribes with foreign aid money get other Pakistani officials to issue a stand down order. The SEALS swoop in unopposed but somehow still lose a helicopter. They kill a captive Bin Laden as part of a deal to avoid exposing Saudi support for Al Qaeda. The media gets fed a cover story about the compound being a command center. Some doctor guy becomes a scapegoat and vaccination programs are derailed in all of Pakistan. The CIA fabricates documents from the compound and flirts with claiming credit for "enhanced interrogation" technique in the matter.
Yup, totally the same story. And it played no part in Obama's re-election campaign, did it?!
yep, Story A is just the shining facade with nice sausages on the shelves and the Story B is the rest of the sausage factory. There is no contradiction between those 2 stories, they dovetail together as parts of the same thing.
And rightly so.
That's four assertions about his source, and none of them indicate that the source had any official role in the lead up to or the execution of the mission -- or, indeed, that he was even active in the IC at the time. That, plus the source's use of Vietnam-era terminology, suggests he could have started his career in the 1960s or very early 1970s, and thus could be at least five and as much as 10-15 years retired from the IC (assuming he had a full career at the Agency), and relying on contacts still active in the community for his information. The only statement that indicates the source had access to primary-source docs regards the SEALs' AARs, and even then it's impossible to be certain that Hersh's phrasing actually means that.
In this, Hersh is starting to remind me of many conservative writers who relied on similar source of often dubious quality -- Michael Ledeen's close connections with SISMI (now AISE) being one example, or the network of former CIA officers who whiled away the post-Stansfield Turner years running private intelligence shops and flowing questionable allegations to the National Review.
If Hersh is right -- and "right" in this case, given the explosive nature of his allegations, doesn't even mean in the ballpark, just playing the same game -- then this story is huge, the sort of thing that would forever color Obama's place in history and would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground. But extraordinary claims require &c., and the fact that Hersh had to publish this in the LRB rather than The New Yorker or WaPo (both regular outlets for many of his scoops) indicates that their editors were very uncomfortable with his sourcing as well.
would probably bring Hillary's political hopes crashing to ground
Here we disagree. To put it crudely: NOBODY GIVES A FUCK!
Let's look at something IMO much more serious, Hillary's prowess at trading commodities.[1] She supposedly makes a cash deposit of under $1,000 into a trading account, and through a series of quite astute trades walks away with about $100,000 (about $323,000 in today's money) in about ten months, all as part-time activity.
As someone summarized it:
Only four explanations can account for
these remarkable results.
1) Blair may have been an exceptionally
good trader.
2) Hillary Clinton may have been
exceptionally lucky.
3) Blair may have been front-running
other orders.
4) Or Blair may have arranged to have a
broker fraudulently assign trades to
benefit Clinton's account.
But, like I said, NOBODY GIVES A FUCK. As Wikipedia put it: "There were no official investigations of the trading and Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_cattle_futures_...
Did you read the Wiki? Someone did some calculations of the "luck" involved:
Using a model that was stated to give the
hypothetical investor the benefit of the doubt,
they concluded that the odds of such a return
happening were at best 1 in 31 trillion
Lottery wins are incredibly unlikely too, and yet people win them.
So manyittle things wrong here that I can't give any credit to anything in this dumb article
Few in the US are going to care either way. Osama is dead. How it happened doesn't really matter.
Islamic burials don't specify unceremoniously chucking people into the deep blue sea. Occam's Razor suggests that he was thrown into the ocean to prevent proper identification. Or, if it was really him, that he was killed and discarded to prevent interviews/investigations into his past associations.
The fact that the government would pretend to worry about "appropriate Islamic burials" stinks to high heaven.
The other justification for his at-sea burial, that I've read-that his grave would become a place of pilgrimage if his body were returned to Saudi Arabia is laughable on its face to anyone who knows the least bit about wahabbism.
The details simply don't hold any water though.
1) You don't destroy military hardened electronics systems with concussion grenades. All you'd do is scorch the paintwork.
2) The 'killed by a drone, confirmed by DNA evidence' supposed cover story is ludicrous. If he was killed by a drone high in the sky over the mountains, how on earth is the US supposed to have got a sample of his DNA?
