Wednesday, May 13, 2015

The many problems with Seymour Hersh's Osama bin Laden conspiracy theory...

On Sunday, the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh finally released a story that he has been rumored to have been working on for years: the truth about the killing of Osama bin Laden. According to Hersh's 10,000-word story in the London Review of Books, the official history of bin Laden's death — in which the US tracked him to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan; killed him in a secret raid that infuriated Pakistan; and then buried him at sea — is a lie.

Hersh's story is amazing to read, alleging a vast American-Pakistani conspiracy to stage the raid and even to fake high-level diplomatic incidents as a sort of cover. But his allegations are largely supported only by two sources, neither of whom has direct knowledge of what happened, both of whom are retired, and one of whom is anonymous. The story is riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies.


The story simply does not hold up to scrutiny — and, sadly, is in line with Hersh's recent turn away from the investigative reporting that made him famous into unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.

A decade ago, Hersh was one of the most respected investigative journalists on the planet, having broken major stories from the My Lai massacre in 1969 to the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. But more recently, his reports have become less and less credible. He's claimed that much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei, that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training, and that the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey. Those reports have had little proof and, rather than being borne out by subsequent investigations, have been either unsubstantiated or outright debunked. A close reading of Hersh's bin Laden story suggests it is likely to suffer the same fate. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Sy Hersh: US version of Bin Laden raid is 'full of lies'
  2. ‘Utter nonsense': CIA and White House blast Seymour Hersh’s explosive...
  3. Another fake bin Laden story...
  4. 'US killed Bin Laden clone in Pakistan'
  5. Obama: “We could not say definitively that bin Laden was there”
  6. Photos show three dead men but none look like bin Laden...
  7. Media scrambles as bin Laden story crumbles...
  8. Osama bin Laden dead: is anyone telling the truth?
  9. Top US government insider: Bin Laden died in 2001, 9/11 a false flag...

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