3) The Saudi government would never fund Bin laden, as he was utterly opposed to the ruling family. Yes he was funded by Saudis, but not by the government. Outsiders frequently make this mistake, assuming that Saudi funding for Bin laden, and his family connections there, mean Saudi official support. That's a complete missunderstanding though and implies the author only has a pretty superficial grasp of the relationship.
4) The story that the SEALS were shooting in self defence is entirely necessary, otherwise they would be open to accusations of murder. They would know that and the idea that they would complain about it is ridiculous.
5) If only Bin Laden was killed, who did all the corpses locals found and photographed in the building belong to? Did the SEALs plant the AK-47s and Makarov pistol found at the compound? But if the SEALs were against the administration's re-packaging of the details of the raid and are as above-board as described in the article, why would they collude by planting fake evidence?
The whole thing is completely incoherent.
Well, duh. The ISI officers and generals needed to be able to claim that and if the US people wanted their co-operation they needed to provide plausible deniability.
I am confused as to why this is presented as remotely surprising.
But it's just an hour's train ride away from somewhere, Manhattan.
Also Abbotabad is a real life city, not just some garrison town. And even if it was just a garrison town, it would still befull of un-armed non-military people. How do you think military people live in a garrison city? They aren't faceless storm troopers, many have families living right there. And many, many civilians providing services, from food to dry cleaning to road maintenance to flower delivery etc etc.
Question: What former nuclear test site in Utah? Am not familiar with tests in Utah. The model seems to have been in North Carolina? See http://www.thewire.com/global/2012/10/satellite-images-captu...
The article's theory is built on a house of cards, like a most conspiracy theories, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
A drug cartel kingpin is technically a "civilian", as is the head of a global terrorism network, as is the head of a human trafficking network. None of them are members of a recognized country's militia, but they still command significant force.
Here's a gem, for example: "None of the Seals thought that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid."
What the hell. How do you explain a downed stealth helicopter in Abbottabad then? It just happened to come down by itself?
Is there a person alive that doesn't know this? The same can be said of any powerful nation's policy throughout most if not all of history. Ending the story on such a truism as if it's an exposure is lame.
Source: I am writing this on a highway in a rural part of Pakistan. Abbottabad is very urban.
In short: tweeting would definitely not have been that trivial.
It's like one of the arguments against faked moon landings. The Soviets would have been highly motivated to disprove the events, and had the skills and resources to do so if they had been fake, yet they didn't.
Again, this was a very convenient outcome for the Obama Administration.
So was the unemployment rate falling. What's your point?
Something "good" happening during an administration is not evidence of conspiracy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9042196...
In all fairness, perhaps this wasn't the best example. The official unemployment rate (U3) isn't the most reliable thing: not only can it be revised in subsequent months, but individuals who no longer qualify for unemployment insurance (but are still looking for work) are no longer counted as "unemployed".
The U6 number is slightly more reliable, but is seldom reported as it is not as politically convenient.
as jfb mentioned, this isn't an argument. you're thinking that it's a "motive," except that it's a motive to a crime you haven't provided any evidence for. you're skipping the only step that matters. nevermind that if there was any question, republicans would have made endless mountains of pop corn out of it like they have with the attack on the consulate in Libya.
No. Big, but not that big.
I don't remember where I was when Osama bin laden was killed. It just felt like such an inevitability and correction to history that it should have happened already. Remembering what I was doing was pointless.
Also, everything before was such a waste. We wasted so many lives in Iraq when the real enemies were the Pakistani intelligence service and Saudi Arabia. I just wanted to forget it all.
Occasionally it is a rhetorical technique with powder and steel behind it.
Anyways, the point intended was that, while there are transient enemies of The American Dream (however one may wish to define it within reason, but including the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and general zeitgeist of 20th century America), they tend to go up in flames with their victims.
The true enemies, though, see that by either exploiting or altering the processes of government and manipulating popular opinion, and they tend to integrate themselves with the host and extract as much value as they can. They are also more likely to stay around, having become part of the system. It's unfortunate.
It will be interesting to see if his story is corroborated in the weeks and months to come.
Trying to decide whether to read it. It's long.
Looks like they say there was no firefight, but I remember there was a guy from Bay area, Pakistani techie in Abottabad that night and he live tweeted the gun fight and explosions before any news came out. Wonder how that would fit this new narrative?